Speed Kills

A story recently by Rebecca Beitsch in The Hill quotes Attorney General Pam Bondi saying something about the García deportation case that has me particularly furious. I want to take a few moments here to detail the reasons for my ire.

«Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Trump administration failed to take “one extra step of paperwork” before it mistakenly deported a Maryland man…»

—article 2025-04-16 by Rebecca Beitsch in The Hill

The Very Critical Nature of Due Process

First, “Due Process” is not a paperwork step. It is process—specific actions”—that is due by the government to the people. That process is meaningful and substantive and necessary to ensure the freedom of everyone, including you and me.

It is a foundational principle of US government. Freedom cannot exist without it. It is mentioned in the Bill of Rights, in the Fifth Amendment, and it is guaranteed to “people,” a broader set than just “citizens.” Per US case law [e.g., Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678 (2001)] non-citizens, even including those unlawfully present, are entitled to due process.

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

—The 5th Amendment to the US Constitution

To say that no process is due would be to say that it's fine for this to happen to anyone. You. Me. Anyone. Because it blurs the distinction between “alleged” and “convicted.” They say they are only doing this to criminals, but, in the US, the way we decide who a criminal is—at least up to now—by due process.

What's good for the goose…

But would the President know this? I'm going to go out on a pretty sturdy limb here and guess “yes.” In spite of being actually convicted on 34 counts (which he disputes), in general, he relies heavily on the difference between accusation and conviction to claim a clean reputation in the face of a very large number of uncharged crimes.

What protects him is not “one extra step of paperwork” but due process, the fact that, under the Constitution, we have a process for determing whether someone accused of being a criminal is in fact an actual.

That important bit of process due to him—and to García—does not take place in the President's mind. It is not just a routine bit of unilateral business to be done by ICE. It happens in court.

Highest possible stakes

If we think we can skip that step, the part about going to court for a fair hearing with proper evidence and a chance to rebut charges, then anyone can be that mistake.

Again from the article in The Hill:

«“He is not coming back to our country. President Bukele said he was not sending him back. That’s the end of the story,” she told reporters at a press conference Wednesday, referring to the Salvadorian leader. “If he wanted to send him back, we would give him a plane ride back. There was no situation ever where he was going to stay in this country. None, none.”»

—article 2025-04-16 by Rebecca Beitsch in The Hill

And the notion we would just summarily re-deport him, again without due process, is saying that the US president does not care about this very critical step that has historically set the United States apart from barbarous countries.

Also, the President's oath of office is not itself a mere matter of paperwork (or lip service). It is something all presidents swear to, and it includes language about protecting the Constitution from enemies. He is not doing that. This is not a small administrative matter.

Legal angles?

Personally, I'd go so far as to argue that once he is not defending the Constitution, none of his acts are official acts, and every single one is subject to question before our court system. That is how I would re-approach SCOTUS and ask for clarification because if they really meant that official acts include the overthrowing or ignoring or otherwise trashing of the Constitution someone had sworn to protect, then they themselves need to be impeached on that basis, because saying that was not upholding their oath office to the Constitution and (in my opinion) makes that ruling invalid.

Also, in criminal law, when dealing with evidence, there is the notion of fruit of the poisonous tree when dealing with evidence improperly obtained. What would help a lot right now is the same for the Executive and SCOTUS itself. Once it has been demonstrated that there is a corrupt actor, not defending the Constitution, all further actions coming from that person really should be seen as invalid. To do otherwise is to say that allowing an enemy actor to have effect is more important than We The People. I see no reason at all that this should be so.

I know that people differ politically on a wide variety of issues, but I hope that we can at least admit that logical consistency and sanity are not partisan matters. Assuming that's so, I just don't see how we can have any kind of functional democracy, at least not one based on the Constitution, if major aspects of it are being eroded in real time. Somehow we have to find a means to stop this cancer in its tracks.

On speed

And while we're on the topic of things going too fast, I want to touch on one other matter as we close: speed itself. Speed is a theme that runs through all of this.

The rate at which things happen is a tangible quality of things that is easily overlooked when describing what's going on, but it really matters quite a lot if things are happening faster than people can keep up with or react to.

Project 2025

There is a shock and awe campaign ongoing as part of the Project 2025 rollout. Wikipedia says this about the deployment strategy it's using:

Shock and awe (technically known as rapid dominance) is a military strategy based on the use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy's perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight.

