Billmon: The Totalitarian Temptation

More: What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you -- where would you hide then Roper, the laws all being flat?

Robert Bolt
A Man for All Seasons
1960

Something that has long struck me as rather odd about the conservative assault on the Constitution is the willingness, or rather eagerness, of right-wing authoritarians to create and empower repressive mechanisms that at least in theory could some day be used to repress them.