Trump issues excessive power to police departments

 The Nation - Donald Trump has issued an executive order that will make it even harder to hold cops accountable—and flirts blatantly with martial law. Named the dystopian “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” this new order purports to “unleash high-impact local police forces; protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by State or local officials; and surge resources to officers in need.”

The aggressive language in the order could be cribbed from any military police state in the annals of history, and that’s clearly the kind of polity that Trump would like to create and lead. The order instructs the secretary of defense to put down the bottle long enough to “determine how military and national security assets, training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.” It also instructs the Department of Homeland Security to “advance the objectives of this order.”

Careful readers will note that this sounds an awful lot like the prelude to martial law, a framework where national military assets are deployed in American cities to enforce the president’s priorities. That would, of course, be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the president from using the American military as a domestic police force.