You think you are a citizen today because you've always been a citizen, you have papers to prove it. It's never even been questioned. What if those papers get destroyed? What if the officer interpreting your papers is employed by someone who doesn't like you because you're disobedient. Without rule of law your status as a citizen doesn't protect you. Without a functioning judiciary capable of providing consequences to those who violate rule of law, you have no one to appeal to.
This administration complains about single judges restricting their actions. That should literally terrify you. The judges are not stopping the administration, they are ruling that the law is stopping the administration. When the administration says it is judges stopping it, it is claiming that there is no law, only the actions of loyal or disobedient men.
We are in a constitutional crisis. We are effectively lawless. Right now, we cannot depend on the law to restrict powerful people's actions. We have no way to predict what is possible for someone with a gun who is loyal to the president to do without consequences and therefore no way to act as if the law protects us.
Complaining on social media is fine, but that won't solve the problem.
As a European, I'm shocked at how complacent the public has been. I've lived in France and people do global strikes and widespread civil unrest for a change of retirement law. Yet in the US a dictatorship emerges and you have small demonstrations here and there and spicy comments on social media. That won't change things.
I mean it's trite but obviously a democracy can fail in this way (see Weimar Germany). If you can make enough people feel aggrieved and give them an "other" to hate, you're off to the races.
This US slip into authoritarianism should cause us all to reconsider history too. This is the wealthiest country in the world, so economic trouble is clearly not required, and it gives lie to the notion that the US had some kind of unique structural defense against authoritarianism - maybe there is no defense, and this is inevitable.
A big part of the problem is that wealth has overwhelmingly been funneled upwards. Despite being the wealthiest country on the planet, and despite said wealth largely increasing over time, the average person hasn't felt it, because they don't get a cut. For over 50 years now, wages have become disconnected with productivity, with the capital class siphoning off nearly all productivity gains for themselves at the expense of everyone else.
One of the primary reasons Trump won the election is that the Democrats were hailing the high-level economic numbers as a big success, but the average person wasn't really feeling it. Being told that things are going great when they're suffering put many people off voting and caused others to vote against the incumbent party in hopes of a change.
Unfortunately for the masses, the Republican party has largely been responsible for the current wealth inequality through repeated tax cuts disproportionately affecting the wealthy and attacks on worker representation over the last half century. Though, to be fair, despite their rhetoric, the Democratic party has generally been complicit, as they are also owned and operated by moneyed interests. Citizens United was probably the final nail in the coffin containing any hope to turn things around.
This nonsense drives me bananas. It's not true. There are no numbers showing that the median/average/working-class/whatever American citizen is worse off in any meaningful way. Period. It didn't happen. Americans are wealthier now[1] than they ever have been. Americans are wealthier now than anyone[2] has been, ever, in the entirety of human experience.
That they (and you) don't believe this to be the case is important and interesting. But it's not true.
[1] Maybe not for that ←long once the Q2/Q3 results show up with the tariff impact and the layoff start
[2] Anyone with a broad enough sampling I guess. There are always tiny states with skewed statistics.
What precisely are you measuring to conclude that Americans are wealthier than ever before?
When it comes to luxury goods, sure - things like TVs and computers are cheaper than they ever have been, both relative to wealth and even in absolute terms.
However, when you look at necessities like housing, healthcare, and I dare say education, you'll notice that all have far outpaced inflation and even wage growth.
As a personal anecdote - my father did much the same job I do, and yet while he was taking care of a full family of four, I can't say that I feel any better off despite being single and not regularly vacationing like I did growing up.
As far as I can tell - I'm not alone. If anything, I'm uniquely blessed relative to my peers due to my tech background. We have an entire generation putting off family building because stagnant wages coupled with high student loan debt and housing prices cause many to perceive they are hardly getting by. Nearly half of all adults live paycheck-to-paycheck.
No, no, no. Americans are wealthier in PPP metrics than they ever have been. There are no numbers that show what you believe. None. It's wrong. And yet you, and everyone else, believes it anyway. And because Everyone Believes It you figure it must represent some great truth and thus people showing you numbers to the contrary must be wrong, or lying. And so you end up prey for politicians lying to you, and you elect a government that starts a trade war.
And I guess it does represent such a truth, but it's a great truth about universal delusion at the end of an empire, or something else. It's not about wealth. It's not.
It always, always is relative. People compare themselves with neighbors/TV, not with themselves 50 years ago.
Totally agree with you, don't know why so many downvotes. But important point is wealth is never absolute, but comparative. And that's where inequality comes into play. Almost all revolutions happen because of inequality.
I've met Silicon Valley multi-millionaires why cried they are poor and how those damn billionaires gentrifying them from their lovely neighborhoods.
I'm against forced equalization of incomes, but on the long run that's what keeps the system stable. Unless you are Norway, of course, where people strongly believe equalization is good, and post everyone's compensation on public (well, taxes, but it's easy to get comp from taxes).
UPDATE: so the metric we should look at is Gini index, not GDP or PPP.
That explains jealousy, not "suffering" as the upthread commenter put it. No, this is 100% irrational.
I mean, think about it: there have always been phenomenally wealthy people. If every billionaire in the US had their net worth cut by 50%, instantly, that would fix the "Gini index" you think we should be looking at.
But would their lifestyles change? Would anyone but the billionaires even notice? If you stop a person on the street and ask "Is it fair that Bill Gates is worth $50B dollars?", they're going to say "no", right? That's way too much money. Except, of course, that Gates is worth twice that and the number is something that you argue should be "fair".
No, it's not numbers. It's irrational delusion fed by fear and anger and click-chasing from everywhere across the media landscape. But. It's. Wrong. And someone needs to start telling people that.
Because at this point our shared delusion is causing a trade war that is going to make all of us (literally, all of humanity) poorer.
As long as they're fed a 24/7 media diet of government overreach and cruelty to others, they won't even notice when it's their turn. Note that even now, they blame American job losses on Central America and China instead of the American CEOs that signed and profited from those deals.
Sorry - I didn't mean to sound like I was accusing everyone, but there's certainly U.S. communities where racist attitudes/behaviour are allowed to fester unchecked. I find it quite shocking.
As long as their have Tiktok, Netflix and their burger and fries, people don’t really care. They write an angry comment, scroll to the next post about cute cats and forget all about it.
> As a European, I'm shocked at how complacent the public has been.
There have been large, growing, and recurring protests.
> Yet in the US a dictatorship emerges and you have small demonstrations here and there
They aren't small. (They aren't well covered by the media, but the media is actively part of the problem.)
> that won't change things.
The social infrastructure and culture around which things like general strikes and more significant actions occur does not exist in the United States. The current and growing protest movement (and the networking and community building go on around and behind it) is how that infrastructure gets built. So, I disagree, the things you are saying won't change it are absolutely indispensable to building the capacity for the kind of things that can change it, assuming that it continues to develop in a way that cannot be constrained effectively by more regular political means such as the 2026 midterm and 2028 presidential elections.
Because a very large number of Americans are pro-dictatorship. This is not an a Manchurian-candidate scenario. This is a legitimately-elected leader doing exactly what he was elected to do.
A lot of them seem to be cheering him on as if they elected a king. The problem being of course that legally there is no person who can just issue edicts and have them become law, there is no legal way to elect a king.
> This is a legitimately-elected leader doing exactly what he was elected to do.
He put a fair bit of effort in telling people he wasn't going to do most of this stuff. It was always clear that he was lying, but lots of people believed him and are now very surprised.
> This is a legitimately-elected leader doing exactly what he was elected to do.
He was elected to bring prices and inflation down; that’s what he campaigned on! He lied at that time and people trusted in his lies. He have no idea what he can do to bring prices and inflation down! Marketing could be his expertise, but when it comes to performing duties of the President, he’s super dumb.
It's going to be "fun" when the tariffs really hit and prices and inflation go up. Then people will have to fall back on "no, we elected him for the unlawful mass deportations".
It's always going to be something. It's like the entire span of history and politics from 2016 to six months before the election never happened, and Trump was always a reasonable, respectable, honest politician who never said or did anything out of the ordinary. Why would anyone have any reason not to trust his intentions? Why would anyone associate him with these extremist beliefs?
"I voted for the Party because I supported their infrastructure plan, I had no idea where all of those trains would be going" kind of feel.
And the sad thing is, it will work because our entire framework of subjective truth and reality is built on the very technologies they already use to reprogram us and revise history. Trump was always an honest man. We were always at war with Canada. It was always about egg prices.
If you bracket away Trump, political dissent in US is co-opted by one of the two parties(tea-parties, for instances), or muted(Occupy Wall Street) or criminalized. In other words, political dissent doesn't lead to the emergence of new parties, as is the case in Europe.
Cyncicsm is the belief that you don't think there is anything worth fighting for. Cynicism is an admission that you prefer to submit than fight. Most of the world looked at Ukraine and cynically said that Zelenskyy would flee and Ukrainians would not fight because they themselves would not be willing to fight. Few people have values they would consider dying for. Few people would put themselves at risk for another person. Few people would be willing to die building a better world that they won't get to experience. Yet Ukrainians are fighting for western values right now. They are fighting for a government in which they are a person and not a thing. They are fighting for a government that does not treat them arbitrarily. They are fighting for them and their children to have a future.
On the Maidan revolution of Ukraine:
The Maidan was a revolt against произвол (pronounced: preez-vol), an idea of arbitrariness tinged with tyranny, helplessness in the face of power, the feeling that the powers that be can do whatever they want to you, and you are helpless, that you are being treated as a plaything, as a thing and not as a human being, as an object and not as a subject, and the Maidan became a revolt against произвол, it became an insistence on being treated as a person and not as a thing, as a subject not as an object, and they began to call themselves on the Maidan the revolution of dignity. The Making of Modern Ukraine: Maidan and Self-Understanding, Guest Lecturer: Marci Shore -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg_CLI3xY58&list=PLh9mgdi4rN...
In November 2013 Ukraine was expected to sign a long-anticipated association agreement with the European Union. At the eleventh hour, on 21 November 2013, Yanukovych refused.
The disappointment was especially crushing for students, who felt as if their future had vanished; Europe would be closed to them. That evening a thirty-two-year-old Ukrainian journalist from Kabul named Mustafa Nayyem wrote in Russian on his Facebook page:
Come on, let’s get serious.
Who is ready to go out to the Maidan by midnight tonight? ‘Likes’ don’t count.
That night Ukrainians—overwhelming students—came to the Maidan—and stayed. They held hands and shouted, “Ukraine is Europe!” At 4 am on 30 November 2013 Yanukovych sent his riot police to the Maidan to beat the students. The violence against peaceful protestors was a shock. Yanukovych, it seems, was counting on the shock to shake parents into pulling their kids off the streets. That was when something remarkable happened: instead of pulling their kids off the streets, the parents joined them there. It was a historic Aufhebung of Oedipal rebellion. Now there were close to a million people on the streets of Kyiv, and they were shouting, “We will not permit you to beat our children!” Ukraine's Maidan Revolution --https://snyder.substack.com/p/ukraines-maidan-revolution
I showed up to the first protest of my entire life on April 5th. This Saturday, April 19th, everyone here should show up, too.
> The violence against peaceful protestors was a shock.
A couple of months later not just violence. I know someone who was at the Maidan helping the wounded. That guy is mostly neutral and not pro West or whatnot, he just talked about what he saw and that included a few protesters fatally shot by paid agents (I didn't know about that until I talked to him). Clearly even that didn't work when people are motivated enough.
Grimly, it was the shooting of a large number of demonstrators that pushed the rest of the country, the "centrists" and the "apolitical", off the fence.
I don't know whether that would work in America. The Vegas shooter killed 60 and injured several hundred people, to zero political effect. BLM riots incurred a lot of injuries but very few actual deaths. I suspect Amerimaidan would go very badly and be easily demonized in the media.
George Floyd protests happened and they were significant enough to get the second in command of the US military and Americas top military advisor to both say trump is a threat to the constitution as well as achieving the goal of justice in the form of consequences for George Floyd's murder.
It was so traumatic for America's top military advisor that he made a major point to those under him that they swore an oath to the constitution and not a "wannabe dictator."
Many police departments have enacted various reforms, hard to tell if they have been enacted in good faith.
The Vegas shooter is business as usual and generally considered a societal problem. The BLM protests were different and seen as caused/provoked by the administration at the time.
As far as the grim part... Unfortunately that's the way power works. Power will not be challenged without putting up a fight.
If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny. Timothy Snyder - On Tyranny.
We need violence. People are going to downvote this but this is the only way to push back. Peaceful protests are good for things like policy changes. Trump and his administration need to be dragged through the streets and hung.