—Wikipedia “shock and awe” entry

Military, though? Yes, I think so. It's a good metaphor because it highlights the strategic and tactical nature of the actions taken and that the goal is a political conquest that changes government by means other than democratic votes. Not all military action uses guns. In Sun Tzu's The Art of War, the use of physical violence is seen almost as a last resort.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

—Sun Tzu in The Art of War

Project 2025 is a very ambitious plan with a very detailed playbook for a quick (six month) rollout.

There is a lot in Project 2025 that people might object to. But part of the plan is to do a lot very quickly, each outrageous act a distraction for each other in a kind of fog of war kicked up by a Gish gallop of indignities and violations.

The site www.project2025.observer helps enumerate its aspects and track the progress of each.

DOGE

Speed is an underlying premise of the recent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Efficiency usually implies either lower cost or higher speed. But efficiency is an elusive term and invites the question, “efficiency of what?” My recent essay Government is not a Business discusses, among other things, how inefficiency is important to the correct function of government, making the point that speeding things up doesn't automatically make things better.

People also assume that efficiency means monetary efficiency or time efficiency, but there are other uses of the term that seem to fit better. I think of the efficiency that DOGE is seeking as more like what I've come to call a “permission efficiency”. This relates to the earlier discussion of the safeguards of democracy. They are essentially trying to create a thugocracy, a place where bullies and thugs rule. Rights are protections against state action, but these autocratic oligarch wannabes don't want to have to ask permission for anything. They find permission-asking unhelpful to their goal of pushing people around and hence “inefficient.” That's more like what DOGE is trying to streamline—any possibility of rights claimed by citizens.

And they want to do it fast. Faster than people can react. Because if they took the time to debate it, the debate would not go in their favor.

Forced Pregnancy

Pregnancy, which many of us think should be a completely private matter, has become a public issue. It is a way for certain men to assert an ugly dominance over women through forced pregnancy. From the moment of a pregnancy's conception, a clock starts ticking counting down to when abortion is no longer politically allowed. Where it is allowed, there has been a focus on tactics to introduce procedural obstacles many, of which have no other purpose than to slow down a woman's ability to respond in time to exercise her rights.

Nature imposes some time limits of its own, but then men impose additional ones. None of it serves personal choice, personal health, or personal justice. In a nation whose Constitution promises to leave religion as a private matter, this debate is everything about the assertion of oppressive government control of very private matters, and wending its way in and out of everything that goes on is a race against time.

Weaponizing speed itself

That's really the problem with all of this. By acting swiftly, they can bypass anyone's chance to fight back. Even acts that have protections, if those protections cannot be practically put into play in the time alloted, are effectively neutralized.

In effect, speed itself is the weapon that is and will continue to kill people, perhaps even you and me.

I'll close with a quote from a case years ago, in the aftermath of World War II, Shaughnessy v. U.S. ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206 (1953). It's striking how relevant this passage seems, even 70+ years later. The circumstances are not far off. What's changed are some of the tools of such aspiring tyranny, speed itself now central among the repertoire of weapons they wield because modern technology accommodates greater speeds. We must stop this. Let's just hope we can do it in time.

«No society is free where government makes one person's liberty depend upon the arbitrary will of another. Dictatorships have done this since time immemorial. They do now. Russian laws of 1934 authorized the People's Commissariat to imprison, banish, and exile Russian citizens as well as "foreign subjects who are socially dangerous." * Hitler's secret police were given like powers. German courts were forbidden to make any inquiry whatever as to the information on which the police acted. Our Bill of Rights was written to prevent such oppressive practices. Under it, this Nation has fostered and protected individual freedom. The Founders abhorred arbitrary one-an imprisonments. Their belief was -- our constitutional principles are -- that no person of any faith, rich or poor, high or low, native or foreigner, white or colored, can have his life, liberty or property taken "without due process of law." This means to me that neither the federal police nor federal prosecutors nor any other governmental official, whatever his title, can put or keep people in prison without accountability to courts of justice. It means that individual liberty is too highly prized in this country to allow executive officials to imprison and hold people on the basis of information kept secret from courts. It means that Mezei should not be deprived of his liberty indefinitely except as the result of a fair open court hearing in which evidence is appraised by the court, not by the prosecutor.»

—Shaughnessy v. U.S. ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206 (1953)

Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This post originated as a rant by me on Mastodon. Substantive content has been aded, re-focusing on the issue of speed.

The graphic was produced using abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.7 and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra, then post-processing in Gimp.

