As Sheldon Richman writes in his latest Freeman column, under the National Defense Authorization Act, the president is just a stroke of the pen (that is, signing an executive order) from having powers that no politician (not just the president) was supposed to have under our Constitution and no politician should ever have anywhere. All the president needs to do is declare a national emergency and he and federal bureaucrats can then commandeer people and their resources at their whims. As we know, powers seized by government under an “emergency” are seldom relinquished when the purported emergency is over.