This first one is obvious and is a knife aimed at the heart of our country: the Trump administration is talking about suspending habeas corpus, and clearly their pet rat-weasel, Stephen Miller, is floating the idea to the press.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said Friday that the Trump administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the right of a person to challenge their detention in court.
If carried out by President Donald Trump, the suspension of habeas corpus would be a dramatic escalation of his administration’s immigration policy by significantly curtailing a right enshrined in the Constitution.
This is what tyrants do — they want the ability to silence critics by throwing them in prison while denying them the right to defend themselves. Never mind that they are busy draping themselves in the corpse of Abraham Lincoln, because he suspended the right during the Civil War (we are not in a war, no matter how insincerely they insist we are being “invaded”), this is a fundamental attack on the rule of law.
The second sign of imminent doom is that Dan Three Arrows is returning to posting video essays. The United States is so fucked right now.
I predict that there will be blood in the streets before this is over; if he suspends habeas corpus, why not suspend the 2026 elections next?
If all that isn’t enough for you…
ADepartment of Homeland Security (DHS) official confirmed Saturday that arrests of Democratic members of Congress “is definitely on the table” following a confrontation at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Newark, New Jersey.
This statement comes after Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested on Friday at the Delaney Hall detention center, sparking a dispute over what actually occurred during the incident.
If habeas corpus goes down, I don’t think I can rationalize any kind of restraint in resisting. It’s a government crossing the line by saying that they don’t have to justify any whim. That’s the point where the government becomes a rabid beast.
PZM,
“I predict that there will be blood in the streets before this is over; ”
The time would be now, like, urgently, and there is nothing. This includes the Democratic party. It won’t happen, one of the reasons being that you would be fighting stormtroopers with military equipment out in those streets.
“if he suspends habeas corpus, why not suspend the 2026 elections next?”
I’m surprised about this, for many of my European and Canadian friends it is entirely obvious that there won’t be any free elections in the US anymore for the foreseeable future. That is the whole point.
There were a lot of people at this incident, which means a lot of witnesses.
There were also a lot of cameras and video cameras at this incident, which means a lot of photos and videos.
Just about everyone carries at least one of these with them everyday, that is what smart phones do.
The facts of this incident should not be questionable.
Someone is lying here.
I’m sure it is the present government, which is notable for lying a lot about everything.
What ICE and DHS and the Trump regime are doing is simply trying to scare the elected Democratic party officials.
Rat Führer Müller desperately wants to deport anybody who displeases him which is everybody. But, don’t y’all worry. If Rat Boy gets his way then Chuck Schumer will write a Strong Letter, A VERY STRONG LETTER!!!!
It’s my understanding that only Congress can curtail habeas corpus. Trump can sign another one of his bullshit royal decrees that have no basis in law or the Constitution, but he doesn’t have the power to suspend a constitutional right. That doesn’t mean he won’t try. He could order Reich Minister Homan to round up people without due process and dare the courts to intervene. This would mean more emergency judicial interventions. In the meantime, anyone caught in the ICE net would languish in some Texas or Louisiana detention camp for weeks or months as the process played out. Once they get their hands on you, being an American citizen won’t count for much. Trump’s mini-Kissinger, Stephen Miller, has a visceral hatred of Latinos. He would gladly deport any, even those who’ve been in the U.S. far longer than his own ancestors. (Note. Stephen Miller’s Jewish ancestors immigrated to America in 1903, fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms in what is now Belarus. His great-great-grandfather, Wolf-Lieb Glosser, arrived at Ellis Island with $8 to his name. Despite this history, Miller has no sympathy for others fleeing similar persecution in their own countries.)
(emphasis mine)
We didn’t resist it then, I don’t think we’ll resist it now. If just takes Trump at the helm for people to resist unjust laws put in place by his predecessors, then I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
I’ve grown sick of commentators claiming that MAGA isn’t conservative. That conservatives just want to preserve freedom and tradition, but Trump is some separate radical movement that wants to upend everything.
