I hate that we feel we have to respond to the right’s accusations of these folks being gang members at all; that isn’t the point. Whether these men are mass murderers, saints or anything between, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about the absence of due process.
"It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one."
Voltaire
People like Senator Van Hollen are taking refuge in an abstraction - what does 'due process' really mean anyway when two immigration judges have already accepted the government's claim that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13 on the basis of the flimsiest evidence available? Should immigrants be exposed to the lottery that is the US immigration court system where children are once again being tried without access to legal representation?
What must be done instead is to think of the people involved. Think of the sadistic attempts by the administration to demonise them, whether they are immigrants seeking refuge in the US or students at your universities. In the case of Abrego Garcia, the horror is that an obviously completely innocent man was unlawfully detained and deported to an inhumane prison in El Salvador on spurious grounds that the administration have never been confident enough to defend on their own merits in a court of law. Instead, they produce a grieving mother, Patty Morin, asking her to do their dirty work for them or a photoshopped picture of Abrego Garcia's fist ('evidence' that in any case that was never submitted before a court). Judge Paula Xinis has called it out for what it is - "wholly lawless". And she has also emphasised the irreparable harm that Abrego Garcia has already suffered at the hands of this lawless administration.
This is more important than your 'due process' because Abrego Garcia is not alone -
‘More important than due process’ to whom, though? They have already shown their frightening lack of compassion or even the ability to see people they deem ‘others’ as human or deserving of humane treatment. What they DO cling to is the flag, guns, ‘God bless America’ and the Constitution- or so they claim. Therefore, I am trying to come with the argument that everything they think they stand for CAN be taken away at the whim of their fickle, reckless, spiteful, loose cannon of a dictator president. If they can see that if due process is not granted to everyone, they as citizens could be whisked away and disappeared just as easily as to those ‘illegals’ they hate can. Maybe we can appeal to that seed of fear as the least common denominator and find some shred of commonality to fight this lawlessness.
But they don't believe that it's going to happen to them though, do they? They're the folk who get a full pardon for insurrection. That also counts as 'due process' under your Constitution even though it was a scandalous abuse of power. Due process is not going to save anybody unless it's accompanied by a sense of moral outrage about what's right and what's wrong. That's what is missing here in my view. Senator Van Hollen said on Fox News "I am not defending the man, I'm defending his rights." That's not enough when innocent people are being brutalised.
You keep saying ‘your Constitution’, leading me to think you aren’t here. I am and, sadly, the onslaught of civil and human rights violations in the past 90+ days has been truly overwhelming. We who feel and express moral
outrage are exhausted and feel like we are screaming into the wind.
I live in the UK, KB, and we don't have a written constitution so we are more dependent than you on the good faith of the people who occupy key roles in the three branches of the state. My view is that your Constitution has become too resistant to change over its 230-year existence, necessitating a certain amount of judicial activism that has finally led to the potentially dangerous abandonment of precedent by your highest court. You even have the strange phenomenon of lawyers now using a deeply conservative legal doctrine (the so-called Major Questions doctrine) to oppose some of Trump's assertions of umlimited executive power (which his people justify under the Unitary Executive theory). You have these vying legal philosophies playing out in court because of the sclerotic and undecipherable nature of your Constitution and the unwiillingness of your Congress to step in decisively and re-assert its constitutional role. The result is that you have constitutional lawyers and academics uncertain of how things will unfold if Trump continues to resist court orders. Just yesterday, he made another garbled attempt to justify his policy of deportation without due process, in spite of a clear ruling from SCOTUS. He told reporters:
“We’re getting them out, and I hope we get cooperation from the courts because you know, we have thousands of people that are ready to go out, and you can’s have a trial for all of these people. It wasn’t meant, the system wasn’t meant- and we don’t think there is anything that says … Look, we are getting some very bad people, killers, murderers, drug dealers, really bad people, the mentally ill, the mentally insane, they emptied out insane asylums into our country, we’re getting them out. And a judge can’t say: ‘No, you have to have a trial. No, we are going to have a very dangerous country if we are not allowed to do what we are entitled to do."
Thank you once again, Professor, for a thorough and clear summary. We are in an unimaginable place in history. We have learned nothing from the atrocities in the last century.
I see today that Hegseth is all over the MSM mansplaining, that the new revelations about another 'oopsie' by him like 'signal gate' is "all the media's fault." Damn.... Didn't he consider Biden, or maybe Hillary, or even "Hunters laptop" ? Lol.. You can't make this stuff up ! Does anyone recall Joe Biden blaming the media or anyone else for something ?
Now according to the White House it's officially a 'deep state' plot against him at the Pentagon, which to be honest is probably not far from the truth given how dangerously useless this man is.
