When some evangelizing seems a right move

Fred Clark writes The Slackivist where he urges seekers and other ex-evangelicals to  "Test everything; hold fast to what is good." He is as horrified as so many of us are by the dragnet Donald Trump and this ghoulish assistant Stephen Miller are letting loose against migrants.

He recounts the story of the Oklahoma woman and her kids put out half naked in the rain while unidentified agents who trashed their house and stole their money -- all only to realize that the person the agents sought had moved on. (Homeland Security is now claiming lamely there had been human traffickers at the address previously.)

Clark has a suggestion, only a little tongue in cheek, for resistance to this kind of thing:

Doxxing the Secret Police to call them to repentance

The secret police of ICE know they’re the Bad Guys. That’s why they wear masks and don’t carry badges and refuse to give their names.

And so ... it is necessary for us — and for them — to unmask them, to use their names, and to identify them publicly. To make them famous. This is needed to save our freedom and to save their souls.

Refusal by such "agents of the law" to say who they are and who they work for seems to indicative fearfulness ...

... But what are the secret police afraid of? Who are they afraid of? Why are they hiding their faces and their names?

They are afraid of us — of the majority of normal, decent people. And they are hiding their faces and their names because they know that what they are doing is wrong and shameful and bad. They know that they are the Bad Guys in this story. That is as obvious to them as it is to you and so they cannot face you. They cannot do what they are doing and save face, so to do what they are doing they must hide their faces.

So let’s see their faces. And their names.

In asking to see those faces and names, some fear I’m also asking thereby to learn their addresses, which seems to imply a hint of violence or, at least, the threat of such. (“We know where you live” almost always seems to be an implicit threat of violence.) But violence is not at all what I’m suggesting and not at all what I have in mind

Clark has experience meeting people who didn't expect visitors are their houses ...

What I have in mind, rather, is Evangelism Explosion. What I have in mind is what I learned and practiced in youth group at my white fundamentalist Christian church growing up — the spiritual practice my white evangelical tradition shares with the Latter Day Saints and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’m talking about door-to-door evangelism.

Most of you reading this have only experienced this from the other side of the door — as the knock-ee rather than as the knock-er. I’ve been on both sides. Neither one is pleasant.

The one positive thing from my experience conducting door-to-door “evangelism” was probably that it made door-to-door political canvassing so much easier for me. Sure, an undecided voter might not welcome a random knock at the door, and, yeah, they might not favor the candidate I’m campaigning for, but even the worst case scenario here isn’t as bad as the essential premise of the conversation you’re trying to have when doing door-to-door evangelism. 

That involves standing on the front porch of a stranger and saying, “Hi. You don’t know me and I don’t know you, but I know you’re a sinner who deserves to suffer for eternity in Hell.”

... you can kick the boy out of evangelicalism but you cannot completely kick the evangelicalism out of the boy. And so when I think about these secret police masking themselves in their shame — when I think about a group that already understands that they are sinners in desperate need of repentance and salvation — I can’t help but think it’s worth giving this a try.

...  the names and addresses of our secret police should also be treated just as all those Evangelism Explosion training sessions taught us to treat the names and addresses of our “unchurched” neighbors.

We should be knocking on their doors.

We should smile and tell them we’re there with the good news of salvation, because even though they are damnable sinners, repentance and redemption are still available. The repentance and redemption they need are still possible. The salvation they already know they need can still be theirs.

After all, they are already admitting to guilty consciences with the masks and gear ...

... The Bad Guys may choose to continue being the Bad Guys, but we cannot allow them to deceive themselves about the fact that that is what they are choosing.

Our “Evangelism Explosion” training taught us more tactful ways of saying that. But still, that’s what we were saying.

Caveat: The political canvassing training I've had nowadays is, perhaps, a little more sophisticated and a little less ham-handed. The model promoted by the union UniteHERE calls on canvassers at the doors to share, empathetically, what motivates them to do anything so odd as knock at the house of a stranger. "I'm here because I'm afraid a Trump administration might screw up my Social Security ..." for example.

But Fred is onto something. Reaching out directly, non-violently, to the consciences of the agents of a rogue state seems a right idea. Probably not simple or easy, but one right approach among many. Takes some courage, but so does everything these days.

What's wrong with these people?

From where I abide, that's the chronic question I come to when I take in what MAGA Republicans seem to want. Their fury against my life and that of my friends and neighbors seems inexplicable. What matters to them?