Bullshit! Everything the MAGAts have accomplished has been on the mainstream Republican wishlist since Goldwater. Conservatism always leads to fascism, especially as progress encroaches on the power and privilege (I.e. “freedom and tradition”).
I’m just not sure about any positive result after all of this…stuff.
Turning the country into a magaprison and asking the world to shop here seem somewhat at odds.
fishy @#8
I would think they’d dovetail nicely – a workforce cheap enough to compete with the rest of the world will produce goods cheap enough to be competitive in the world market. As long as you stick to goods you can make with no imported material, and accept orders from abroad it should work fine. Just don’t expect us to want to visit to buy the goods.
I’m both sad and angry:
Look around. It is obvious that we are already living in a CHRISTO-FASCIST MILITANT PLUTOCRATIC POLICE STATE where the rule of law is laughed at by the insane aholes running this asylum.
Can anyone provide a factual rebuttal to that statement?
Can anyone provide a practical, effective method of returning this country to a reasonable facsimile of a decent nation? My organization is still looking for one. But, just shouting and marching around in protest have proven ineffective in the present.
rorschach @2
I’ve been saying that for a while now and I’m still surprised to see so few acknowledging this. I understand that it is not something anyone wants to see but not planning right now for this and waiting for 2026 to see it come to effect and then trying to reverse it will be too late. People need to start doing something about it now but just being some random Canadian I don’t know what can be done and I personally cannot do much, if anything.
And people such as John Watts @5 saying that only congress can do something or that the president cannot do something lawfully is completely irrelevant and pointless. He has the full support of the law enforcers and what he says goes. It should be clear that this is the plan and that they are going slowly to push the limits so as to normalize all of this. And it seems to be working.
Here is another sign of the end of our democracy.
Our local homeless shelter has shut down.
They relied on a lot of Federal funding and that just stopped when Elon Musk and Trump got in and started wrecking everything.
We have a large homeless population here for several reasons.
Not least, the winter climate isn’t too terrible.
It still does get cold enough that people die of hypothermia in the parks in the winter, not many but one or two a year.
This program was actually quite successful. They not only housed people but had systems in place to get people off the street and back into housing and society. Which actually worked some of the time.
This is going to be a disaster for everyone; the city, the county, the downtown businesses, and most of all, the unhoused and now unhoused and unsheltered population.
I liked the poem at the end, particularly the line “Tear apart the noose of paragraphs.” I copied the poem to a google doc and did a bit of reformatting here: Rathenau
A new popular coping mechanism?
https://featureassets.gocomics.com/assets/5119acc008f6013e9da2005056a9545d?optimizer=image&width=992&quality=85
“In total, the Trump administration cut 15% of the Houston Food Bank’s budget, said Greene. Breaking it down, that’s a loss of $7 million to buy food from local farmers, $3 million to distribute goods to 1,600 pantries and $1 million to help seniors and low-income families apply for health insurance.”
The cuts represent 20 million pounds of food.
However, all Texas MAGA GOPQ representatives are on board with eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” although no rep could identify even a single example.
I just watched ~20 min. and I will finish watching the Dan Three Arrows video. It is full of incontrovertible evidence that this nation is already F*CKED. It is scary. It is important. I thank PZ for embedding it. EVERYONE here should see the entire video.
A couple of notes on why Trump can “declare” all he wants, but he can’t dispose of habeas corpus:
• Sure, Lincoln did it during the Civil War. Of course, he wasn’t around to face the music afterward. Even so, there’s binding Supreme Court precedent that suspension of habeas corpus is frowned upon and requires much more than a declaration from the executive branch. (Insert footnote citing at least 50 law journal articles about here)
• For “aliens” who are citizens of countries with which the US has diplomatic relations, what Trump wants to do almost certainly violates international law as to those countries. The requirement to inform the consulate of the nation of citizenship is a treaty-level concept (that is, it’s below the Constitution but above any executive or legislative reach, except during the process of ratifying a treaty and that gets really complicated).
