![[Fanciful, mostly grayscale rendering of a cartoonish but not funny image that shows several police vehicles outside of some kind of border with steel bars as a fence. One of the vehices has a sort of cannon that is transparent and loaded with people, some of whom have already been shot helplessly into the air to cross the border fence.]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUfSUNurMWMvpTBA40WzWO-3ZcWO-3etbO1LyciZQFTC7_lbIjd1iL2JuVLPKOmYAGGNKnvzhFw3x7AbsqZrc-aO964-VQmnHHHqKDqtqzSO3wfGWwEYR8W1sVOLnyEauxaWrdQH3m-88UjKayOL3GKcREcykqddhKHptrn2R1HgNeMeXiMuv2PyCZoeg/s1250/swift-injustice-relabeled-aspect%281250x750%29.jpg)
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…»
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.”
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.
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.”»
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.
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.”
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.»
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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.
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