It's not enough to be against, that's what the Iranians did and it created a power vacuum filled by people worse than what they had. You must be for something.
Indeed - but isn't the court decision, as per TFA, a step in the right direction? Courts are slow but if they grind in the right direction, they get there.
Americans don't have much experience of this kind of tug of war (good for you). So far Trump hasn't faced any difficulties yet. Courts haven't kicked in, economy is steady, no external shocks and the tariff stuff hasn't percolated down to Main Street. It's easy to be a populist.
The hard stuff starts when the combined noose of court action, domestic discontent and external shocks really starts to bite, and there's still hope courts will retain their independence.
I can see why you say so, and it is a concern, equally if you assume that courts are slow and work eventually, that's what it will look like on the happy trajectory of law being enforced.
If you assume US is now irredeemably fucked forever, you might as well stop venting. But nothing actually is forever. Much, much worse Soviet rule in Europe lasted 45 years. I still hold out that populism in the US will be over much sooner.
People always say stuff like this, forgetting that the level of technology has skyrocketed. We cannot compare the USSR in the 20th century to the mass surveillance state and technology-dependant lives that exists today. And even in a significantly weaker, more vulnerable position, the USSR only really fell apart due to internal stresses. The people themselves were completely subjugated in the meantime, a cultural norm that has continued long after the fall of the union and led to the rise of (attempted) fascism again in those states.
There is no real reason to believe that a state with this level of sophistication, if willing to use the US military on civilians, could ever be toppled by the people.
I think it will take a lot more than the judiciary to depose Trump. If they can't meaningfully penalise him for the insurrection when he wasn't president, then they're even more powerless now that he is.
If Trump, or anyone else, makes people really angry, I would imagine his "unimpeachability" will go.
I agree, I wouldn't count on the judiciary to stop him in his tracks. Even then, if some of his associates go to prison, and stay there, everyone else might think twice next time they are given dubious instructions.
Any law has only been as good as the people enforcing it, and this has always been the case in every country and every time period. You are delusional if you think that a piece of paper (i.e the “Law”) has any power whatsoever. When has “your status as citizen” ever protected you? Only when the people in power like you. Remember when the Obama administration ordered a extrajudicial killing of an American citizen by drone strike?
Obama approved a policy of targeted killing, which killed an American bystander when targeting an Egyptian citizen. That's very different to "ordered an extra judicial killing".
That's still very much ordering a mob hit, not a judicial process. The Egyptian citizen didn't get due process either.
So much of this stuff comes from the war on terror. It's all extended Guantanamo. The movie creation of a category of bad guys so bad that they can't be afforded court process and instead are murdered on the basis of secret "evidence".
Totally. Obama authorising drone strikes was abhorrent. I just didn't like myflash13 downplaying the significance of Trump's actions by comparing them to a falsity. Especially when Trump himself bragged about the extrajudicial killings of a US activist on US soil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_an...).
It definitely seems to be heading that way but I think it's premature to label it a constitutional crisis. It's only one part of the picture. The Trump admin has abided by court orders before and continues to do so, though sometimes reluctantly. The judicial branch is still trying to resolve the conflict by ruling contempt of court. If this incident doesn't get resolved and the Supreme Court rules on it and Trump ignores that ruling, for example, maybe that would be a full blown constitutional crisis. I think scope matters too.
That doesn't mean that the incident isn't concerning. But I think we should be careful to incite false panic which could cause distrust. Save that panic for the real constitutional crisis brewing.
Lawyer here - the true consitutional crisis will likely come when the judge holds someone in criminal contempt, and trump pardons them.
There is some unfortunate precedent that allows this. At the time, the ruling was not really that consequential, but obviously, much more so now.
My general view is that pardon power was not really intended to extend to things which are fundamental to the function of another co-equal branch. It was meant to be federal crimes. In the end, Madison/et al felt that impeachment would suffice to protect from pardon abuse.
Contempt of this kind is not really a federal crime - it was considered part of the inherent powers of a court, but there is a statute that now covers it (18 USC 401), so it is unfortunately considered a federal crime and thus pardonable.
So when trump gets pissed off or whatever and pardons whoever gets held in contempt, that's when it's basically a crisis. Because at that point it just means they don't actually have to care. They will just abuse this legal loophole and declare that everything is actually okay, and they have done nothing wrong.
There are other ways, of course, it may become one, but that one seems the most likely path to me at the moment.
I continue to be astounded that the ability of the US president to pardon someone of a criminal conviction exists. It seems like such a blatant contradiction of the separation of powers.
It's not unique to the US. Many countries have it. I must say, sans abuse, it is useful. It is intended for the very few people who fall through the cracks of legal rules.
There was a guy in Poland who was extorted by gangsters. Initially he took an informal loan, but they made him repay it indefinitely, threatening violence. Police failed to help, for unclear reasons. He ended up murdering the extorted. It was a premeditated murder, not in direct defence of his life, etc, and so he got life imprisonment.
He did serve a chunk of his sentence, but in the end was pardoned, on the grounds that he was kind of in a hard place. Without help from the police, he was at the mercy of a gangster, with a constant threat of violence and no perspective of any relief. Link in Polish: https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artur_Bryli%C5%84ski
It's not without controversy in Poland either. It was used in an attempt to quash an ongoing process about blatant abuse of power by two politicians. But I would disagree that the prerogative is totally without merit.
Sorry, maybe i was not specific enough.
I meant when he pardons a meaningful us government official for violating a court order that he didn't give a shit about.
In this case Joe was pardoned for criminal contempt of a court order related to racial profiling.
While it involved immigrants, it's not like he was a member of the US government. He was a state official doing state things, that were, yes, in line with trump's policy objectives. That's fairly different.
It was also two months later.
Back then nobody also cared in the way they do now, and to be blunt, it's hard to get people to care about racial profiling crimes anyway.
The same way nobody cared when the precedent was originally sent.
Honestly, and I am being this direct because you say you are a professional which means you understand exactly what it means, but also understand the consequences of it being as it appears... your explanation sounds like you are experiencing grief and in the first stage of it, denial, to me.
Why did you add "meaningful" as a qualifier, what are on both sides of "meaningful" as a fulcrum of judgement? Why isn't this as bad as it appears?
I would argue it was a proof of concept for executive supremacy over the judiciary and that concept was proven making it a full blown constitutional crisis.
Even assuming what you said is true, from a historical perspective, the SS were not government officials, but a paramilitary "deputized" by their leader and eventually given state legitimacy.
This means the analysis must not be done from a framing of official acts, because in an authoritarian government anything the authoritarian wants is officially sanctioned, and punishment of anything they don't want is also officially sanctioned.
Pardoning contempt, under any circumstances, means that the court cannot compel a person to participate in judiciary process, no? NPR was talking about this back then and stating that the apparent ruling is that the only check on executive power right now is a 60% vote in congress, otherwise the president is above the law. That is a constitutional crisis.
I like this reasoning. It is like suggesting that people ignore speed advisory signs because they’ll probably be able to slam on the brakes once they make contact with another car
No, it is not small. I am really surprised that no one has been arrested yet who has been involved with this kipnapping of people. If Donald Trump is sanctioning this kipnapping, he is involved as well and should be arrested as well. That he has not been arrested yet, shows that he is above the law.
Yes, first there will be two weeks of discovery and depositions, which the DOJ will try to appeal. Then there will be a contempt hearing for some bureaucrat, probably Neom or one of her subordinates. Then that will be appealed to the 4th circuit court of appeals. Then it will be appealed to the Supreme Court if the DOJ loses there.
The court can deputize anyone they choose in order to make the arrest. It's just a question of whether someone in the executive branch shoots the deputies before they can.
Well, ultimately it comes down to a question for the US military: On orders from President Trump, are you willing to violate your oath to the Constitution, and to shoot US citizens? If the answer is "yes", then it's over. But if the answer is "no"...
the generals who make the decisions and who could depose the great leader are already being replaced. Will the foot soldiers remember their oath to the constitution? given how the majority of them are proper Maga, I'm not convinced they will side with the people. the military and law enforcement are there first and foremost to serve the oligarchs, not the people, no matter what a piece of paper says.
There's a lot of layers in between. Lower-level generals (I mean those below the Joint Chiefs and heads of services), colonels, majors, lieutenants. All of them have an oath to the Constitution. They aren't all MAGA. Are they going to follow the Constitution, or the President?
>That he has not been arrested yet, shows that he is above the law.
That is your perfect summary of the "unitary executive" which in the past was called even shorter - the King. It has already been decided by Supreme Court - he can't be prosecuted for anything he does as President. And for his subordinates doing his bidding, even if it is illegal, he would write pardons (he may even write pre-pardons like Biden did for Fauci). Thus no constitutional crisis because both things - no prosecution and the pardons - are according to the Constitution.
A commentary on the current Trump situation i heard from the Russian opposition: democracy requires constant maintenance by the people while with autocracy the people are freed from that burden.
If you're in a building, when should you pull the fire alarm? When you smell smoke? When you see smoke? When smoke bellows? When a door is hot to the touch? Only once you see flame?
If an arsonist threatened to burn down your house, should you only call the police once the house is on fire? Is it possible by taking action earlier you could prevent disaster and loss of well being.
The people who wrote the plan this administration is following said: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."[1] The threat has been credibly made and they appear to be successfully carrying it out with minimal forceful resistance.
People who study Fascism, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, Russia, and Eastern Europe are fleeing the country including Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder.[2]
Trump has stated he wished he had Hitler's generals.[3]
A second in command of the United States armed forces as well as America's top military advisor have both called him a threat to the constitution. [4][5]
There is definitely cause to sound the alarm, but I didn’t think it’s a full blown constitutional crisis. It’s one district judge against one action by the administration. That doesn’t mean ignore court orders is acceptable and there should be backlash. However, I view a constitutional crisis in this case as more of universal contempt of court. Maybe that is just a semantic argument but this seems to be a discussion about semantics.
American prosperity and American corporations exist on the basis of the rule of law.
It's not just a human issue - it's a fundamental stability issue. If the POTUS and his associates can point to someone and just disappear them without any due process or recourse, then why can't they do the same with a "Chinese collaborator" corporation's executives? Or, heck the CEO.
And then certain politicians can have those people reassign shares to them.
A lot of Americans will say that I'm grasping at straws, or being far fetched. And they would be wrong.
This is a thing that happens in authoritarian regimes that lack due process. Even when the people are one of the "elites."
When you look at Trump point a finger and disappear people, ask how is Jack Ma doing lately?
More germanely, he disagreed with the regime. Fairly harmless criticism,
The Financial Times reported that the disappearance may have been connected to a speech given at the annual People's Bank of China financial markets forum,[41] in which Ma criticized China's regulators and banks.[41] Ma described state banks as operating with a pawn shop mentality and criticized the Basel Accords as a "club for the elderly."
In response, the authoritarians in charge decided to show Ma who was boss and behold,
Ant Group made major changes to its ownership structure and corporate governance in January 2023.[42]: 261 That month, Ant Group announced a series of changes in shareholder voting rights, with Ma no longer the actual controller of Ant Group.[50] Ma's voting rights were reduced from 50% to 6%.[42]: 271 Following these changes, no single shareholder has a controlling stake in the company.[42]: 261 The company's board also added another independent director.[42]: 261 The Chinese government spoke positively of Ant Group's changes, including describing them as improvements in transparency and accountability
"improvements in transparency and accountability" —> they forced him to sell his voting shares and forcibly removed him from his company.
Do you want the US to follow in these footsteps?
This isn't a slippery slope. It's a Slip 'N Slide. Ma's not the first person they did this to. China is not the first country to do this either. And yes, none of them imagined it would happen to them until it happened to them.
The reason why the US is a bastion of technological progress, startups and capitalism is because the freedom to do business is underwritten by fundamental personal freedoms. If you lose that, then you will lose all of the wealth that system created.
Why would you want to be a founder in a world where you can show obedience to the party, rise up the ranks, and just... grab shares from the next big startup? Wet your beak a little. Get a cut.
It might not happen now. It might not happen in a year. Or three. But it will happen.
For the night is long and the knives are ever sharp.
Take a look on historical numbers (https://usafacts.org/articles/what-can-the-data-tell-us-abou...). You’ll find out what was happening during Biden administration is what was happening on average in 90s and beginning of 2000s. Somehow you don’t label this as criminal act of Bush administration? Somehow it wasn’t as huge of a problem back then as it’s labeled now? Think about why?
In fact it was during Obama times when illegal immigration got to the low levels.