• Then there’s the requirement in the law of armed conflict that prisoners or other detainees cannot be treated “less well” than prisoners or other detainees who are one’s own citizens. That means that if Trump wants to suspend habeas corpus for foreigners, he must (a) stop proclaiming that it’s organized hostile action (which brings it inside the law of armed conflict), which has been the basis of his declaration of an “emergency” thus far, and/or (b) suspend habeas corpus for everyone during the now-carefully-not-attributed-to-hostilities “emergency,” which runs right into the post-Civil War and post-WW2 precedents that even the Office of Legal Counsel won’t be able to overcome.
• Most amusingly, he can’t use the military to do any of this. Posse Comitatus is still the law of the land, and there’s 80s-era “War on Drugs” precedent treating Posse Comitatus as not only a clear statute, but one of nearly treaty-level weight (as the concept is largely incorporated in the international law of armed conflict). That means that troops “deployed to the border” — regular or National Guard or whatever — have no authority to detain or arrest civilians.
@17 Jaws wrote: A couple of notes on why Trump can “declare” all he wants, but he can’t dispose of habeas corpus
I reply: You are correct in that the law won’t allow him to do that. However, recent events have taught us that this mump admin. laughs at the law and either ignores or runs around court orders. They have already made this is a LAWLESS CHRISTO-FASCIST PLUTOCRATIC MILITARY POLICE STATE. The rule of law is a toothless old dog that they have locked in a cellar!
A group a private military contractors has already submitted a proposal to the White House that uses a “small army” of mercenaries and armed volunteers to round up millions of undocumented workers around the country and bus them to concentration camps to the White House.
Those 2A fanatics who claim they need their arsenal to stave off government tyranny may soon be co-opted to facilitate and defend government tyranny against the masses.
So predictable.
Oh, and don’t forget that they’re also heavily pruning the senior ranks of the US military as we type, which is another tactic commonly deployed during authoritarian takeovers.
Can’t be having non-compliant senior officers gumming up the works.
Jaws @17: You haven’t been paying attention. As shermanj mentions @18, Trump doesn’t care about the law and no one is making him follow it: all the law enforcers are in on it. As for international law, Russia is still in Ukraine doing war crimes and Putin hasn’t changed his mind (not to mention all the times the US itself has done war crimes by bombing hospitals and other unlawful acts). No one outside the US is going to change the course of what is happening.
I think it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing democrats, journalists, judges, etc., falling from windows (or whatever turns out to be the US equivalent of the Russian method). And it won’t be subtle because the message is an important part of the execution.
Jean @11
I have been following a couple of Airline Pilot’s aviation accident/incident Youtube channels, Mentour Pilot (large Commercial Aircraft) and Pilot Debrief (mostly General Aviation). “Hoover” on Pilot Debrief frequently refers to “Normalization of Deviance” as a major contributing factor to a crash. Normalization of Deviance refers to the normalization of deviance from standard procedures and practices – for example an instructor who did stall and spin training at increasingly lower altitudes. What the Orange Fuhrer and his accomplices are doing is exactly that.
Jean @21:
Trump may not care about the rule of law (I have a strong suspicion that he couldn’t spell “jurisprudence” if you spotted him the first eleven letters, and he certainly couldn’t define it). Many of the underlings — especially, but certainly not only, military officers — do, or at least can spell “Nuremberg.” Ironically, the most-dangerous-and-difficult-to-control leaders around any revolutionary/quasirevolutionary movement are the in-place-under-the-prior-regime leaders just below the level whose names make the news: Battalion, squadron, and individual-warship commanders, and their immediate subordinates. Support (or opposition) from generals and admirals can make a difference, <sarcasm> but sadly they’re not essential to either success or resistance </sarcasm>.