Law and Ordering

“First They Came” | ”Als sie kamen”
by Martin Niemöller

There's been a lot of erosion of US democracy lately. The latest is the case of Kilmar Abrego García's deportation. It should matter to everyone because of the specific precedent it sets.

But it's part of a general trend for how many precedents are being set. The order in which things are happening is not accidental.

In many ways, what I'm going to say here is just a restatement of the famous Niemöller poem. Great poetry often captures an idea crisply, and certainly that poem does. But some things are important enough to say a lot of different ways, and this is certainly one.

So, at the risk of redundancy, let me just say that there's a very specific ordering in which laws and norms are being stretched and broken. It goes from “most acceptable” to “least acceptable” in our society for whose rights we'll tolerate violating. We as a society have grown used to some of our members being abused. They know this ugly truth, and they're exploiting it.

As I explained in my essay Political Terraforming last fall, the goal is plainly just to eliminate all rights. But they can't do it all at once. There's a clear order in which this has to be done.

In effect, there is an aspect of this which is its incremental and creeping nature. We see that as a kind of icky feeling as we wake each morning to look at the Internet, but it's not just that. It's tactical. The Overton window can only stretch at a certain rate. It's apparently fast, but not infinitely fast.

The US right now is a herd of animals where the weakest are at the outside, being picked off one by one by his wolves. We've arranged ourselves with the weakest, least overall-acceptable people at the outside, and too many of us comfort ourselves that we're safe because we're not on the outside (yet).

There's some part of this that's shock and awe, trying to go as fast as possible before anyone can react at all. But there's a slowness component to it, too.

With the system—and our own sensibilities—overwhelmed, citizens are forced to prioritize which indignity to be responding to at any given time. This Gish gallop of disgusting acts is so vast that one cannot respond to everything. So the Project 2025 goal is to lay a foundation of precedents, breaking prior norms, moving the Overton window while most people aren't yet noticing or caring because they're busy with other indignities.

So, amid the flurry of things that every day assault us citizens, they're going slowly enough that the part involving precedent setting passes unnoticed. In this way, by the time it matters for mainstream America, the aspiring dictator will be poised to say “This is just how it's done. You've lost your chance.”

We must not let these things pass unnoticed. It matters to catch them and object to them before legal precedents are set. And, for those of us who think we are not immediately threatened, it matters to see that really we are. It's coming for all of us, and soon. The damage will be done by the time it gets to many of us. So none of us can afford to postpone our outrage and involvement.

E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

We The People must not let them divide us. We must stand as one.

 

---

Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This post began as a comment on reddit. It's been tidied up and expanded, and the formatting has been adjusted to be suitable for a web venue. The reddit post is best seen as a first draft.

The graphic was downloaded downloaded from Wikimedia (which says it is in the public domain), and then cropped and scaled using Gimp.

Retirement Savings

I often hear people say that Social Security should be eliminated, that we'd do better with our own 401K's.

There are a lot of problems with that argument.

The argument is that people could invest their money better. Maybe. But they can also invest their money worse. So it's a very uneven policy. And that is ultimately cruel. It makes gamblers of us all, and experience shows that gamblers are often a lot more confident than is warranted.

Moral Failing

The sociopaths among us often say, “Too bad. Individuals should take responsibility for their lack of saving. It's not my fault that some people don't plan.” Is that so? I doubt it.

You see, those same people are telling us that we should eliminate the minimum wage, asking “if the market doesn't want to pay someone enough to even live, why should it have to?” So exactly where is the savings supposed to come from?

On the one side, people work hard for hardly any money. On the other side, they're told their failure to save is a moral failing. But where is the discussion of moral failing in having more money than God and yet still being unwilling to help raise people out of poverty? That seems the biggest moral failing.

Dynastic Wealth & Connection

Moreover, a lot of what makes the difference in who succeeds or fails is one's parents. Dynastic fortunes. Better schools. Better connections. Race. Sometimes even just better health or better clothing. The narrative is spun that the rich worked hard for their money, but, in my personal experience, poor people work much harder for the scraps they are thrown than rich people ever do, and the notion of “meritocracy” is nonsense because the people who get ahead are just those who get to start ahead of the others.

Social Security as Moral Agent

While on the topic of morality, let's also look at the structure of Social Security itself. People like to compare it to a 401K, but it's not like that. It's not a bank account. It's a very different beast.

As an example, if you become suddenly unable to work, it kicks in right away, even if you haven't paid a lot up front. That's very different than a bank account. Also, if you live for only a short while or for a long time, it continues to pay you through your life.