Don’t get me wrong, I do think Biden administration should’ve done better job at protecting the border. But the solution and fix for this isn’t abandoning due process rights and turning authoritarian. This solution is much much worse than problem at hands we have.
And yes, under Obama it got low, and that's great. He was called Deporter-in-Chief for a reason.
> But the solution and fix for this isn’t abandoning due process rights and turning authoritarian
Again, where were you with this "due process" when Biden manufactured this crime on a massive scale to create more dem voters?
The process is pretty straightforward. You can't prove your legal status, you get deported. Sure, occasionally you will have some injustice when dealing with hundreds of thousands of criminals. None of that would've happened if Biden didn't manufacture this crime in the first place. It's all on him.
I think government should follow laws. And it especially should follow constitution and protect rights of the people:
- first of all the government shouldn't be able to send people to foreign gulag at all, period. I learnt that it's a gray area for (already) convicted people so far, but I think it's just plain wrong
- however if government sends someone to foreign gulag it should be under proper due process (the one outlined for criminal cases). Don't confuse sending people to foreign gulag with deportation, it's not
- deportation should be also happening only with due process, but this one can be relaxed, as it is right now - immigration judges exist separately from Article III courts
The danger of what's happening right now is very clear, anyone (regardless to their citizenship) can be taken off the streets and send to foreign prison. This is mindblowingly bad, and nothing can justify that in lawful state.
The government already (under Biden) was successfully deporting around 1M people a year. While it will take some time to go through the backlog and bring things back to normal, it doesn't require as dire actions as the current administration take. And the fact that Biden wave was comparable to historical ones does prove this successfully.
Your claim about dem voters is obviously false - most of these people have 10s of years before they naturalize (if ever), and even after this both immigrants and latino voters tend to lean republican. Also being in the US illegally isn't a crime. So you calling these people hundreds of thousands of criminals is nothing but scapegoating.
I disapprove Biden's handling of illegal immigration, but I also lived in authoritarian state. And living in a country where you afraid of the government, don't trust laws anymore and accept corruption is way worse than having some Mexican guy doing low income jobs in your city.
Keep spreading misinformation. Ideologues like you will never admit Biden deported more illegal immigrants than Trump during their terms. Your brains can't seem to process it. You've bought into decades of deliberate lies and propaganda to the point where you've completely lost your grip on reality.
It's literally impossible to tell trolls apart from legitimate ignorance. But there's no way you actually believe this nonsense right? It's trivial to disprove.
Just look at their post history. He's a garden variety fascist in the full use of the term. There's no point to engaging with them because they don't care about the rule of law or anything other than what the party line is. Flag and move on.
But they imported around ~10K per day for 4 years. Do the math. The 270K deportations, if real, mean nothing. They just let them back in in less than a month.
But I don't believe that 270K number anyway, seems like typical left-wing propaganda.
However, as is easy to see from recent,
well known examples, the results of our
legal system depend heavily on personal
attitudes, predilections, and opinions of
individual judges, lawyers, etc., and,
net, "the law" is inconsistent,
unpredictable, unreliable (some might say
emotional and irrational), often too slow,
too expensive, and a source not of
justice or "the law" but of lawfare
battles, war by special means. As in
shooting wars, both sides lose. E.g., can
see
Dershowitz to Newsmax: Boasberg Should
Be Held in Contempt
where Judge Boasberg and Emeritus Harvard
Law Professor Dershowitz strongly
disagree.
For another example, one part of this
Boasberg case had the SCOTUS rule 5-4 --
that is inconsistent and unpredictable.
In math, physical science, and now often
in biology and medical science, we have
many examples of one things, clear,
explicit, highly predictable -- the
Pythagorean theorem, Einstein's Special
Relativity, protein folding, Phase III
trials, placebo controlled, randomized,
double blind.
But, in strong contrast, "the law" is
unpredictable, in each case, no "one
thing", closer to medieval ugly torture
and nonsense than math, science,
technology, etc. of 2025. The law
profession should be ashamed. "Your
Honor"? Not really.
As I understand the situation, the SCOTUS
is created by our Constitution, but the
rest of our legal system, including Judge
Boasberg, is the creation of and funded by
Congress. So, Congress can cut off the
funds and maybe just abolish Boasberg's
court.
My guess is that the media has raised
attention, the voters want something
better in our legal system, and soon
Congress will make some changes. With
also the POTUS, the legal system, "the
law", currently widely less liked than a
skunk at a garden party, can be turned
inside out, fumigated, disinfected,
bleached, scrubbed, washed, rinsed, hung
out to dry, stitched, patched, ironed,
folded, and used as, hmm, a seat cushion.
Sorry 'bout that. As a startup founder,
my view is, at any or all costs, to stay
low, quiet, out of sight, and anonymous,
have only an LLC and never a corporation,
and be far from any entanglements with
"the law".
“The law” has ways of finding you when you least expect it. I have a friend who is in jail for last year for nothing-burger (in other country).
I think perceiving laws at the US as unpredictable is just showing that you haven’t seen countries with truly dysfunctional judicial. Of course justice can be tricky. Of course courts can be flawed. It’s a spectrum, and we’re not at the worst spot in it so far (maybe apart from SC, SC is terrible).
I’m not sure what’s a point of federal courts being creation of
Congress (ie laws) and not creation of constitution. Most
of the executive branch is creation of Congress too.
The nicety of laws and courts you can (by yourself) go and read courts opinions and arguments and made your own judgements who’s at fault - executive branch ignoring laws and stressing the system with bad faith behavior, or courts deciding unjustly by reading laws wrongly. I did this for bunch of court opinions and don’t expect good faith from the administration anymore.
I avoided that. I was commenting in general terms.
"countries with truly dysfunctional judicial"
I suspect that much of how people get along in such a country is just to pay enough to the right persons. As a joke, that would often be faster and cheaper than following the US system fully honestly.
I'm reminded of the movie where, given a problem, someone could go to Vito and get a solution -- he had "all the judges and politicians in his pocket".
The role of Congress: The SCOTUS is from the Constitution, and all the rest are from Congress. If Congress sees a problem with those courts, it can fix it right away -- impeach a judge, cut off their funds, abolish their court, etc.
Just because our legal system is not the worst possible in the world does not mean that we should tolerate its faults.
In a dictorship doesn't matter what the judge thinks, which is the unfortunate state of affairs, it appears the US citzens have yet to realise who is in power.
If it was another small country, the rest of the world would probably ignore what is currently happening in USA.
However it isn't a small country, rather one of the major countries and world powers, hence everyone gets hurt when failing to learn from history.
It's always seemed weird to me that the founding fathers designed this system without thinking what would happen in such a scenario.
You have three branches, for checks and balances, and gave one of them command of the entire US military. It seems not so much a stretch of imagination that that one may go rogue one day.
If you split the armies up between them, that would invite civil war.
Maybe they figured if things get too bad, officers of good conscience would stem the madness and have some political/legal cover from the other 1-2 branches? Eg. If a president tried to give orders to the military after being impeached and removed, it's doubtful they'd be followed.
The problem then is compounded by the fact the president picks the secdef, and is more or less able to fire anyone showing an ounce of 'disloyalty', as we've seen happen in recent weeks. Twice if memory serves me right.
So all but the very dumbest would curate their military leaders before attempting boldness.
That never works, see the dictorships along the history, most folks fall back into the "I was following orders" excuse, because as it happens, if they refuse there is another one with no problem with "I was following orders" that will put them into place, regardless of the form.
Hence the Allies imposed a constitution on Germany in which there is an individual obligation on military personnel to uphold the constitution over following orders. Not perfect but a useful countermeasure.
Yeah, but at the end of the day, what is on paper and the actions one is willing to do aren't really the same.
It took us 48 years to get rid of our dictatorship, and in theory there were multiple occasions where the militar could have joined to take it down, it was only when the colonial wars got bad enough, that there was enough people in the movement to have made it possible.
And to make a point out of it, the laws imposed by the Allied did nothing to prevent what happened in East Germany and Stasi deeds after that law came to be.
Trying to work out which country you're referring to - Spain? Portugal? East Germany?
> laws imposed by the Allied did nothing to prevent what happened in East Germany and Stasi deeds after that law came to be
Well, yes, I should probably have clarified West Germany, a different country from East Germany, due to the Soviet control at the end of WW2. I suppose the point is that no legal order withstands overwhelming force in the end.
I belong to the first generation growing up as a child after the dictorship ended, thus like many people around the world in similar circustances, I do happen to have a close relation to what it means, and stand by the revolution cries "25 April forever, fascism never again", that unfortunely many in voting age have no clue what it actually means in practice, hence we have our own issues coming to our shores with Chega party.
It's very difficult if not impossible to design a system that allows for a madman to be in charge, because to do so, the system would have to severely curtail the executive's powers which would render him or her useless. The tacit assumption has always been that the voters would not select a madman to run a complex system but here we are.
> It's always seemed weird to me that the founding fathers designed this system without thinking what would happen in such a scenario.
The thing is, no political system is foolproof and free of issues. But the US and the UK are about the only major countries in the world that didn't experience a forced reboot of some sorts - wars, revolutions, secessions, whatever - that brought an update of the constitution and legal system with it. Everyone else, however, did and learned from the issues that they and other countries had experienced in the meantime.
By now, the US is running on the same system for over 238 years. Yes, there have been some updates and amendments, but the fundamental assumptions are still the same stuff from centuries past, when virtually instant, global communication and transport of goods and people wasn't even thinkable.
They absolutely thought about it. They plainly stated it in the country's founding document:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Locke also advocated governmental separation of powers and believed that revolution is not only a right but an obligation in some circumstances. These ideas would come to have profound influence on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
Our founding father's were very very liberal and strongly believed in a consent based government which implies the idea of revoking consent. When a government starts acting in ways you cannot consent to, like invading Canada or Greenland, robbing people of due process, preventing trade, and refusing to be bound by law, they had a very clear answer. You can find many Jeffersonian quotes about this very idea that many young Americans hear from their fathers and grandfathers, sadly many of those once young Americans have been corrupted by fox news.
> endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness
People asked, at the time, if that applied to women or black people, and after considerable argument concluded that the answer was "no". From that stems a lot of America's problems.
Yep. Social programs and taxes were reduced under Reagan to prevent "welfare queens" from abusing the system. Many of the "poor whites" would have also benefited from those very same social programs. Rich people who were taxed less were able to spend that money consolidating power and weakening the government making the government less capable of regulating that very power consolidation. Power compounded and now we have oligarchs. Eventually they purchased citizens united from the supreme court "legitimating" their money as valid political power in a democracy.
We used to have free public pools in this country. They were built out during the 20's and 30's. Most of these were replaced with paid pool access or closed outright during integration to prevent black families from being able to enjoy them as well. There's a racist stereotype around black folk not being able to swim which has been the multi-generational result. Poor white families were negatively impacted as well. But I guess it was worth it to keep the "wrong types" from being able to enjoy things.
> [Senator] Van Hollen[, who represents Abrego Garcia's home state of Maryland,] said he had asked Vice President Felix Ulloa ... why Abrego Garcia was still locked up in the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) if he had committed no crime and El Salvador had no evidence that he was a member of the street gang MS-13. // "His answer was that the Trump administration is paying El Salvador, the government of El Salvador, to keep him at CECOT"
> Bukele said during a White House visit on Monday he did not have the power to return Abrego Garcia to the United States. // Trump told reporters he did not have the authority to intervene, leaving the man in limbo
Reminiscent of Stalin's utterance to Churchill at Yalta about not risking the pope's displeasure about Soviet resettlement plans for Polish Catholics: "How many divisions does the Pope have?"
Today in America, that could be rephrased as "The Courts? How many loosely organized, non-uniformed paramilitaries do they have?"
Imagine if we sentence the assholes officials that did not respect the court order to some time in jail in the Venezuela. That would teach them a real lesson in my opinion!
The fact remains that every single American should be opposed to this. If the admin can freely deport someone who was here legally and with proper papers and ignore their habeas corpus rights then there is nothing stopping them from doing so to US citizens. Once you accept that rights no longer matter, you are giving up your own rights and the rights of your fellow Americans.
This is THE line in the sand. Either you agree that people have rights afforded to them by the constitution or you are a fascist. And there is no mincing words on this.
The line and goalposts have been moved so many times, they will just continue to be moved. The White House spokesperson is already saying Kilmar is an MS-13 gang member as ruled by some secret ICE court. People will take is as gospel and legitimize his "deportation". There is no more line that people will stand behind until it's too late.
Horrible as it may sound, I'm not sure this is the court case that has the most chances of brining people on the judge's "side".
