WE MUST NEVER ALLOW RON DeSANTIS ANYWHERE NEAR THE "DOOMSDAY BOOK"

Miles Taylor, who worked in the Department of Homeland Security in the first years of the Trump presidency and wrote anonymously about being "part of the resistance" to Trump within the administration, will publish a book next month titled Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump. An excerpt in Vanity Fair mostly cautions us about the danger of allowing Trump back into the White House - but what Taylor writes also leaves me worried about what Ron DeSantis would do with nearly unlimited presidential powers:

Inside the White House complex, an instruction manual is hidden in a secure location for use only in national emergencies. Few people know where it is, and even fewer people are allowed to access it. Informally dubbed the “Doomsday Book,” the manual contains the president’s break-glass options for keeping the country running in situations ranging from global nuclear war to an armed foreign invasion of the United States.

The options are known by an anodyne name—PEADs—or “presidential emergency action documents.” Recently declassified records suggest that the PEADs allow the president to invoke extraordinary powers. The records hint at draft authorizations to enable the White House to unilaterally detain “dangerous persons,” censor the news media, flip an internet “kill switch,” take over social media, and suspend Americans from traveling. These might be the type of actions a president would take if the nation’s capital was destroyed, enemy forces were hunting down U.S. leaders, or the survival of U.S. democracy was in doubt.

Taylor believes that Trump didn't use these powers to remain in office after the 2020 election because he didn't know what was in the Doomsday Book. A National Security Council staffer named Mike Harvey limited access to the book, so loyalists staffers didn't know what was in it either.

If he's elected again, Trump might learn about these emergency powers and use them -- but if Ron DeSantis gets to the White House, he absolutely will learn about them, and almost certainly use them. As I've told you, DeSantis is obsessed with maximizing his own power. We know what he did after he was elected governor of Florida in 2018:

He directed his general counsel to figure out just how far a governor could push his authority. He pored over a binder enumerating his varied powers....

Then he systematically deployed each one....

Mr. DeSantis’s willingness to exert that power in extraordinary ways has led him to barrel through norms, challenge the legal limits of his office and threaten political retribution against those who cross him. Unlike former President Donald J. Trump ... Mr. DeSantis is a keen student of American government who has expanded his influence tactically and methodically, using detailed knowledge of the pliable confines of his office to his advantage.

And we know what he promises to do as president:

He told conservative radio host Mark Levin that he had studied the US Constitution’s “leverage points” and would use his knowledge to exercise the “true scope” of presidential power.

“You’ve got to know how to use your leverage to advance what you’re trying to accomplish,” DeSantis told Twitter CEO Elon Musk....

“Presidents have not been willing to wield Article Two power to discipline the bureaucracy,” DeSantis said. “I’ll come in and on day one we’ll be spitting nails.”

Among his top priorities, DeSantis said, would be to “re-constitutionalize” the federal government, which he described as a plan to “discipline the bureaucracy” and agencies that he saic are “detached from constitutional accountability.”

He would dispel with the longstanding tradition that government institutions like the US Department of Justice operate independently from the president – embracing a philosophy that Trump often governed by but never articulated so succinctly.

“Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the DOJ and FBI are quote, independent,” DeSantis said. “They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the elected President of the United States.”

When people tell you who they are, believe them. Here's what DeSantis said about his first win as governor:

“I may have earned 51 percent of the vote, but that entitled me to wield 100 percent of the executive power, and I resolved to use it to advance conservative principles,” DeSantis said at an event in Wisconsin on May 6.

If DeSantis becomes president, "100 percent of the executive power" will include all the powers in the Doomsday Book. Now imagine him in the White House during a pandemic, or a period of demonstrations like the summer of 2020. Do you think he'd hesitate to declare an emergency and break open the book? He might even invoke it in response to a normal level of crossings at the southern border. I put nothing past him.

It seems unlikely now that DeSantis could be elected president in 2024 - but he's in second place in every Republican primary poll, and if Trump's health gives out, or his legal troubles persuade him to quit the race, DeSantins will win the nomination easily. He trails President Biden by only 1 point in general election polling.

We know DeSantis's thirst for power. That's why he must never be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office.