She is a tool, a mere cipher but she performs her role with gusto and conviction and her indignation is real. It's hard to believe that anyone could be more impossibly stupid but she is the perfect representative of everything that MAGA stands for.
If instead of the deception, the lying, and that game playing, our “leaders” would lead with integrity and wisdom, we could be heading into the United States our founders risked their lives for. What a waste of time, and resources! Keep up the fight anyway you can 💙🇺🇸
OMG Visions of grandeur by our leader, (he must truly love himself) yet the government is in shambles, the pentagon is in shambles, the immigration issue is in shambles. What more can I say the Alien Enemies Act shouldn't be implemented because we aren't in the war currently so he has no ground to stand on there either!
Use this spreadsheet to call/email/write any of our representatives as often as possible. Not just your own state reps, reach out to those in other states. Be as loud as you can and share this. Use your voice and make some “good trouble.”
I want to unsubscribe from everything because I get too much email and one of my "FB friends" posts your stuff. I want to stop my yearly subscription too.
I don’t disagree as it can be overwhelming. I have pruned some by unsubscribing, which the app makes very simple to do w/o fanfare or hassle. I’ve also changed the frequency of notifications, so as not to unsubscribe from people whose viewpoints I truly value and can teach me something.
I get two kinds of political mail: commentaries that I value, like HCR's Letters and those from Kensinger, Reisch, Krugman, the Contrarians, and Ohman (of the SF Chron). The other types, which I'm finding increasingly hard to tolerate, involve requests for money. My mailboxes are jammed with such requests every day. And some are downright ridiculous; I had a request for a donation from some guy running for city council in a small town in the midwest recently. That one went right to oblivion, with a block thrown in. Anyway, Ann, I'm sorry you're throwing out the good stuff (such as HCR's letters) along with what is, I'll bet, responsible for your frustrations-- incessant fund raisers.
John, they need the funds to keep going. Many of them are completely free but ask for donations from those who are well off enough to provide them on behalf of those who aren't. I mention sites like ProPublica, whose ground-breaking investigations are often picked up by the national press, or the Intercept or individuals like Bill McKibben, who has been fighting the good fight on the dangers of global warming for longer than I can remember. These are brilliant, worthy people whose journalism we need and if the 'price' is having one's inbox cluttered with requests for donations then in my view the task of de-cluttering is a small task to pay for keeping informed.
I agree, and I give regularly to these causes, too regularly, I fear, since I get requests from guys like that city council candidate in the midwest I mentioned. That's really inappropriate. And sometimes I hear from the same candidate's office as many as three times in one day. The first time I'll make a donation (small, usually $25-50), but then a few hours later I might get another request. Now computers ought to be programmed to prevent this from happening. Don't ask again for a few days at least. It's this sort of thing that clogs my mailbox and irritates me. A request from journalists for support is almost never ignored, so you're preaching to the choir about that.
You're a good guy, John. It's very similar with charities. They will come back again and again to those who have supported them in the past. In the end I settled on around a dozen of them and make a monthly contribution. I really don't mind them asking me for help.
I replied to a fundraising email that I’m already contributing monthly to the Spanberger campaign for Virginia Governor; and if they want me to continue doing that, they must stop with the daily appeals for ever more money. It seems to have worked! Act Blue had better figure out how to focus their energy on non-contributors, or lose the goodwill of their small-dollar donors ($25/month or less).
I understand that when Nayib Bukhele was in the WH, Humpty said that he should build five more giant prisons, and he would fill them up; to which Bukele replied: “we have lots of space!
So there it is in a nutshell: put American citizens into hellish concentration camps in Central America. Next, he’ll announce that he’s sending his political targets to Russia to help them in their death struggle with the Ukrainian dictator, Zelenskyy!
Meanwhile over at the Pentagon, Pete has stepped into another giant cow pie; he’s in it up to his eyeballs, and still denies everything he provably did. Why not send HIM to Russia? With friends like Secetary of Heavy Drinking, white Supremacy and Abuse of Women (Pete), we don’t need enemies. China is probably thinking: isn’t this a good time to strike, while the U.S. military is being so badly mismanaged by the most unqualified, incompetent SecDef in American history?
I hate that we feel we have to respond to the right’s accusations of these folks being gang members at all; that isn’t the point. Whether these men are mass murderers, saints or anything between, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about the absence of due process.
"It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one."
Voltaire
People like Senator Van Hollen are taking refuge in an abstraction - what does 'due process' really mean anyway when two immigration judges have already accepted the government's claim that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13 on the basis of the flimsiest evidence available? Should immigrants be exposed to the lottery that is the US immigration court system where children are once again being tried without access to legal representation?