(Don't get me wrong, I know there should not be "sides" when talking about the rule of law.)
But here, Trump can play the "tribal" card to his base very easily (I'm expecting a variation of "non white woke judges are once again defending dangerous illegal gang members immigrants against hard working white Americans, this is a witch hunt, fight !")
I think the average republican voter won't care.
We already know they don't care about document mishandling, cyber security, sharing war plans, gutting science, etc...
They used to care about sex and religion, but don't any more.
However, we know they care about kids.
Is there a lawsuit brewing about harm done by the trump administration to kids of white, non immigrants, conservative, affluent, christian, devouts, mainstream and influencial Americans ?
(That being said, I was very surprised to read that the SCOTUS itself confirmed Trump should not have deported at least one of those people [1].)
> Is there a lawsuit brewing about harm done by the trump administration to kids of white, non immigrants, conservative, affluent, christian, devouts, mainstream and influencial Americans ?
Interesting. In effect I think you are asking how the opposition should appeal to the supporters.
One way would be as you suggest to angle the message towards their identity, their group affiliation. This would work for the groups you suggest but this would a) only strengthen group identities that are being targeted and b) weaken the oppositions beliefs in their own groups. The opposition views politics as groups of people with characteristics at fight with each other. The election showed that for supporters the hard identity groupings are, at best that softer than before and at worst don't actually exist in reality.
A more effective argument would lead to the opposition using the belief system of their target.
For example "All people have equality and valuable personhood and illegal actions damage this inherent value". This is basically the classical liberal mindset based on Christian values. But this isn't really the mindset of those in opposition while they continue to view the world as being run by power between conflicting identity groups. They believe that people are not equal, that equity is more important, that people belong to groups with inherent characteristics of varying levels of power, and that to solve issues the power needs to move between groups.
In other words, yes, an appeal to the group identities of the supporters will probably work for some but it will strengthen their group identity (increased race-nationalism), and the supporters actually cover a much wider range than the identities you give. An alternative appeal to the values of the supporters would work much better but would lead to a weakening of the oppositions own beliefs. Looking at it from a religion lens: the opposition cannot use Christian appeals to morality while they reject Christianity.
"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves." Enders Game
> Interesting. In effect I think you are asking how the opposition should appeal to the supporters.
Exactly. The opposition has to realize that they are outnumbered, at the moment ; but this is not a static or permanent things.
By definition, every majority hangs on "swing voters", and is ousted when the swing voters decide to swing again.
"Appealing to your base" is how you win primaries ; if you continue beyond that, and insist on "purity", "support 100% of our causes, or you're a facist", while the other side has a "big tent" strategy, then you only alienate potential supporters, and opposition is going to be long.
(Caveat: of course, this assumes pretty "normal" conditions where elections happen fairly, on a regular basis, etc...)
Also, about the role of "kids" in those discussion, one side obviously knows how to do it _very_ well: [1]
> Trump can play the "tribal" card to his base very easily
Well, yes. It's the Pinochet situation; I'm sure the majority of white Americans can be propaganda'd into supporting having dissidents thrown out of helicopters.
> harm done by the trump administration to kids of white, non immigrants, conservative, affluent, christian, devouts, mainstream and influencial Americans
The whole point of a fascist setup with personal rule is that those people will get almost instantly exempted from any of this stuff happening to them. Whether that's by the discretion of agents on the ground or as soon as it reaches the media. And including in cases where they've committed actual crimes.
This is just one more in a long string of lies. They absolutely do not care about kids unless it's about their right to marry them[1]. Or watch passively as they die to easily preventable diseases[2]. Or go out of their way to deny them access to food[3].
They don't fear their kids will be married in Wyoming, or part of mennonites, or poor.
They're terrified that their kids could turn gay, or be raped in the bathroom by a trans men, or be denied a scholarship because some other diverse kid is getting it.
Are those fear rational ? I don't know.
Is one side much better at stoking such fear than the other ? I do know.
Which side is going to keep winning until the other side gets it's act together, if it ever gets a chance ? You bet I have my opinions...
> But here, Trump can play the "tribal" card to his base very easily (I'm expecting a variation of "non white woke judges are once again defending dangerous illegal gang members immigrants against hard working white Americans, this is a witch hunt, fight !")
Just today (yesterday?) they're already doing this - the Press Secretary paraded a mom whose daughter was murdered by an undocumented immigrant and said "this is why we're doing this, for people like her", completely ignoring the small detail that this current person is not accused, suspected, or convicted of murdering anyone.
His legal status was unambiguously deportable. To anywhere but el salvador. An administration with half a brain would have just brought the dude back for 5 seconds and rerouted him to the border on the Guatemala side with a 'walk over there to go home' for some sort of miniscule favor to Guatemala and mission accomplished.
The dude at one point at least a wife abusing gang member, and indisputably an here illegally when he was given deportation orders he ignored.
I get that orange man is bad and must be opposed at all costs and conditions… but seriously, this is so strange that people are willing to go to bat for this guy.
If the president doesn't abide by the courts that's a constitutional crisis, a fundamental problem. Maybe this one instance isn't enough to say that the Trump admin won't abide by the courts, but it's a start. Immigration is not the issue either. It's about the 3 equal branches of government and how one branch is trying to discredit the other. The issue isn't about public perception. The issue is about how the US government will function if the constitution is ignored by the Executive branch.
> Immigration is not the issue either. It's about the 3 equal branches of government and how one branch is trying to discredit the other.
Which branch is guilty of this?
It’s far more frequent for a rogue district judge fo overstep its authority, is it not? They seem to get reversed quite often.
The admin's ever increasing desperate shrillness is making somewhat of a standoff. He's gone from a gang member to a human-smuggling terrorist gang leader real fast. While also being an apprentice steelworker, supporting his wife & her kids from a previous marriage?
The admin is absolutely over the top with lies deceit & no good. Unwilling to be at all reasonable at any point. They are desperate to make sure no one ever has a chance to make them look like the clown car full of incompetents with no one but syccophantic pathetic mouthy yes men that they are.
But the admin is destined to eat shit again and again. You can't just disappear people cleanly & conveniently; even sending them into an awful concentration camp where no one can hear from them ever won't hide the lies & insanity these monsters spew.
There is 0% chance in my mind that they would dig in like this unless the guy is dead, bukele is demanding a ransom to fix it, or something really bad happened there. There is no rational reason for the administration to endure this, especially since they can easily just blame the return on the bleeding heart judges.
The admin demonstrates very little rational reason. Demanding a purge of American history, banning words from research, insisting private colleges control student speech, end so called DEI programs, and demanding to install their own crony shits in the faculty... The list goes on and on with madness that is beyond reason.
The reason to be a pig headed totalitarian mind-controlling gaslighting bully over this particular man is because being a bully requires putting on a strong front, requires avoiding or besting challenges. Alas, this admin is a bully staring down the Constitution and all America.
> There is no rational reason for the administration to endure this
Endure? They caused this. The reason is because they don't think that enough people will care about the fate of one foreigner to hold Trump accountable. He's counting on the people not understanding or caring at all about the rule of law, and he may be right. Plenty of commenters here don't.
They already admitted in black and white in court to judge Xinus they were wrong. They're refusing to fix it. Why admit you're wrong but refuse to take a simple action to fix it unless it can't be fixed? Literally all they have to do is bring him back and refulfill the deportation by dropping him in some barren desert in Somalia, anywhere but taking him to the one place they couldn't.
Actually I care that you, Vyrealian, cannot be deported to a foreign prison without a hearing, even if the President of the United States says you're an illegal immigrant in MS13.
And if you're any kind of American, you should care about that, too.
From my time in central America, it is a top down shakedown operation for literally anything and everything. Very pragmatic people really. They will profit both ways, coming and going. That's the key thing the senator from Maryland forgot when he thought he could reason with them from a sense of justice.
They're going to want favors or money. I knew why the senator failed as soon as he said it, he should have talked to literally anyone with family in a former Spanish colony before he went down there.
I'm not sure what you're implying that he could be "shaking down" Trump for, but I think Bukele already knows they imprison innocent people... it has been reported that they have released at least 8,000 of them in the last 3 years, which also seems to contradict the often cited claim that "nobody ever leaves" CECOT.
Bukele is extremely intelligent. His service is underpriced, based off memos only $20k / person / year and in a nearly brand new maximum security prison. I sincerely think he may have known just how stupidly the US would execute this and will come prepared with demands for their release -- secretly and in a way that we will not find out. Even if he has to wait for the next administration. He knows our courts and much of the public will put politicians under fire for this.
To the other respondent’s point about Noriega, a central american autocrat cannot “shakedown” the American government. The balance of force is entirely in the gringos’ favor - if they choose to use it. If Bukele refuses, it’s simply because this is what Trump wishes him to do. Bush I _invaded_ Panama to enforce a district court’s arrest warrant.
and this single district judge is trying to enact a political movement.
Flights take off.
Dude issues temporary ban on Alien Enemies deportations.
Flights do not turn around.
Supreme Court clears temporary ban.
Dude now claims admin defied his court order.
Because admin clearly defied his court order? What’s an issue with this and what kind of mindset makes you oppose this? Isn’t this clear - you’re suppose to do what courts told you? You’re not entitled to choose what to do and what not? Regardless if you’re private citizen or government. You do what you asked for, you appeal if you disagree. You impeach if you think judge is off the rails and/or corrupt. But before all of this you do what you asked to do by courts.
Isn’t it chilling to the bone to pretend admin can do whatever they (themself) consider right? I’m terrified by this possibility, and I think you should be too.
Without rule of law no other issue matters.
You think you are a citizen today because you've always been a citizen, you have papers to prove it. It's never even been questioned. What if those papers get destroyed? What if the officer interpreting your papers is employed by someone who doesn't like you because you're disobedient. Without rule of law your status as a citizen doesn't protect you. Without a functioning judiciary capable of providing consequences to those who violate rule of law, you have no one to appeal to.
This administration complains about single judges restricting their actions. That should literally terrify you. The judges are not stopping the administration, they are ruling that the law is stopping the administration. When the administration says it is judges stopping it, it is claiming that there is no law, only the actions of loyal or disobedient men.
We are in a constitutional crisis. We are effectively lawless. Right now, we cannot depend on the law to restrict powerful people's actions. We have no way to predict what is possible for someone with a gun who is loyal to the president to do without consequences and therefore no way to act as if the law protects us.
The question is what do you do to prevent it?
Complaining on social media is fine, but that won't solve the problem.
As a European, I'm shocked at how complacent the public has been. I've lived in France and people do global strikes and widespread civil unrest for a change of retirement law. Yet in the US a dictatorship emerges and you have small demonstrations here and there and spicy comments on social media. That won't change things.
Too much of the US population is still in favor of this sort of thing. After all, it's happening to an immigrant.
I mean it's trite but obviously a democracy can fail in this way (see Weimar Germany). If you can make enough people feel aggrieved and give them an "other" to hate, you're off to the races.
This US slip into authoritarianism should cause us all to reconsider history too. This is the wealthiest country in the world, so economic trouble is clearly not required, and it gives lie to the notion that the US had some kind of unique structural defense against authoritarianism - maybe there is no defense, and this is inevitable.
A big part of the problem is that wealth has overwhelmingly been funneled upwards. Despite being the wealthiest country on the planet, and despite said wealth largely increasing over time, the average person hasn't felt it, because they don't get a cut. For over 50 years now, wages have become disconnected with productivity, with the capital class siphoning off nearly all productivity gains for themselves at the expense of everyone else.
See: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ See: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
One of the primary reasons Trump won the election is that the Democrats were hailing the high-level economic numbers as a big success, but the average person wasn't really feeling it. Being told that things are going great when they're suffering put many people off voting and caused others to vote against the incumbent party in hopes of a change.
Unfortunately for the masses, the Republican party has largely been responsible for the current wealth inequality through repeated tax cuts disproportionately affecting the wealthy and attacks on worker representation over the last half century. Though, to be fair, despite their rhetoric, the Democratic party has generally been complicit, as they are also owned and operated by moneyed interests. Citizens United was probably the final nail in the coffin containing any hope to turn things around.
This nonsense drives me bananas. It's not true. There are no numbers showing that the median/average/working-class/whatever American citizen is worse off in any meaningful way. Period. It didn't happen. Americans are wealthier now[1] than they ever have been. Americans are wealthier now than anyone[2] has been, ever, in the entirety of human experience.
That they (and you) don't believe this to be the case is important and interesting. But it's not true.
