When loyalty to the Dear Leader takes precedence over everything else

We are living in a remarkable time when the government seems to be deliberately scorning the constitutional system of checks and balances that has been so carefully created. Subverting the principles of the constitution for venal and partisan reasons and political expediency has been going on for a long time but what is new is how brazen the current efforts are. The Customs and Border Protection officers ignoring the rulings of several federal judges that they stay the implementation of Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration and refuges pending full evaluation was one step. The fact that Trump did not ask the CBP to follow the judicial orders means that they will see him as giving tacit approval of their defiance.
[Read more…]

Constitutional crisis unfolding

Back on December 15, I wrote the following:

Another thing to watch for are the inevitable lawsuits that are going to be filed as the Trump administration takes actions that are of dubious legality. Autocrats are used to thinking that their word is law and although US presidents have got used to thinking that they can bend the law to their will, Trump is likely to take that approach well beyond even what Obama and Bush and their predecessors did. Trump has been a magnet for lawsuits in the past and there is no reason to think that he will be less so as president. How will he react when a court rules against him?

[Read more…]

More on border abuses

From reader Sarah, I heard the story of Dutch writer Niels Gerson Lohman who describes what happened to him as he was trying to enter the US from Canada by train. He had spent the year traveling all over the world and had hoped to end the trip by visiting New Orleans, a city that his father had spoken of fondly. But the US Customs and Border Protection people had other ideas. After a lengthy questioning and searching of his belongings on the train, they then took him off it so that the train left without him and took him into a corrugated tin shed. [Read more…]

The dangers of traveling while Muslim

I have written repeatedly about the fact that it is when you are entering the US that you have the least rights and that the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which operates as part of the Orwellian-sounding Department of Homeland Security, abuses people with impunity by detaining them for long periods of time, harassing them, keeping them under harsh conditions, taking their property, humiliating and degrading them, and renditioning them to other countries to be tortured, all without giving them any reasons. Other countries also abuse their border powers, as what happened to David Miranda at Heathrow airport shows. [Read more…]

The profiling of a Somali-American woman

We have seen how David Miranda was questioned for nine hours and had his electronic equipment taken from him by British security forces in the transit area of Heathrow airport. This article describes how the NSA actually pays the British secret service to spy on their behalf because the British have weaker regulations of their government officials’ actions. [Read more…]