There might be issues with getting necessary cost of living adjustments, but the only reason we don't do those more often is that the aforementioned rich sociopaths insist it's more important to give tax breaks to the wealthy.

They'll tell you that Social Security is intended only to supplement your retirement, not to be the full amount, and yet they'll happily attach penalties for those using Social Security if they try to draw money out of it while also getting other income. That's not really how supplements work, and it's a disincentive to additional work.

A Social Contract

But my point is that the contract is not for a specific quantity of money. It is a social contract. You pay into it while you're able and you are paid when you're not able. We could do better in the “helping people to get paid” part, but the point is for it to keep a great many people from falling into poverty—to add dignity.

It's worth noting that Social Security did not arise in a vacuum. While people could invest their money, a lot of people didn't, or else were losers in that gambling. Before Social Security, in the 1930s, the elderly poverty rate in the depression was something like 70%. So there is an objective way to understand what this did for the public. Some have called it the most successful anti-poverty program in the history of the US.

Implementation Details

If we were sincerely worried that investing in the market were a better bet, we could arrange for the Social Security trust fund to do that. That's just an implementation detail and has nothing to do with the overall social promise. If DOGE wanted to do something helpful, instead of aggressively dismantling all of the US government's ability to provide value to the public, they could analyze whether there are better ways to manage the funds.

But, ultimately, government is not a business and Social Security is not a profit & loss center, even if it's popular for some who don't like it to portray it that way. It mostly pays for itself, but from a moral point of view, its real purpose is to say that we as a society need to have a commitment to our sick and elderly, to assure they are taken care of, before we declare a profit.

If we as a nation are able to give tax breaks to rich citizens only by cutting social programs, then the rich are preying on the poor. The health and welfare of all citizens is our first priority as a nation. We should not be preferencing the already-preferenced before we have attended to that.

The Present Day

This topic is very apropos in the current market. We may be about to enter another recession, perhaps a depression. 401K's are down. So the claim that we could do better investing on our own is uncertain, but is again certainly going to test a lot of ordinary citizens, postponing their ability to retire.

And I emphasize that the choice of when to retire is not just a whim. Even ignoring age discrimination, age wears on a person, and some people do physical jobs—actual hard work, as opposed to the metaphorically hard work done by rich executives—that leaves them depleted. So, delayed retirement is not just an inconvenience, it is in some cases cruel torture, and in some cases impossible.

But even as we are potentially entering a depression, the billionaires are salivating. They are looking forward to “buying low”. They're treating this roller coaster as a buying opportunity! They plan to get rich on this depression. Even as others suffer and probably many die. As homes and farms are foreclosed upon. They are gleeful.

Betting on Regular Citizens

This is the time when Social Security should be doubling down and assuring people it will increase benefits to cover rising costs—although it wouldn't be terrible if we also just impeached the President who's artificially causing those rising costs by imposing tariffs that really no sane business people think are a good idea. Social Security is a social contract with the population about what our priority is, even in tough times. Especially then. So, if we need more money, we should be bumping the tax on those gleeful about what a great buying opportunity this is. That would properly reflect our societal morality.

They, the rich, would probably whine that such a tax singles them out. They'd speak of their pain, and claim that others were just jealous of their wealth and cleverness. No one should stand for such rhetoric. The rich folks making noise did not get their power by dealing honorably with us citizens. This is not jealousy speaking. It is a desire for justice. Be glad I'm not suggesting—as some have and still do—that we just “eat the rich” and be done with it. Proper taxation of accumulated wealth (not just income) works for me.

No one needs that much money anyway. It's clear from their observed behavior that one can only buy so many gold toilet seats before one starts to wonder what the point of excess riches is, and really it seems the only thing that one can find to spend such wealth on is buying governments. And then, apparently, running them badly and cruelly. The Peter Principle in its most high stakes form. No, I'm not going to feel sorry about suggesting taxation.

 

---

Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

An early version of this post lost some text from the original that was restored a few hours after posting.

This post originated as a rant by me on Mastodon. Small amounts of content have been aded, it has been lightly copy-edited, and its typography has been adjusted to fit this forum. Also, some of the tariffs were paused today as this revised version of the essay goes online, along with claims that this was all strategic. But that only underscores my point about gambling. There is no certainty in the 401K approach like there would be in a societal commitment to care for its weaker members.

The graphic was produced using abacus.ai using RouteLLM and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra, then post-processing in Gimp.

Government is not a Business

Be wary of the statement “Government needs to be run like a business.” It should not. It's meant to sound unobjectionable, but is a radical shift away from anything familiar.