[1] Maybe not for that ←long once the Q2/Q3 results show up with the tariff impact and the layoff start
[2] Anyone with a broad enough sampling I guess. There are always tiny states with skewed statistics.
What precisely are you measuring to conclude that Americans are wealthier than ever before?
When it comes to luxury goods, sure - things like TVs and computers are cheaper than they ever have been, both relative to wealth and even in absolute terms.
However, when you look at necessities like housing, healthcare, and I dare say education, you'll notice that all have far outpaced inflation and even wage growth.
See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
See: https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/
See: https://www.statista.com/statistics/631987/percent-of-income...
See: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/05/18/cost-of-coll...
See: https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-costs-over-tim...
See: https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2018/07/24/pric...
---
As a personal anecdote - my father did much the same job I do, and yet while he was taking care of a full family of four, I can't say that I feel any better off despite being single and not regularly vacationing like I did growing up.
As far as I can tell - I'm not alone. If anything, I'm uniquely blessed relative to my peers due to my tech background. We have an entire generation putting off family building because stagnant wages coupled with high student loan debt and housing prices cause many to perceive they are hardly getting by. Nearly half of all adults live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Wealthy doesn't mean anything when paired with unaffordable.
No, no, no. Americans are wealthier in PPP metrics than they ever have been. There are no numbers that show what you believe. None. It's wrong. And yet you, and everyone else, believes it anyway. And because Everyone Believes It you figure it must represent some great truth and thus people showing you numbers to the contrary must be wrong, or lying. And so you end up prey for politicians lying to you, and you elect a government that starts a trade war.
And I guess it does represent such a truth, but it's a great truth about universal delusion at the end of an empire, or something else. It's not about wealth. It's not.
It always, always is relative. People compare themselves with neighbors/TV, not with themselves 50 years ago.
Totally agree with you, don't know why so many downvotes. But important point is wealth is never absolute, but comparative. And that's where inequality comes into play. Almost all revolutions happen because of inequality.
I've met Silicon Valley multi-millionaires why cried they are poor and how those damn billionaires gentrifying them from their lovely neighborhoods.
I'm against forced equalization of incomes, but on the long run that's what keeps the system stable. Unless you are Norway, of course, where people strongly believe equalization is good, and post everyone's compensation on public (well, taxes, but it's easy to get comp from taxes).
UPDATE: so the metric we should look at is Gini index, not GDP or PPP.
That explains jealousy, not "suffering" as the upthread commenter put it. No, this is 100% irrational.
I mean, think about it: there have always been phenomenally wealthy people. If every billionaire in the US had their net worth cut by 50%, instantly, that would fix the "Gini index" you think we should be looking at.
But would their lifestyles change? Would anyone but the billionaires even notice? If you stop a person on the street and ask "Is it fair that Bill Gates is worth $50B dollars?", they're going to say "no", right? That's way too much money. Except, of course, that Gates is worth twice that and the number is something that you argue should be "fair".
No, it's not numbers. It's irrational delusion fed by fear and anger and click-chasing from everywhere across the media landscape. But. It's. Wrong. And someone needs to start telling people that.
Because at this point our shared delusion is causing a trade war that is going to make all of us (literally, all of humanity) poorer.
In that case, they deserve what's likely to happen to them too.
People that only care about themselves or their racial group are a curse upon society.
As long as they're fed a 24/7 media diet of government overreach and cruelty to others, they won't even notice when it's their turn. Note that even now, they blame American job losses on Central America and China instead of the American CEOs that signed and profited from those deals.
Yeah but they fuck it up for the rest of us on the way down
That's the price you pay for tolerating and enabling their behaviour.
It constantly astonishes me how blatantly racist some of the people in the U.S. are. How do they not get punched in the face?
> That's the price you pay for tolerating and enabling their behaviour.
Be careful about assuming that we are all tolerating and enabling their behavior. That's not true as a blanket statement.
Sorry - I didn't mean to sound like I was accusing everyone, but there's certainly U.S. communities where racist attitudes/behaviour are allowed to fester unchecked. I find it quite shocking.
> How do they not get punched in the face?
Guns and pre-segregating their social circle.
As long as their have Tiktok, Netflix and their burger and fries, people don’t really care. They write an angry comment, scroll to the next post about cute cats and forget all about it.
Ah the Roman way, however they also had their ways to change goverments when the ruler went too far off the track.
There’s going to be riots when it comes time to buy the Switch 2 and iPhone 17 which will cost double what the rest of the world pays.
> As a European, I'm shocked at how complacent the public has been.
There have been large, growing, and recurring protests.
> Yet in the US a dictatorship emerges and you have small demonstrations here and there
They aren't small. (They aren't well covered by the media, but the media is actively part of the problem.)
> that won't change things.
The social infrastructure and culture around which things like general strikes and more significant actions occur does not exist in the United States. The current and growing protest movement (and the networking and community building go on around and behind it) is how that infrastructure gets built. So, I disagree, the things you are saying won't change it are absolutely indispensable to building the capacity for the kind of things that can change it, assuming that it continues to develop in a way that cannot be constrained effectively by more regular political means such as the 2026 midterm and 2028 presidential elections.
Change of retirement law directly impacts the population in a way they understand.
Because a very large number of Americans are pro-dictatorship. This is not an a Manchurian-candidate scenario. This is a legitimately-elected leader doing exactly what he was elected to do.
A lot of them seem to be cheering him on as if they elected a king. The problem being of course that legally there is no person who can just issue edicts and have them become law, there is no legal way to elect a king.
His approval rating is not doing very well.
For what they are doing, it should be much lower than what it is
It doesn't have to be legal anymore, that's the whole point.
> This is a legitimately-elected leader doing exactly what he was elected to do.
He put a fair bit of effort in telling people he wasn't going to do most of this stuff. It was always clear that he was lying, but lots of people believed him and are now very surprised.
> This is a legitimately-elected leader doing exactly what he was elected to do.
He was elected to bring prices and inflation down; that’s what he campaigned on! He lied at that time and people trusted in his lies. He have no idea what he can do to bring prices and inflation down! Marketing could be his expertise, but when it comes to performing duties of the President, he’s super dumb.
It's going to be "fun" when the tariffs really hit and prices and inflation go up. Then people will have to fall back on "no, we elected him for the unlawful mass deportations".
It's always going to be something. It's like the entire span of history and politics from 2016 to six months before the election never happened, and Trump was always a reasonable, respectable, honest politician who never said or did anything out of the ordinary. Why would anyone have any reason not to trust his intentions? Why would anyone associate him with these extremist beliefs?
"I voted for the Party because I supported their infrastructure plan, I had no idea where all of those trains would be going" kind of feel.
And the sad thing is, it will work because our entire framework of subjective truth and reality is built on the very technologies they already use to reprogram us and revise history. Trump was always an honest man. We were always at war with Canada. It was always about egg prices.
He was also going to stop the Ukraine war on day one, which seems to be delayed.
If you bracket away Trump, political dissent in US is co-opted by one of the two parties(tea-parties, for instances), or muted(Occupy Wall Street) or criminalized. In other words, political dissent doesn't lead to the emergence of new parties, as is the case in Europe.
Cyncicsm is the belief that you don't think there is anything worth fighting for. Cynicism is an admission that you prefer to submit than fight. Most of the world looked at Ukraine and cynically said that Zelenskyy would flee and Ukrainians would not fight because they themselves would not be willing to fight. Few people have values they would consider dying for. Few people would put themselves at risk for another person. Few people would be willing to die building a better world that they won't get to experience. Yet Ukrainians are fighting for western values right now. They are fighting for a government in which they are a person and not a thing. They are fighting for a government that does not treat them arbitrarily. They are fighting for them and their children to have a future.
On the Maidan revolution of Ukraine:
The Maidan was a revolt against произвол (pronounced: preez-vol), an idea of arbitrariness tinged with tyranny, helplessness in the face of power, the feeling that the powers that be can do whatever they want to you, and you are helpless, that you are being treated as a plaything, as a thing and not as a human being, as an object and not as a subject, and the Maidan became a revolt against произвол, it became an insistence on being treated as a person and not as a thing, as a subject not as an object, and they began to call themselves on the Maidan the revolution of dignity. The Making of Modern Ukraine: Maidan and Self-Understanding, Guest Lecturer: Marci Shore -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg_CLI3xY58&list=PLh9mgdi4rN...
In November 2013 Ukraine was expected to sign a long-anticipated association agreement with the European Union. At the eleventh hour, on 21 November 2013, Yanukovych refused.
The disappointment was especially crushing for students, who felt as if their future had vanished; Europe would be closed to them. That evening a thirty-two-year-old Ukrainian journalist from Kabul named Mustafa Nayyem wrote in Russian on his Facebook page:
That night Ukrainians—overwhelming students—came to the Maidan—and stayed. They held hands and shouted, “Ukraine is Europe!” At 4 am on 30 November 2013 Yanukovych sent his riot police to the Maidan to beat the students. The violence against peaceful protestors was a shock. Yanukovych, it seems, was counting on the shock to shake parents into pulling their kids off the streets. That was when something remarkable happened: instead of pulling their kids off the streets, the parents joined them there. It was a historic Aufhebung of Oedipal rebellion. Now there were close to a million people on the streets of Kyiv, and they were shouting, “We will not permit you to beat our children!” Ukraine's Maidan Revolution --https://snyder.substack.com/p/ukraines-maidan-revolutionI showed up to the first protest of my entire life on April 5th. This Saturday, April 19th, everyone here should show up, too.
Upvotes don't count.
> The violence against peaceful protestors was a shock.
A couple of months later not just violence. I know someone who was at the Maidan helping the wounded. That guy is mostly neutral and not pro West or whatnot, he just talked about what he saw and that included a few protesters fatally shot by paid agents (I didn't know about that until I talked to him). Clearly even that didn't work when people are motivated enough.
Grimly, it was the shooting of a large number of demonstrators that pushed the rest of the country, the "centrists" and the "apolitical", off the fence.
I don't know whether that would work in America. The Vegas shooter killed 60 and injured several hundred people, to zero political effect. BLM riots incurred a lot of injuries but very few actual deaths. I suspect Amerimaidan would go very badly and be easily demonized in the media.
George Floyd protests happened and they were significant enough to get the second in command of the US military and Americas top military advisor to both say trump is a threat to the constitution as well as achieving the goal of justice in the form of consequences for George Floyd's murder.
It was so traumatic for America's top military advisor that he made a major point to those under him that they swore an oath to the constitution and not a "wannabe dictator."
Many police departments have enacted various reforms, hard to tell if they have been enacted in good faith.
The Vegas shooter is business as usual and generally considered a societal problem. The BLM protests were different and seen as caused/provoked by the administration at the time.
As far as the grim part... Unfortunately that's the way power works. Power will not be challenged without putting up a fight.
If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny. Timothy Snyder - On Tyranny.
I feel like the media will know that demonizing it is how they'd completely lose that many ad viewers/subscribers.
Difficult to imagine what event would cause people to turn off Fox permanently and re-emerge, blinking, into the sunlight.
We need violence. People are going to downvote this but this is the only way to push back. Peaceful protests are good for things like policy changes. Trump and his administration need to be dragged through the streets and hung.
No. No this is completely wrong framing.
Law needs to be enforced.
It's not enough to be against, that's what the Iranians did and it created a power vacuum filled by people worse than what they had. You must be for something.
There are still oaths to the constitution, but these people need mandate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_(politics)) to act.
I weep for the loss dignity, of law, of belief that tomorrow brings.
They are bound by your consent, you are not bound by their fear.
Right here.
We are in a crisis.
Indeed - but isn't the court decision, as per TFA, a step in the right direction? Courts are slow but if they grind in the right direction, they get there.
Americans don't have much experience of this kind of tug of war (good for you). So far Trump hasn't faced any difficulties yet. Courts haven't kicked in, economy is steady, no external shocks and the tariff stuff hasn't percolated down to Main Street. It's easy to be a populist.
The hard stuff starts when the combined noose of court action, domestic discontent and external shocks really starts to bite, and there's still hope courts will retain their independence.
If they move so slowly that they take over four years to deal with an insurrection attempt, then they are effectively not working as intended
Don't forget that a NY court directly enabled this by convicting the President of misuse of campaign funds and then applying zero sentence.
I can see why you say so, and it is a concern, equally if you assume that courts are slow and work eventually, that's what it will look like on the happy trajectory of law being enforced.
If you assume US is now irredeemably fucked forever, you might as well stop venting. But nothing actually is forever. Much, much worse Soviet rule in Europe lasted 45 years. I still hold out that populism in the US will be over much sooner.
