If a bully threatens to beat up a skinny kid if he doesn’t give him his lunch money, and the bully doesn’t have to follow through because the kid does fork it over, does that mean that the aggressive kid isn’t a bully?

Of course not. He’s a bully because he threatened to beat up the skinny kid and used coercion to get his way.

Well, Congressman Sherman said that congress was threatened with martial law this week. Specifically, he says that Congress was told martial law would be imposed if they didn’t pass the Paulson bailout proposal.

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Martial law means that the separation of powers which the Founding Fathers enshrined in the Constitution are destroyed, and an all-powerful executive branch calls the shots.

Is the threat of imposing martial law any different than actually imposing it?

No. Congress is just like the skinny kid.

Just because it forked over $700 billion or more in our lunch money based upon coercion by the thugs in the executive branch doesn’t mean that the thugs are still following the separation of powers or anything else in the Constitution.

Remember that, for years, Congress has operated under “martial law” provisions which force Congress members to vote on legislation without having time to adequately read and review it.

Remember also that the U.S. has been in a declared state of national emergency for 7 years, and normal constitutional provisions were probably long ago superseded.

As University of California Berkeley Professor Emeritus Peter Dale Scott has warned:

“The systems of checks and balances established by the U.S. Constitution would seem to be failing.

To put it another way, if the White House is successful in frustrating [Congress' requests], then [the declared state of emergency] has arguably already superseded the Constitution as a higher authority.”

And remember that U.S. troops are being stationed inside the U.S. to suppress “civil unrest”.

Whether or not there is martial law in name, there is martial law in fact.