Centralized Control

The Constitution is designed around the notion of decentralizing control. It's inefficient, as people often notice, but that's by design. Inefficiency is protection from tyrants. It makes things happen slowly, allowing time for deliberation. Every time you make something efficient, you enable change to happen faster than government can respond, as is happening now with DOGE.

Tyrants want central control. Be wary of the statement “The President is the CEO of the US.” They want you to think a President is a King, a central voice to tell us everything. That neglects the checks & balances of three co-equal branches of government, intended to distribute control, to have the various branches fighting with one another, to make sure there's lots of consensus before anything happens.

Checks on Power

When a Congressperson salutes POTUS and says “yes, sir, you're in charge,” they breach their oath of office. The whole point of distributed power is distributed thought, which isn't happening.

It's pointless and dangerous, to have all the thought be centralized in one person and then to have everyone just say “yes” because then you just have a zillion photocopies of one person's thought. If that person is even thinking. Democracy at all levels intends many people thinking in different ways and making sure many paths of thought lead to convergent policy. That's how consensus is built.

In Service of All

But even beyond that, government differs from business in another very important way. Business is founded centrally on the notion of profit made by determining who not to serve. It's rarely profitable to serve everyone, so the assumption is that it's fine to leave some unserved. Maybe someone else will serve them. Maybe not.

Business figures out its profitable customer base and just focuses on them. That's not what democratic government promises. Democracy, even beyond all the voting stuff, is about believing each person matters just because they exist, that dignity arises not from wealth but from being alive, that we are all equals. Government must serve each of us in a way that does not prioritize rich over poor.

Oh, You Poor Unheard Rich People!

Money already speaks. It needs no representation in government. There are people, usually rich people, who sometimes say that Big Business needs special attention in government. It does not. Business is not going to be forgotten, no matter what government does, so stop feeling sorry for it. Big Business has the shameless means to be regularly petulant, but in spite of its many pity parties, it is not suffering.

Undo the Citizens United ruling. Corporations are not people. Profit-making entities don't need to be voting. Their stakeholders can already vote in public elections. Businesses need no additional, redundant, amplified freedom of speech, no megaphone.

Business isn't going to suddenly stop happening if we change laws in some way that is unfavorable to particular rich folk. If the people who are in business now don't like it, they can drop out. Others will happily take their place.

Fairly Represented

What needs representation in government are regular people. Government sets the rules that all businesses must follow.

Adam Smith, called the father of economics and/or capitalism, expressed concern about morality in business. He very clearly understood that the optimization engine that is the marketplace will not find morality on its own, that business will tend toward tyranny if not forced to do otherwise. He suggested that if you want morality in business, it must be encoded in law.

It's government's job to make good rules that hold tyranny at bay. Some people and businesses will tell you they'd profit better if there were no rules. In my view, where there are no rules, bullies rule. That's no world to be seeking.

What Privatization Dodges

Nor should government be privatized. An important thing that government offers is accountability and auditability by the public, and redress of injustice. Many pushes for privatization are attempts to get around such scrutiny and accountability.

Business is a dictatorship in structure, where the US government distributes control to avoid dictatorial control. We're lulled by business success to thinking such dictatorships nonthreatening, but you can go home from them at the end of the day, they cannot keep you from leaving, and they can't threaten your family or property, as government dictatorships might.

Employees have a duty to business leaders, who have a fiduciary duty to shareholders, whereas our elected representatives have a duty to the public, those who elected them. Elected leaders must be working for The People, not vice versa.

DOGE Debunked

Business profits by efficiency, where democracy finds strength in inefficiency because it distributes power. Too-concentrated power is historically understood to be a great danger. A DOGE-like effort to focus on efficiency might be defensible in some businesses, where efficiency is the central concern, In government, however, DOGE undermines both the safeguards underlying and the stated goals of the US government.

Government must not be run like a business. Elimination of inefficiency is not an automatic positive. Privatization loses control of and accountability for things that affect citizens' lives. Such suggestions are active dangers to democracy to be discussed with great wariness.

 

---

Other Posts by Kent Pitman on related topics:

• Speed Kills
• Retirement Savings
• Political Terraforming
• Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics

Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This post was cobbled together from other writings of mine, so if you feel like you've read some or all of this before, you're probably right. But I wanted to put it all in one place.

The graphic was produced using abacus.ai using Claude-Sonnet 3.7 and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra, then post-processing in Gimp.