People always say stuff like this, forgetting that the level of technology has skyrocketed. We cannot compare the USSR in the 20th century to the mass surveillance state and technology-dependant lives that exists today. And even in a significantly weaker, more vulnerable position, the USSR only really fell apart due to internal stresses. The people themselves were completely subjugated in the meantime, a cultural norm that has continued long after the fall of the union and led to the rise of (attempted) fascism again in those states.
There is no real reason to believe that a state with this level of sophistication, if willing to use the US military on civilians, could ever be toppled by the people.
I think it will take a lot more than the judiciary to depose Trump. If they can't meaningfully penalise him for the insurrection when he wasn't president, then they're even more powerless now that he is.
If Trump, or anyone else, makes people really angry, I would imagine his "unimpeachability" will go.
I agree, I wouldn't count on the judiciary to stop him in his tracks. Even then, if some of his associates go to prison, and stay there, everyone else might think twice next time they are given dubious instructions.
Any law has only been as good as the people enforcing it, and this has always been the case in every country and every time period. You are delusional if you think that a piece of paper (i.e the “Law”) has any power whatsoever. When has “your status as citizen” ever protected you? Only when the people in power like you. Remember when the Obama administration ordered a extrajudicial killing of an American citizen by drone strike?
Are you talking about Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Aw...
Obama approved a policy of targeted killing, which killed an American bystander when targeting an Egyptian citizen. That's very different to "ordered an extra judicial killing".
That's still very much ordering a mob hit, not a judicial process. The Egyptian citizen didn't get due process either.
So much of this stuff comes from the war on terror. It's all extended Guantanamo. The movie creation of a category of bad guys so bad that they can't be afforded court process and instead are murdered on the basis of secret "evidence".
Totally. Obama authorising drone strikes was abhorrent. I just didn't like myflash13 downplaying the significance of Trump's actions by comparing them to a falsity. Especially when Trump himself bragged about the extrajudicial killings of a US activist on US soil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_an...).
It definitely seems to be heading that way but I think it's premature to label it a constitutional crisis. It's only one part of the picture. The Trump admin has abided by court orders before and continues to do so, though sometimes reluctantly. The judicial branch is still trying to resolve the conflict by ruling contempt of court. If this incident doesn't get resolved and the Supreme Court rules on it and Trump ignores that ruling, for example, maybe that would be a full blown constitutional crisis. I think scope matters too.
That doesn't mean that the incident isn't concerning. But I think we should be careful to incite false panic which could cause distrust. Save that panic for the real constitutional crisis brewing.
Lawyer here - the true consitutional crisis will likely come when the judge holds someone in criminal contempt, and trump pardons them.
There is some unfortunate precedent that allows this. At the time, the ruling was not really that consequential, but obviously, much more so now.
My general view is that pardon power was not really intended to extend to things which are fundamental to the function of another co-equal branch. It was meant to be federal crimes. In the end, Madison/et al felt that impeachment would suffice to protect from pardon abuse.
Contempt of this kind is not really a federal crime - it was considered part of the inherent powers of a court, but there is a statute that now covers it (18 USC 401), so it is unfortunately considered a federal crime and thus pardonable.
So when trump gets pissed off or whatever and pardons whoever gets held in contempt, that's when it's basically a crisis. Because at that point it just means they don't actually have to care. They will just abuse this legal loophole and declare that everything is actually okay, and they have done nothing wrong.
There are other ways, of course, it may become one, but that one seems the most likely path to me at the moment.
I continue to be astounded that the ability of the US president to pardon someone of a criminal conviction exists. It seems like such a blatant contradiction of the separation of powers.
It's not unique to the US. Many countries have it. I must say, sans abuse, it is useful. It is intended for the very few people who fall through the cracks of legal rules.
There was a guy in Poland who was extorted by gangsters. Initially he took an informal loan, but they made him repay it indefinitely, threatening violence. Police failed to help, for unclear reasons. He ended up murdering the extorted. It was a premeditated murder, not in direct defence of his life, etc, and so he got life imprisonment.
He did serve a chunk of his sentence, but in the end was pardoned, on the grounds that he was kind of in a hard place. Without help from the police, he was at the mercy of a gangster, with a constant threat of violence and no perspective of any relief. Link in Polish: https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artur_Bryli%C5%84ski
It's not without controversy in Poland either. It was used in an attempt to quash an ongoing process about blatant abuse of power by two politicians. But I would disagree that the prerogative is totally without merit.
> Lawyer here - the true consitutional crisis will likely come when the judge holds someone in criminal contempt, and trump pardons them.
This already happened in Melendres v. Arpaio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Joe_Arpaio
On August 25, 2017, President Donald Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio for criminal contempt of court, a misdemeanor.
Sorry, maybe i was not specific enough. I meant when he pardons a meaningful us government official for violating a court order that he didn't give a shit about.
In this case Joe was pardoned for criminal contempt of a court order related to racial profiling.
While it involved immigrants, it's not like he was a member of the US government. He was a state official doing state things, that were, yes, in line with trump's policy objectives. That's fairly different.
It was also two months later.
Back then nobody also cared in the way they do now, and to be blunt, it's hard to get people to care about racial profiling crimes anyway.
The same way nobody cared when the precedent was originally sent.
Honestly, and I am being this direct because you say you are a professional which means you understand exactly what it means, but also understand the consequences of it being as it appears... your explanation sounds like you are experiencing grief and in the first stage of it, denial, to me.
Why did you add "meaningful" as a qualifier, what are on both sides of "meaningful" as a fulcrum of judgement? Why isn't this as bad as it appears?
I would argue it was a proof of concept for executive supremacy over the judiciary and that concept was proven making it a full blown constitutional crisis.
Even assuming what you said is true, from a historical perspective, the SS were not government officials, but a paramilitary "deputized" by their leader and eventually given state legitimacy.
This means the analysis must not be done from a framing of official acts, because in an authoritarian government anything the authoritarian wants is officially sanctioned, and punishment of anything they don't want is also officially sanctioned.
Pardoning contempt, under any circumstances, means that the court cannot compel a person to participate in judiciary process, no? NPR was talking about this back then and stating that the apparent ruling is that the only check on executive power right now is a 60% vote in congress, otherwise the president is above the law. That is a constitutional crisis.
> the true consitutional crisis will likely come when the judge holds someone in criminal contempt, and trump pardons them.
Or federal agents refuse to arrest them.
Have they? I believe they still haven't followed the supreme Court order in the return of Garcia and that was a unanimous decision.
It definitely seems to be heading that way but I think it's premature to label it a constitutional crisis.
I guess it will be one when it's too late?
I like this reasoning. It is like suggesting that people ignore speed advisory signs because they’ll probably be able to slam on the brakes once they make contact with another car
No, it is not small. I am really surprised that no one has been arrested yet who has been involved with this kipnapping of people. If Donald Trump is sanctioning this kipnapping, he is involved as well and should be arrested as well. That he has not been arrested yet, shows that he is above the law.
That is the next step AFTER contempt of court.
Yes, first there will be two weeks of discovery and depositions, which the DOJ will try to appeal. Then there will be a contempt hearing for some bureaucrat, probably Neom or one of her subordinates. Then that will be appealed to the 4th circuit court of appeals. Then it will be appealed to the Supreme Court if the DOJ loses there.
and then...... nobody will enforce it, because the executive is the one doing the crime.
The court can deputize anyone they choose in order to make the arrest. It's just a question of whether someone in the executive branch shoots the deputies before they can.
Yeah that's where the well-armed militia comes in, they will go in against a nuclear power to capture the president...
Well, ultimately it comes down to a question for the US military: On orders from President Trump, are you willing to violate your oath to the Constitution, and to shoot US citizens? If the answer is "yes", then it's over. But if the answer is "no"...
the generals who make the decisions and who could depose the great leader are already being replaced. Will the foot soldiers remember their oath to the constitution? given how the majority of them are proper Maga, I'm not convinced they will side with the people. the military and law enforcement are there first and foremost to serve the oligarchs, not the people, no matter what a piece of paper says.
There's a lot of layers in between. Lower-level generals (I mean those below the Joint Chiefs and heads of services), colonels, majors, lieutenants. All of them have an oath to the Constitution. They aren't all MAGA. Are they going to follow the Constitution, or the President?
it'll be civil war part 2, of course.
>That he has not been arrested yet, shows that he is above the law.
That is your perfect summary of the "unitary executive" which in the past was called even shorter - the King. It has already been decided by Supreme Court - he can't be prosecuted for anything he does as President. And for his subordinates doing his bidding, even if it is illegal, he would write pardons (he may even write pre-pardons like Biden did for Fauci). Thus no constitutional crisis because both things - no prosecution and the pardons - are according to the Constitution.
A commentary on the current Trump situation i heard from the Russian opposition: democracy requires constant maintenance by the people while with autocracy the people are freed from that burden.
If you're in a building, when should you pull the fire alarm? When you smell smoke? When you see smoke? When smoke bellows? When a door is hot to the touch? Only once you see flame?
If an arsonist threatened to burn down your house, should you only call the police once the house is on fire? Is it possible by taking action earlier you could prevent disaster and loss of well being.
The people who wrote the plan this administration is following said: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."[1] The threat has been credibly made and they appear to be successfully carrying it out with minimal forceful resistance.
People who study Fascism, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, Russia, and Eastern Europe are fleeing the country including Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder.[2]
Trump has stated he wished he had Hitler's generals.[3]
A second in command of the United States armed forces as well as America's top military advisor have both called him a threat to the constitution. [4][5]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/heritage-foun... [2] https://archive.is/jb23b -- https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/the-fascism-expert-at-... [3] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-said-hitler-did-... [4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/10/12/mark-milley... [5] https://archive.is/d6f9J -- https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/james-m...
There is definitely cause to sound the alarm, but I didn’t think it’s a full blown constitutional crisis. It’s one district judge against one action by the administration. That doesn’t mean ignore court orders is acceptable and there should be backlash. However, I view a constitutional crisis in this case as more of universal contempt of court. Maybe that is just a semantic argument but this seems to be a discussion about semantics.
American prosperity and American corporations exist on the basis of the rule of law.
It's not just a human issue - it's a fundamental stability issue. If the POTUS and his associates can point to someone and just disappear them without any due process or recourse, then why can't they do the same with a "Chinese collaborator" corporation's executives? Or, heck the CEO.
And then certain politicians can have those people reassign shares to them.
A lot of Americans will say that I'm grasping at straws, or being far fetched. And they would be wrong.
This is a thing that happens in authoritarian regimes that lack due process. Even when the people are one of the "elites."
When you look at Trump point a finger and disappear people, ask how is Jack Ma doing lately?
https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/china/china-alibaba-crack...
https://www.wired.com/story/jack-ma-isnt-back/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65084344
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5308604/alibaba-founder...
More germanely, he disagreed with the regime. Fairly harmless criticism,
In response, the authoritarians in charge decided to show Ma who was boss and behold, "improvements in transparency and accountability" —> they forced him to sell his voting shares and forcibly removed him from his company.Do you want the US to follow in these footsteps?
This isn't a slippery slope. It's a Slip 'N Slide. Ma's not the first person they did this to. China is not the first country to do this either. And yes, none of them imagined it would happen to them until it happened to them.
The reason why the US is a bastion of technological progress, startups and capitalism is because the freedom to do business is underwritten by fundamental personal freedoms. If you lose that, then you will lose all of the wealth that system created.
Why would you want to be a founder in a world where you can show obedience to the party, rise up the ranks, and just... grab shares from the next big startup? Wet your beak a little. Get a cut.
It might not happen now. It might not happen in a year. Or three. But it will happen.
For the night is long and the knives are ever sharp.
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Take a look on historical numbers (https://usafacts.org/articles/what-can-the-data-tell-us-abou...). You’ll find out what was happening during Biden administration is what was happening on average in 90s and beginning of 2000s. Somehow you don’t label this as criminal act of Bush administration? Somehow it wasn’t as huge of a problem back then as it’s labeled now? Think about why?
In fact it was during Obama times when illegal immigration got to the low levels.
Don’t get me wrong, I do think Biden administration should’ve done better job at protecting the border. But the solution and fix for this isn’t abandoning due process rights and turning authoritarian. This solution is much much worse than problem at hands we have.
The illegal migration under Bush was half of the levels of under Biden
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20240127_EPC...
And yes, under Obama it got low, and that's great. He was called Deporter-in-Chief for a reason.
> But the solution and fix for this isn’t abandoning due process rights and turning authoritarian
Again, where were you with this "due process" when Biden manufactured this crime on a massive scale to create more dem voters?