What must be done instead is to think of the people involved. Think of the sadistic attempts by the administration to demonise them, whether they are immigrants seeking refuge in the US or students at your universities. In the case of Abrego Garcia, the horror is that an obviously completely innocent man was unlawfully detained and deported to an inhumane prison in El Salvador on spurious grounds that the administration have never been confident enough to defend on their own merits in a court of law. Instead, they produce a grieving mother, Patty Morin, asking her to do their dirty work for them or a photoshopped picture of Abrego Garcia's fist ('evidence' that in any case that was never submitted before a court). Judge Paula Xinis has called it out for what it is - "wholly lawless". And she has also emphasised the irreparable harm that Abrego Garcia has already suffered at the hands of this lawless administration.
This is more important than your 'due process' because Abrego Garcia is not alone -
https://popular.info/p/federal-immigration-authorities-wrongfully?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1664&post_id=161759094&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=9sm91&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5217595-international-students-faculty-trump-immigration-crackdown-ice-tufts-student-detained-columbia-alabama/
‘More important than due process’ to whom, though? They have already shown their frightening lack of compassion or even the ability to see people they deem ‘others’ as human or deserving of humane treatment. What they DO cling to is the flag, guns, ‘God bless America’ and the Constitution- or so they claim. Therefore, I am trying to come with the argument that everything they think they stand for CAN be taken away at the whim of their fickle, reckless, spiteful, loose cannon of a dictator president. If they can see that if due process is not granted to everyone, they as citizens could be whisked away and disappeared just as easily as to those ‘illegals’ they hate can. Maybe we can appeal to that seed of fear as the least common denominator and find some shred of commonality to fight this lawlessness.
But they don't believe that it's going to happen to them though, do they? They're the folk who get a full pardon for insurrection. That also counts as 'due process' under your Constitution even though it was a scandalous abuse of power. Due process is not going to save anybody unless it's accompanied by a sense of moral outrage about what's right and what's wrong. That's what is missing here in my view. Senator Van Hollen said on Fox News "I am not defending the man, I'm defending his rights." That's not enough when innocent people are being brutalised.
You keep saying ‘your Constitution’, leading me to think you aren’t here. I am and, sadly, the onslaught of civil and human rights violations in the past 90+ days has been truly overwhelming. We who feel and express moral
outrage are exhausted and feel like we are screaming into the wind.
I live in the UK, KB, and we don't have a written constitution so we are more dependent than you on the good faith of the people who occupy key roles in the three branches of the state. My view is that your Constitution has become too resistant to change over its 230-year existence, necessitating a certain amount of judicial activism that has finally led to the potentially dangerous abandonment of precedent by your highest court. You even have the strange phenomenon of lawyers now using a deeply conservative legal doctrine (the so-called Major Questions doctrine) to oppose some of Trump's assertions of umlimited executive power (which his people justify under the Unitary Executive theory). You have these vying legal philosophies playing out in court because of the sclerotic and undecipherable nature of your Constitution and the unwiillingness of your Congress to step in decisively and re-assert its constitutional role. The result is that you have constitutional lawyers and academics uncertain of how things will unfold if Trump continues to resist court orders. Just yesterday, he made another garbled attempt to justify his policy of deportation without due process, in spite of a clear ruling from SCOTUS. He told reporters:
“We’re getting them out, and I hope we get cooperation from the courts because you know, we have thousands of people that are ready to go out, and you can’s have a trial for all of these people. It wasn’t meant, the system wasn’t meant- and we don’t think there is anything that says … Look, we are getting some very bad people, killers, murderers, drug dealers, really bad people, the mentally ill, the mentally insane, they emptied out insane asylums into our country, we’re getting them out. And a judge can’t say: ‘No, you have to have a trial. No, we are going to have a very dangerous country if we are not allowed to do what we are entitled to do."
I am not alone in my opinion of the situation.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-08-23/constitution-undemocratic-amendments-rewrite
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." - Dostoevsky
Or some other country's hellhole of a prison?
Thank you once again, Professor, for a thorough and clear summary. We are in an unimaginable place in history. We have learned nothing from the atrocities in the last century.
Thank you, Heather. Your letters are always so clear and easy to understand.
I see today that Hegseth is all over the MSM mansplaining, that the new revelations about another 'oopsie' by him like 'signal gate' is "all the media's fault." Damn.... Didn't he consider Biden, or maybe Hillary, or even "Hunters laptop" ? Lol.. You can't make this stuff up ! Does anyone recall Joe Biden blaming the media or anyone else for something ?
Now according to the White House it's officially a 'deep state' plot against him at the Pentagon, which to be honest is probably not far from the truth given how dangerously useless this man is.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-house-unveils-crazy-defense-of-plot-victim-pete-hegseth/
Perhaps. Leavitt is such a tool - spinmeister. We do make our own beds after all. Nice article by the way; thanks.
She is a tool, a mere cipher but she performs her role with gusto and conviction and her indignation is real. It's hard to believe that anyone could be more impossibly stupid but she is the perfect representative of everything that MAGA stands for.
