Street sit-downs by citizens, barricades set on fire by masked young men, and public rosary-praying by members of religious orders have led Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro to:
- Send Venezuela's National Guard troops to fire tear gas into protesters from highway overpasses,
- Postpone regional elections,
- Support the Supreme Court's attempt to strip the National Assembly of its powers.
During wars, history shows the United States passed Alien and Sedition Laws to deport or imprison male subjects of enemy countries and to punish those who published anti-government material; suspended habeus corpus which requires persons to be lawfully charged with a crime before they are detained; and sent Japanese citizens to internment camps.
Just as governments may be ready to cut funding for education and Social Security to fund a military buildup, to muzzle the press, or to increase surveillance during a crisis, the public needs to be ready to come together to support voting rights, to defend the independence of courts, to demand constitutional guarantees, and, most of all, with a fierce determination not to repeat mistakes of the past. Will citizens be up to the task of discerning which powers a government needs for the crisis at hand?
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