The process is pretty straightforward. You can't prove your legal status, you get deported. Sure, occasionally you will have some injustice when dealing with hundreds of thousands of criminals. None of that would've happened if Biden didn't manufacture this crime in the first place. It's all on him.
I think government should follow laws. And it especially should follow constitution and protect rights of the people:
- first of all the government shouldn't be able to send people to foreign gulag at all, period. I learnt that it's a gray area for (already) convicted people so far, but I think it's just plain wrong
- however if government sends someone to foreign gulag it should be under proper due process (the one outlined for criminal cases). Don't confuse sending people to foreign gulag with deportation, it's not
- deportation should be also happening only with due process, but this one can be relaxed, as it is right now - immigration judges exist separately from Article III courts
The danger of what's happening right now is very clear, anyone (regardless to their citizenship) can be taken off the streets and send to foreign prison. This is mindblowingly bad, and nothing can justify that in lawful state.
The government already (under Biden) was successfully deporting around 1M people a year. While it will take some time to go through the backlog and bring things back to normal, it doesn't require as dire actions as the current administration take. And the fact that Biden wave was comparable to historical ones does prove this successfully.
Your claim about dem voters is obviously false - most of these people have 10s of years before they naturalize (if ever), and even after this both immigrants and latino voters tend to lean republican. Also being in the US illegally isn't a crime. So you calling these people hundreds of thousands of criminals is nothing but scapegoating.
I disapprove Biden's handling of illegal immigration, but I also lived in authoritarian state. And living in a country where you afraid of the government, don't trust laws anymore and accept corruption is way worse than having some Mexican guy doing low income jobs in your city.
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Keep spreading misinformation. Ideologues like you will never admit Biden deported more illegal immigrants than Trump during their terms. Your brains can't seem to process it. You've bought into decades of deliberate lies and propaganda to the point where you've completely lost your grip on reality.
You're the one spreading misinformation. Biden didn't deport anyone, he completely opened the border.
It's literally impossible to tell trolls apart from legitimate ignorance. But there's no way you actually believe this nonsense right? It's trivial to disprove.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/19/politics/biden-deportations-r...
Just look at their post history. He's a garden variety fascist in the full use of the term. There's no point to engaging with them because they don't care about the rule of law or anything other than what the party line is. Flag and move on.
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But they imported around ~10K per day for 4 years. Do the math. The 270K deportations, if real, mean nothing. They just let them back in in less than a month.
But I don't believe that 270K number anyway, seems like typical left-wing propaganda.
> the law
Would be nice!!!
However, as is easy to see from recent, well known examples, the results of our legal system depend heavily on personal attitudes, predilections, and opinions of individual judges, lawyers, etc., and, net, "the law" is inconsistent, unpredictable, unreliable (some might say emotional and irrational), often too slow, too expensive, and a source not of justice or "the law" but of lawfare battles, war by special means. As in shooting wars, both sides lose. E.g., can see
Dershowitz to Newsmax: Boasberg Should Be Held in Contempt
at
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/alan-dershowitz-james-boa...
where Judge Boasberg and Emeritus Harvard Law Professor Dershowitz strongly disagree.
For another example, one part of this Boasberg case had the SCOTUS rule 5-4 -- that is inconsistent and unpredictable.
In math, physical science, and now often in biology and medical science, we have many examples of one things, clear, explicit, highly predictable -- the Pythagorean theorem, Einstein's Special Relativity, protein folding, Phase III trials, placebo controlled, randomized, double blind.
But, in strong contrast, "the law" is unpredictable, in each case, no "one thing", closer to medieval ugly torture and nonsense than math, science, technology, etc. of 2025. The law profession should be ashamed. "Your Honor"? Not really.
As I understand the situation, the SCOTUS is created by our Constitution, but the rest of our legal system, including Judge Boasberg, is the creation of and funded by Congress. So, Congress can cut off the funds and maybe just abolish Boasberg's court.
My guess is that the media has raised attention, the voters want something better in our legal system, and soon Congress will make some changes. With also the POTUS, the legal system, "the law", currently widely less liked than a skunk at a garden party, can be turned inside out, fumigated, disinfected, bleached, scrubbed, washed, rinsed, hung out to dry, stitched, patched, ironed, folded, and used as, hmm, a seat cushion.
Sorry 'bout that. As a startup founder, my view is, at any or all costs, to stay low, quiet, out of sight, and anonymous, have only an LLC and never a corporation, and be far from any entanglements with "the law".
“The law” has ways of finding you when you least expect it. I have a friend who is in jail for last year for nothing-burger (in other country).
I think perceiving laws at the US as unpredictable is just showing that you haven’t seen countries with truly dysfunctional judicial. Of course justice can be tricky. Of course courts can be flawed. It’s a spectrum, and we’re not at the worst spot in it so far (maybe apart from SC, SC is terrible).
I’m not sure what’s a point of federal courts being creation of Congress (ie laws) and not creation of constitution. Most of the executive branch is creation of Congress too.
The nicety of laws and courts you can (by yourself) go and read courts opinions and arguments and made your own judgements who’s at fault - executive branch ignoring laws and stressing the system with bad faith behavior, or courts deciding unjustly by reading laws wrongly. I did this for bunch of court opinions and don’t expect good faith from the administration anymore.
"administration"?
I avoided that. I was commenting in general terms.
"countries with truly dysfunctional judicial"
I suspect that much of how people get along in such a country is just to pay enough to the right persons. As a joke, that would often be faster and cheaper than following the US system fully honestly.
I'm reminded of the movie where, given a problem, someone could go to Vito and get a solution -- he had "all the judges and politicians in his pocket".
The role of Congress: The SCOTUS is from the Constitution, and all the rest are from Congress. If Congress sees a problem with those courts, it can fix it right away -- impeach a judge, cut off their funds, abolish their court, etc.
Just because our legal system is not the worst possible in the world does not mean that we should tolerate its faults.
They don't care because voters do support this.
Overall, he’s not popular right now.
Only because he's tanking the economy with his tariffs in both the short- and long-term.
Voters don't care otherwise, or they would never have elected him.
Well, that’s the thing about a president who does literally everything wrong: everybody can point to a thing he does that makes them angry.
In a dictorship doesn't matter what the judge thinks, which is the unfortunate state of affairs, it appears the US citzens have yet to realise who is in power.
If it was another small country, the rest of the world would probably ignore what is currently happening in USA.
However it isn't a small country, rather one of the major countries and world powers, hence everyone gets hurt when failing to learn from history.
It's always seemed weird to me that the founding fathers designed this system without thinking what would happen in such a scenario.
You have three branches, for checks and balances, and gave one of them command of the entire US military. It seems not so much a stretch of imagination that that one may go rogue one day.
No piece of paper can protect a people from enslaving themselves if they are determined to.
yes, as a citizen of the USA, deporting the non-citizens feels exactly like slavery
It won't stop there. Your turn will come.
> and gave one of them command of the entire US military
The US didn't have a military and resisted having a standing army until WWI.
The point still stands though ? At some point , the president become “commander in chief”
If you split the armies up between them, that would invite civil war.
Maybe they figured if things get too bad, officers of good conscience would stem the madness and have some political/legal cover from the other 1-2 branches? Eg. If a president tried to give orders to the military after being impeached and removed, it's doubtful they'd be followed.
One may assume.
The problem then is compounded by the fact the president picks the secdef, and is more or less able to fire anyone showing an ounce of 'disloyalty', as we've seen happen in recent weeks. Twice if memory serves me right.
So all but the very dumbest would curate their military leaders before attempting boldness.
That never works, see the dictorships along the history, most folks fall back into the "I was following orders" excuse, because as it happens, if they refuse there is another one with no problem with "I was following orders" that will put them into place, regardless of the form.
Hence the Allies imposed a constitution on Germany in which there is an individual obligation on military personnel to uphold the constitution over following orders. Not perfect but a useful countermeasure.
Yeah, but at the end of the day, what is on paper and the actions one is willing to do aren't really the same.
It took us 48 years to get rid of our dictatorship, and in theory there were multiple occasions where the militar could have joined to take it down, it was only when the colonial wars got bad enough, that there was enough people in the movement to have made it possible.
And to make a point out of it, the laws imposed by the Allied did nothing to prevent what happened in East Germany and Stasi deeds after that law came to be.
> 48 years to get rid of our dictatorship
Trying to work out which country you're referring to - Spain? Portugal? East Germany?
> laws imposed by the Allied did nothing to prevent what happened in East Germany and Stasi deeds after that law came to be
Well, yes, I should probably have clarified West Germany, a different country from East Germany, due to the Soviet control at the end of WW2. I suppose the point is that no legal order withstands overwhelming force in the end.
Portugal, 1933 - 1974.
I belong to the first generation growing up as a child after the dictorship ended, thus like many people around the world in similar circustances, I do happen to have a close relation to what it means, and stand by the revolution cries "25 April forever, fascism never again", that unfortunely many in voting age have no clue what it actually means in practice, hence we have our own issues coming to our shores with Chega party.
It's very difficult if not impossible to design a system that allows for a madman to be in charge, because to do so, the system would have to severely curtail the executive's powers which would render him or her useless. The tacit assumption has always been that the voters would not select a madman to run a complex system but here we are.
> It's always seemed weird to me that the founding fathers designed this system without thinking what would happen in such a scenario.
The thing is, no political system is foolproof and free of issues. But the US and the UK are about the only major countries in the world that didn't experience a forced reboot of some sorts - wars, revolutions, secessions, whatever - that brought an update of the constitution and legal system with it. Everyone else, however, did and learned from the issues that they and other countries had experienced in the meantime.
By now, the US is running on the same system for over 238 years. Yes, there have been some updates and amendments, but the fundamental assumptions are still the same stuff from centuries past, when virtually instant, global communication and transport of goods and people wasn't even thinkable.
They absolutely thought about it. They plainly stated it in the country's founding document:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
The founding fathers were big fans of the philosophy of John Locke and his social contract: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
Locke also advocated governmental separation of powers and believed that revolution is not only a right but an obligation in some circumstances. These ideas would come to have profound influence on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
Our founding father's were very very liberal and strongly believed in a consent based government which implies the idea of revoking consent. When a government starts acting in ways you cannot consent to, like invading Canada or Greenland, robbing people of due process, preventing trade, and refusing to be bound by law, they had a very clear answer. You can find many Jeffersonian quotes about this very idea that many young Americans hear from their fathers and grandfathers, sadly many of those once young Americans have been corrupted by fox news.
The writer of the declaration of independence and third president of the united states chose "Rebellion unto tyranny is obedience to god," as a motto on his personal seal: https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...
> endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness
People asked, at the time, if that applied to women or black people, and after considerable argument concluded that the answer was "no". From that stems a lot of America's problems.
Yep. Social programs and taxes were reduced under Reagan to prevent "welfare queens" from abusing the system. Many of the "poor whites" would have also benefited from those very same social programs. Rich people who were taxed less were able to spend that money consolidating power and weakening the government making the government less capable of regulating that very power consolidation. Power compounded and now we have oligarchs. Eventually they purchased citizens united from the supreme court "legitimating" their money as valid political power in a democracy.
We used to have free public pools in this country. They were built out during the 20's and 30's. Most of these were replaced with paid pool access or closed outright during integration to prevent black families from being able to enjoy them as well. There's a racist stereotype around black folk not being able to swim which has been the multi-generational result. Poor white families were negatively impacted as well. But I guess it was worth it to keep the "wrong types" from being able to enjoy things.
Theoretically the electoral college was supposed to prevent guys like Trump from becoming president. Isn't that ironic?
> Isn't that ironic
It was badly engineered.
And it was overly confident on trust over the course of events and human nature - while you are obliged to do the opposite.
Wasn't it established to prevent de-segregation? Three-fifths compromise and all that?
Meanwhile,
# El Salvador rejects US senator's plea to free wrongly deported migrant
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/el-salvador-rejects-us...
> [Senator] Van Hollen[, who represents Abrego Garcia's home state of Maryland,] said he had asked Vice President Felix Ulloa ... why Abrego Garcia was still locked up in the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) if he had committed no crime and El Salvador had no evidence that he was a member of the street gang MS-13. // "His answer was that the Trump administration is paying El Salvador, the government of El Salvador, to keep him at CECOT"
> Bukele said during a White House visit on Monday he did not have the power to return Abrego Garcia to the United States. // Trump told reporters he did not have the authority to intervene, leaving the man in limbo
April 19 https://www.fiftyfifty.one/
No excuses.
Absolutely. Now is the time to get off the couch and be vocal. Don't depend on others to push back. We all need to pitch in.