Please don't allow the current POTUS to "invoke" anything...
He has too many other mental health issues to make an informed decision...
God, continue helping the USA !!
Thank you for this newsletter. I appreciate all you do.
If instead of the deception, the lying, and that game playing, our “leaders” would lead with integrity and wisdom, we could be heading into the United States our founders risked their lives for. What a waste of time, and resources! Keep up the fight anyway you can 💙🇺🇸
OMG Visions of grandeur by our leader, (he must truly love himself) yet the government is in shambles, the pentagon is in shambles, the immigration issue is in shambles. What more can I say the Alien Enemies Act shouldn't be implemented because we aren't in the war currently so he has no ground to stand on there either!
Keep being loud!
Use this spreadsheet to call/email/write any of our representatives as often as possible. Not just your own state reps, reach out to those in other states. Be as loud as you can and share this. Use your voice and make some “good trouble.”
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13lYafj0P-6owAJcH-5_xcpcRvMUZI7rkBPW-Ma9e7hw/edit
How is any of this acceptable?
Ooooh such an important distinction..." I'm not defending the man, I'm defending due process"
Bravo.
I want to unsubscribe from everything because I get too much email and one of my "FB friends" posts your stuff. I want to stop my yearly subscription too.
This isn’t an airport; you don’t need to announce your departure, just leave.
Ha! Good one. Though I can definitely relate to feeling overwhelmed just eliminating bloat from my email inbox.
I don’t disagree as it can be overwhelming. I have pruned some by unsubscribing, which the app makes very simple to do w/o fanfare or hassle. I’ve also changed the frequency of notifications, so as not to unsubscribe from people whose viewpoints I truly value and can teach me something.
However, I’m always all in on anything from HCR!
I get two kinds of political mail: commentaries that I value, like HCR's Letters and those from Kensinger, Reisch, Krugman, the Contrarians, and Ohman (of the SF Chron). The other types, which I'm finding increasingly hard to tolerate, involve requests for money. My mailboxes are jammed with such requests every day. And some are downright ridiculous; I had a request for a donation from some guy running for city council in a small town in the midwest recently. That one went right to oblivion, with a block thrown in. Anyway, Ann, I'm sorry you're throwing out the good stuff (such as HCR's letters) along with what is, I'll bet, responsible for your frustrations-- incessant fund raisers.
John, they need the funds to keep going. Many of them are completely free but ask for donations from those who are well off enough to provide them on behalf of those who aren't. I mention sites like ProPublica, whose ground-breaking investigations are often picked up by the national press, or the Intercept or individuals like Bill McKibben, who has been fighting the good fight on the dangers of global warming for longer than I can remember. These are brilliant, worthy people whose journalism we need and if the 'price' is having one's inbox cluttered with requests for donations then in my view the task of de-cluttering is a small task to pay for keeping informed.
I agree, and I give regularly to these causes, too regularly, I fear, since I get requests from guys like that city council candidate in the midwest I mentioned. That's really inappropriate. And sometimes I hear from the same candidate's office as many as three times in one day. The first time I'll make a donation (small, usually $25-50), but then a few hours later I might get another request. Now computers ought to be programmed to prevent this from happening. Don't ask again for a few days at least. It's this sort of thing that clogs my mailbox and irritates me. A request from journalists for support is almost never ignored, so you're preaching to the choir about that.
You're a good guy, John. It's very similar with charities. They will come back again and again to those who have supported them in the past. In the end I settled on around a dozen of them and make a monthly contribution. I really don't mind them asking me for help.
I replied to a fundraising email that I’m already contributing monthly to the Spanberger campaign for Virginia Governor; and if they want me to continue doing that, they must stop with the daily appeals for ever more money. It seems to have worked! Act Blue had better figure out how to focus their energy on non-contributors, or lose the goodwill of their small-dollar donors ($25/month or less).
But keep your porch light on !!
KEEP YOUR PORCH LIGHTS ON !!
I understand that when Nayib Bukhele was in the WH, Humpty said that he should build five more giant prisons, and he would fill them up; to which Bukele replied: “we have lots of space!
So there it is in a nutshell: put American citizens into hellish concentration camps in Central America. Next, he’ll announce that he’s sending his political targets to Russia to help them in their death struggle with the Ukrainian dictator, Zelenskyy!
Meanwhile over at the Pentagon, Pete has stepped into another giant cow pie; he’s in it up to his eyeballs, and still denies everything he provably did. Why not send HIM to Russia? With friends like Secetary of Heavy Drinking, white Supremacy and Abuse of Women (Pete), we don’t need enemies. China is probably thinking: isn’t this a good time to strike, while the U.S. military is being so badly mismanaged by the most unqualified, incompetent SecDef in American history?
Excellent update !