The US is not a 'wartime state'. It's been committed to business as usual, and if you never bothered reading the news, you could get away with never knowing it was at war for the most part. No rationing or real shortages, no conscription, no opposing forces tromping over the nation, no aerial attacks. The US is technically at war, but its society isn't - if you don't want to sacrifice anything for your country, you can go about your business quite happily and undisturbed.
This is exactly the point. The government has repeatedly used the legal fiction of the United States being "at war" to dramatically expand its punitive authority, despite the fact that the "war" is an open-ended, amorphous legal fiction. That's why it is so dangerous to dismiss some extraordinary assertion of power because it only applies "in wartime"; it's always wartime, even when it's not.