Reminiscent of Stalin's utterance to Churchill at Yalta about not risking the pope's displeasure about Soviet resettlement plans for Polish Catholics: "How many divisions does the Pope have?"
Today in America, that could be rephrased as "The Courts? How many loosely organized, non-uniformed paramilitaries do they have?"
Imagine if we sentence the assholes officials that did not respect the court order to some time in jail in the Venezuela. That would teach them a real lesson in my opinion!
The fact remains that every single American should be opposed to this. If the admin can freely deport someone who was here legally and with proper papers and ignore their habeas corpus rights then there is nothing stopping them from doing so to US citizens. Once you accept that rights no longer matter, you are giving up your own rights and the rights of your fellow Americans.
This is THE line in the sand. Either you agree that people have rights afforded to them by the constitution or you are a fascist. And there is no mincing words on this.
The line and goalposts have been moved so many times, they will just continue to be moved. The White House spokesperson is already saying Kilmar is an MS-13 gang member as ruled by some secret ICE court. People will take is as gospel and legitimize his "deportation". There is no more line that people will stand behind until it's too late.
Horrible as it may sound, I'm not sure this is the court case that has the most chances of brining people on the judge's "side".
(Don't get me wrong, I know there should not be "sides" when talking about the rule of law.)
But here, Trump can play the "tribal" card to his base very easily (I'm expecting a variation of "non white woke judges are once again defending dangerous illegal gang members immigrants against hard working white Americans, this is a witch hunt, fight !")
I think the average republican voter won't care. We already know they don't care about document mishandling, cyber security, sharing war plans, gutting science, etc... They used to care about sex and religion, but don't any more. However, we know they care about kids.
Is there a lawsuit brewing about harm done by the trump administration to kids of white, non immigrants, conservative, affluent, christian, devouts, mainstream and influencial Americans ?
(That being said, I was very surprised to read that the SCOTUS itself confirmed Trump should not have deported at least one of those people [1].)
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250410235416/https://www.cnbc....
> Is there a lawsuit brewing about harm done by the trump administration to kids of white, non immigrants, conservative, affluent, christian, devouts, mainstream and influencial Americans ?
Interesting. In effect I think you are asking how the opposition should appeal to the supporters.
One way would be as you suggest to angle the message towards their identity, their group affiliation. This would work for the groups you suggest but this would a) only strengthen group identities that are being targeted and b) weaken the oppositions beliefs in their own groups. The opposition views politics as groups of people with characteristics at fight with each other. The election showed that for supporters the hard identity groupings are, at best that softer than before and at worst don't actually exist in reality.
A more effective argument would lead to the opposition using the belief system of their target. For example "All people have equality and valuable personhood and illegal actions damage this inherent value". This is basically the classical liberal mindset based on Christian values. But this isn't really the mindset of those in opposition while they continue to view the world as being run by power between conflicting identity groups. They believe that people are not equal, that equity is more important, that people belong to groups with inherent characteristics of varying levels of power, and that to solve issues the power needs to move between groups.
In other words, yes, an appeal to the group identities of the supporters will probably work for some but it will strengthen their group identity (increased race-nationalism), and the supporters actually cover a much wider range than the identities you give. An alternative appeal to the values of the supporters would work much better but would lead to a weakening of the oppositions own beliefs. Looking at it from a religion lens: the opposition cannot use Christian appeals to morality while they reject Christianity.
"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves." Enders Game
> Interesting. In effect I think you are asking how the opposition should appeal to the supporters.
Exactly. The opposition has to realize that they are outnumbered, at the moment ; but this is not a static or permanent things.
By definition, every majority hangs on "swing voters", and is ousted when the swing voters decide to swing again.
"Appealing to your base" is how you win primaries ; if you continue beyond that, and insist on "purity", "support 100% of our causes, or you're a facist", while the other side has a "big tent" strategy, then you only alienate potential supporters, and opposition is going to be long.
(Caveat: of course, this assumes pretty "normal" conditions where elections happen fairly, on a regular basis, etc...)
Also, about the role of "kids" in those discussion, one side obviously knows how to do it _very_ well: [1]
[1] https://heated.world/p/climate-science-isnt-giving-your
> Trump can play the "tribal" card to his base very easily
Well, yes. It's the Pinochet situation; I'm sure the majority of white Americans can be propaganda'd into supporting having dissidents thrown out of helicopters.
> harm done by the trump administration to kids of white, non immigrants, conservative, affluent, christian, devouts, mainstream and influencial Americans
The whole point of a fascist setup with personal rule is that those people will get almost instantly exempted from any of this stuff happening to them. Whether that's by the discretion of agents on the ground or as soon as it reaches the media. And including in cases where they've committed actual crimes.
> However, we know they care about kids.
This is just one more in a long string of lies. They absolutely do not care about kids unless it's about their right to marry them[1]. Or watch passively as they die to easily preventable diseases[2]. Or go out of their way to deny them access to food[3].
[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/wyoming-ending-child-marriage-spark...
[2]: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/03/20/texas-measles-family...
[3]: https://newrepublic.com/post/173668/republicans-declare-bann...
I meant they care about _their_ kids.
They don't fear their kids will be married in Wyoming, or part of mennonites, or poor.
They're terrified that their kids could turn gay, or be raped in the bathroom by a trans men, or be denied a scholarship because some other diverse kid is getting it.
Are those fear rational ? I don't know.
Is one side much better at stoking such fear than the other ? I do know.
Which side is going to keep winning until the other side gets it's act together, if it ever gets a chance ? You bet I have my opinions...
> But here, Trump can play the "tribal" card to his base very easily (I'm expecting a variation of "non white woke judges are once again defending dangerous illegal gang members immigrants against hard working white Americans, this is a witch hunt, fight !")
Just today (yesterday?) they're already doing this - the Press Secretary paraded a mom whose daughter was murdered by an undocumented immigrant and said "this is why we're doing this, for people like her", completely ignoring the small detail that this current person is not accused, suspected, or convicted of murdering anyone.
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The man in question wasn’t here illegally. If there’s no due process of any kind to determine legal status it doesn’t matter anyway.
His legal status was unambiguously deportable. To anywhere but el salvador. An administration with half a brain would have just brought the dude back for 5 seconds and rerouted him to the border on the Guatemala side with a 'walk over there to go home' for some sort of miniscule favor to Guatemala and mission accomplished.
I just checked the statute and the 2019 ruling and was surprised to discover that you are correct.
2019 Ruling: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69777799/1/1/abrego-gar... Referenced statute: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/eoir/legacy/2014... Statutes on where an alien may be deported to: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...
This is such an odd hill to die on.
The dude at one point at least a wife abusing gang member, and indisputably an here illegally when he was given deportation orders he ignored.
I get that orange man is bad and must be opposed at all costs and conditions… but seriously, this is so strange that people are willing to go to bat for this guy.
I’m not joking at all, TDS might be real.
If the president doesn't abide by the courts that's a constitutional crisis, a fundamental problem. Maybe this one instance isn't enough to say that the Trump admin won't abide by the courts, but it's a start. Immigration is not the issue either. It's about the 3 equal branches of government and how one branch is trying to discredit the other. The issue isn't about public perception. The issue is about how the US government will function if the constitution is ignored by the Executive branch.
> Immigration is not the issue either. It's about the 3 equal branches of government and how one branch is trying to discredit the other.
Which branch is guilty of this? It’s far more frequent for a rogue district judge fo overstep its authority, is it not? They seem to get reversed quite often.
The way things work is that if the judge oversteps you appeal, but you are still bound by the ruling unless higher court overrides it.
You can't just say you don't like the ruling and ignore it.
Exactly. And just because it's not a perfect system doesn't mean it's not a good system.
It's the best system that has ever existed.
The executive.
The admin's ever increasing desperate shrillness is making somewhat of a standoff. He's gone from a gang member to a human-smuggling terrorist gang leader real fast. While also being an apprentice steelworker, supporting his wife & her kids from a previous marriage?
The admin is absolutely over the top with lies deceit & no good. Unwilling to be at all reasonable at any point. They are desperate to make sure no one ever has a chance to make them look like the clown car full of incompetents with no one but syccophantic pathetic mouthy yes men that they are.
But the admin is destined to eat shit again and again. You can't just disappear people cleanly & conveniently; even sending them into an awful concentration camp where no one can hear from them ever won't hide the lies & insanity these monsters spew.
There is 0% chance in my mind that they would dig in like this unless the guy is dead, bukele is demanding a ransom to fix it, or something really bad happened there. There is no rational reason for the administration to endure this, especially since they can easily just blame the return on the bleeding heart judges.
The admin demonstrates very little rational reason. Demanding a purge of American history, banning words from research, insisting private colleges control student speech, end so called DEI programs, and demanding to install their own crony shits in the faculty... The list goes on and on with madness that is beyond reason.
The reason to be a pig headed totalitarian mind-controlling gaslighting bully over this particular man is because being a bully requires putting on a strong front, requires avoiding or besting challenges. Alas, this admin is a bully staring down the Constitution and all America.
> There is no rational reason for the administration to endure this
Endure? They caused this. The reason is because they don't think that enough people will care about the fate of one foreigner to hold Trump accountable. He's counting on the people not understanding or caring at all about the rule of law, and he may be right. Plenty of commenters here don't.
The Trump admin doesn't admit when they are wrong.
They already admitted in black and white in court to judge Xinus they were wrong. They're refusing to fix it. Why admit you're wrong but refuse to take a simple action to fix it unless it can't be fixed? Literally all they have to do is bring him back and refulfill the deportation by dropping him in some barren desert in Somalia, anywhere but taking him to the one place they couldn't.
And that's why they fired that attorney. Good authoritarian leaders don't admit when they are wrong.
Maybe they want this fight. They want it to go to the Supreme Court. A favorable ruling will unlock alot of doors.
And ignoring an unfavorable one with no consequences will open even more doors.
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Actually I care that you, Vyrealian, cannot be deported to a foreign prison without a hearing, even if the President of the United States says you're an illegal immigrant in MS13.
And if you're any kind of American, you should care about that, too.
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How do you know they are undocumented unless they are tried in court? The 6th amendment applies to non-citizens as well.
He was documented, he even had work permit, which he got during first trump's term.
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> and is trying to shake down Trump or later more empathetic administration as part of the deal to release them.
remember Manuel Noriega ? This guy is NOT shaking anyone down
From my time in central America, it is a top down shakedown operation for literally anything and everything. Very pragmatic people really. They will profit both ways, coming and going. That's the key thing the senator from Maryland forgot when he thought he could reason with them from a sense of justice.
They're going to want favors or money. I knew why the senator failed as soon as he said it, he should have talked to literally anyone with family in a former Spanish colony before he went down there.
I'm not sure what you're implying that he could be "shaking down" Trump for, but I think Bukele already knows they imprison innocent people... it has been reported that they have released at least 8,000 of them in the last 3 years, which also seems to contradict the often cited claim that "nobody ever leaves" CECOT.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/spa/bukele-reconoce-8%2e000-inocent...
Bukele is extremely intelligent. His service is underpriced, based off memos only $20k / person / year and in a nearly brand new maximum security prison. I sincerely think he may have known just how stupidly the US would execute this and will come prepared with demands for their release -- secretly and in a way that we will not find out. Even if he has to wait for the next administration. He knows our courts and much of the public will put politicians under fire for this.
To the other respondent’s point about Noriega, a central american autocrat cannot “shakedown” the American government. The balance of force is entirely in the gringos’ favor - if they choose to use it. If Bukele refuses, it’s simply because this is what Trump wishes him to do. Bush I _invaded_ Panama to enforce a district court’s arrest warrant.
Old news. The same judge preposterously claimed to have the same "powers" as Trump and forced the DOJ to write this letter on this very case.
https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/do...
Isn't this the one that was already cleared by the Supreme Court?
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/supreme-court-lifts-temp...
and this single district judge is trying to enact a political movement.
Flights take off. Dude issues temporary ban on Alien Enemies deportations. Flights do not turn around. Supreme Court clears temporary ban. Dude now claims admin defied his court order.
Because admin clearly defied his court order? What’s an issue with this and what kind of mindset makes you oppose this? Isn’t this clear - you’re suppose to do what courts told you? You’re not entitled to choose what to do and what not? Regardless if you’re private citizen or government. You do what you asked for, you appeal if you disagree. You impeach if you think judge is off the rails and/or corrupt. But before all of this you do what you asked to do by courts.
Isn’t it chilling to the bone to pretend admin can do whatever they (themself) consider right? I’m terrified by this possibility, and I think you should be too.
Oook, one more criminal prosecution to the heap will not make any difference.