Well the Taft-Hartley Act isn’t exactly obscure, but it did get me to thinking about laws on the books that potentially give the federal government far-reaching powers that few people are aware of. For a semi-example, I thought I read “somewhere” that the act establishing the C.I.A. gave it the authority to disregard civil laws if need be. Or that some McCarthy era law gave the government the right to round up and incarcerate anyone it wanted in the event of a “national emergency”. Or that some of our trade agreements with other countries override US patent and copyright laws. Can anyone give me some solid information about these “stealth” laws?
Sounds like you found some of those Year 2000 scare web sites proclaiming Clinton had the power to do just about anything. Those sites are fun to read, because many of them list executive orders and laws, but when you actually read the executive orders and laws, you often find what they say has very little to what the Y2K scare sites imply about them. 
OTOH, rather than spend time researching executive orders (easy to find), public laws (easy to find) and/or agency rules and regulations (not so easy to find), here’s one:
Spend some time and read it in its entirety.
Then Halloween night, read it again.
Yes your government can do that, and is already doing that!
Check in the bottom of the unmarked, locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory just past the sign that says “Beware of the Leopard”.
Not exactly a law, but the 1870’s Supreme Court ruling that corporations have most of the rights of natural people.
What’s wrong with that? A corporation is typically defined as a legal construct with rights and responsibilities similar to that of a natural person. The Quebec civil code uses legalese like “Juridical Personality” and “Legal Person” to describe a corporation, and section 301 says “Legal persons have full enjoyment of civil rights.”
The main thrust of this is that the government can’t say “Sure you have freedom of speech as an individual, but if a bunch of you got together and formed a newspaper, it’s not really an individual speaking but a corporation, so we can shut you down or put up barreiers to publication or interefere in other ways with the operation of your corporation, since no individual rights are being trampled.”