More to the point, successfully suspending habeas corpus is going to require active, even enthusiastic, participation pretty uniformly among those underlings. There’s going to be some; any such acquiescence/active participation is not going to be uniform (or at least not uniform enough).
Yet. Ask me again in about fifteen years…
@ 6. Trump de facto voter and enabler beholder : Yet again attacking the Democratic party and ignoring the Repug one I see. Why is no one surprised.
This ain’t about Obama and he ain’t the POTUS now – more ‘s the pity. Obama was a vastly better POTUS than Trump who has already metastasised into a full blown Fascist Despot. As predicted by people now proven right who fucking well warned you beforehand.
Just wondering but has anyone here ever seen this Trump-assisting troll focus on attacking the actually fascist party in US politcis and its now emergent dictator? Even once? Beholder, you really are scum with blood drenched hands and are the ethical and political equivalent of something toxic and stinking that gets scraped off a shoe.
There’s an analogy I use , usually wrt to canon law being cited in court and how seriously it should be taken. 8 year old me and my brother have a cubby house with a sign that says ‘No Gurlz Allowed!’. It is way past bed time and Mum is sick of calling us inside. How seriously does she take the sign?
But if Mum = Trump and the sign is the actual law (ie it has all the force of an 8 year old and a 6 year old enforcing it) what then? I think so many well meaning people, lawyers included, have been relying in the force of that sign for so long that they don’t and/or can’t and/or won’t quite believe it when it is ignored.
‘I predict that there will be blood in the streets’. How many examples do you need of this having happened to how many communities already? This is not a prediction, it might be an understated observation at best!
@24
I love you too, StevoR. But our marriage counselor told us we shouldn’t fight like this in public. I’ll try to stick to that advice for the sake of our relationship.
@22: “Normalization of Deviation” is going into my vocabulary. Very useful and relevant term.
@ StevoR
What does this make people who voted for Trump? (There were > 70 million.)
That would seem to be a lot of targets for your hate before you get to the people who didn’t.
@28 If they are not ignorant or willfully ignorant of what they were doing? Worse.
Ugh, that was unclear. If you are willfully ignorant, you are worse, all 70 million or so. BUT if you are ignorant, but not willfully so (brain washed by a church, kept in abusiveness, coerced otherwise, etc etc) then you get a pass, indeed you are a captive.
But willfully ignorant or actively informed and still a fan? To answer the question posed: Worse.
@ 28. Silentbob : As I’ve explained to you already about a gazillion times, beholder DID VOTE FOR TRUMP. In effect, in reality, de facto. In practice if indirectly. But did vote Trump because did NOT vote Kamala.
Despite beholder trying to fool people into thinking he was a left wing progressive who actually cared about principles and what was happening – and would happen in Gaza. Attacking the candidate who wanted less genocide and more reasonable solution as opposed to the candidate we knew and has since proven wanted more & worse genocides – plural – and worse (non) solutions.
Also pre-election, when things were in the balance and could be changed by changing minds beholder attacked the non-fascist party helping the fascist party. Helping Trump. Hurting Kamala Harris – the ONLY other alternative.
Arguing against the non-fascist side and therefore in the binary two choices for POTUS reality helping the fascist against the non-fascist.
Also as I’ve asked you before what part of this exactly do you NOT get and why do you keep defending this vile, Trump-enabling troll?
Please answer although I do full expect you will do your usual refusal to answer.
yeah, well It does look rather dark right about now for sure.
I want to see a “light at the end of the tunnel” but I can not.
the only things we have to count for the moment on is the shear incompetence, ignorance and stupidity of the whole administration team including #1 and their greed and cowardice. While there are a lot of demonstrations mostly the people are not aroused to what is happening. Nothing yet as big as happened in the March of Washington or The May Day protests of 1971 in Washington D.C has happened though there have been continuous demonstrations all over the country
Is it time for which side are you on?