It stands for Presidential Emergency Action Documents. And the author says Trump may well use them to nullify the 2026 election results. Now, before you accuse me and liberals for clutching our pearls on this, I am NOT asking you if you think it will happen. I have no idea if it will. The question is IF it does happen, will you support it?
Here's part of the column, cut and pasted from the Times because it's behind a paywall. TER's limits on post-length makes it impossible to post the entire column. WARNING: its still LONG:
"President Trump hates to lose.
Heading into the 2026 midterm elections, you can’t say that the president hasn’t warned us, over and over, that he will do all he can to prevent the congressional contests from turning into a humiliating Republican rout.
“It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump told Reuters in an interview at the beginning of the year. He claimed that his presidency had been so successful that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
The threat posed by Trump has rattled experts at the Brennan Center and Keep Our Republic, along with scholars who study Trump’s real and claimed powers.
Two of the foremost students of these powers are Joel McCleary, a founder of Keep Our Republic, and Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center. Some, but not all, of their attention has been focused on the secretive creation of presidential emergency action documents, which have come to be known as “PEADs.”
McCleary described his findings and his concerns in a series of emails, many including reports he has written. In an April 23 report, “Continuity of Government, Presidential Emergency Action Documents and the Evolution of Executive Emergency Powers,” McCleary wrote that the president “possesses emergency powers that are virtually unknown to the public, to most members of Congress and to much of the federal judiciary. These powers — codified in classified presidential emergency action documents” — allow
a single individual to suspend fundamental constitutional rights, detain civilians, seize property, impose martial law and censor communications.
They require only a presidential signature. No prior congressional approval is needed. No court reviews them before activation. No statutory mechanism exists for Congress to restrict or terminate these powers once invoked.
While PEADs were first created in the 1950s during the Eisenhower presidency to address the potential of nuclear war to create chaos, there is, McCleary wrote, “no statutory, constitutional or procedural limit on the number of PEADs a president may create, the subjects they may address or the scope of authority they may claim.”
The Brennan Center has published an article describing the history and potential use of PEADs.
I asked Goitein to explain the difference between a declaration of a national emergency and a PEAD. She replied by email:
A declaration of national emergency by the president unlocks statutory authorities contained in 137 different provisions of law. A presidential emergency action document (PEAD) is a draft executive order, directive or communication, prepared in anticipation of a particular type of emergency, that implements an emergency power or powers.
The emergency powers it implements can either be statutory powers or powers that are available to the president — or that the president claims are available — under the Constitution. These draft orders/directives/communications are often accompanied by legal analyses to justify the actions they would implement.
Are the constraints on the use of PEADs less than those on the use of declarations of national emergencies?
Goitein:
It depends. Some PEADs will actually involve a declaration of national emergency, in which case the primary constraint would be the same: Congress could vote on a resolution to terminate the national emergency declaration. This is a very weak constraint, as Congress would have to muster a veto-proof supermajority.
In addition to congressional action, Goitein continued:
the courts could also serve as a check. For either a national emergency declaration or an exercise of emergency authority pursuant to a PEAD, any person adversely affected could file a lawsuit to challenge the government’s actions if those actions appeared to violate the Constitution or a law passed by Congress.
While courts in both scenarios would likely be reluctant to second-guess the president’s determination that an emergency exists, they would be much less reticent in reviewing whether the actions taken in response to the emergency were authorized by law.
While the secretiveness of PEADs prompts suspicion among those wary of the Trump administration, the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 I mentioned earlier is raising specific fears."