Okay, I know some people react to human differences by wanting to erase the unfamiliar. Perhaps that was adaptive for small wandering bands of early humanoids -- though I doubt it. I bet the ones who learned new ways to get along with differences survived better.

But for MAGA, strange people who they experience as different from themselves are not all they want to erase. They also want to erase science, knowledge itself. Economist Paul Krugman attempts to explain this strange mania for destruction.

... why do our new rulers want to destroy science in America? Sadly, the answer is obvious: Science has a tendency to tell you things you may not want to hear. Medical research may tell you that vaccines work and don’t cause autism. Energy research may tell wind power works and doesn’t massacre birds.

And one thing we know about MAGA types is that they are determined to hold on to their prejudices. If science conflicts with those prejudices, they don’t want to know, and they don’t want anyone else to know either. So they really want to destroy science.

Again, this isn’t hyperbole, and it’s not about the long run. American science is being gutted as you read this

There's a human impulse to kill the thing you don't understand.  But that impulse has never contributed well to surviving and thriving.

May Day in Vineyard Haven, Mass.

The crowd at Five Corners had a lot of issues with the present regime. Trump 2.0 offers a wide spectrum of harms to be called out.

This family came out to express historic May Day issues. May Day in the United States is descended from Chicago's 1886 Haymarket Market demonstration where cops violently broke up a protesting crowd and the emerging socialist/labor movement called for a general strike. Contemporary oligarchs may drive us there one day.

 

Generalized protest of the Trump regime's crimes was common.

What could be more straight forward?

So was the shout out to horrors past.

This morning, Heather Cox Richardson quotes Kamala Harris, once again finding her voice:

She urged the audience to “gear up for the hard work ahead, and please, always remember, this country is ours. It doesn't belong to whoever is in the White House. It belongs to you. It belongs to us. It belongs to ‘We, the People.’”

Vineyard folks have not forgotten.

Happy May Day!

Let's keep up the good work. Quite a slide there.

Via The Guardian: They’re the sort of damning reviews that would give any normal person pause for thought. But Trump is not a normal person and is not known for self-reflection. Instead, he ignored the scathing verdicts and immersed himself in the rightwing mirror world, spending most of Tuesday retweeting increasingly hyperbolic praise from Republicans.

“The limits of tyrants,” Frederick Douglass said, “are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

See you at a May Day demonstration. We'll be at one near us. Will you?

We're an unruly and unruled people

After reading at least twenty 100 Days of Trump appraisals of the regime, I think I give my prize for doing the distasteful subject the most justice to historian and opinon writer Jamelle Bouie (gift article).

Trump has wreaked havoc throughout the federal government and destroyed our relationships abroad, but his main goal — the total subordination of American democracy to his will — remains unfulfilled. 

You could even say it is slipping away, as he sabotages his administration with a ruinous trade war, deals with the stiff opposition of a large part of civil society and plummets in his standing with most Americans.

If measured by his ultimate aims, Trump’s first 100 days are a failure....  Even though Trump seems to think he is issuing decrees, the truth is that his directives are provisional and subject to the judgment of the courts as well as future administrations. And if there is a major story to tell about Trump’s second term so far, it is the extent to which many of the president’s most sweeping executive actions have been tied up in the federal judiciary. The White House, while loath to admit it, has even had to back down in the face of hostile rulings. ..

... MAGA propaganda notwithstanding, Trump is not some grand impresario skillfully playing American politics to his precise tune. He may want to bend the nation to his will, but he does not have the capacity to do the kind of work that would make this possible, as well as permanent — or as close to permanent as lawmaking allows. If Roosevelt’s legislative skill was a demonstration of his strength, then Trump’s reliance on executive orders is a sign of his weakness. 

Roosevelt could orchestrate the transformative program of his 100 days because he tied his plan to American government as it existed, even as he worked to remake it. Trump has pursued his by treating the American government as he wants it to be. It is very difficult to close the gap between those two things, and it will become all the more difficult as the bottom falls out of Trump’s standing with the public.

Bouie warns that Trumps' relative failures in his first 100 days are no reason for incautious confidence that we can hold off his attempt, abetted by tech bros, to end our democratic experiment.

Do not take this as succor. Do not think it means that the United States is in the clear. American democracy is still as fragile and as vulnerable as it has ever been, and Trump is still motivated to make his vision a reality. He may even lash out as it becomes clear that he has lost whatever initiative he had to begin with. This makes his first 100 days less a triumph for him than a warning to the rest of us. The unthinkable, an American dictatorship, is possible.

But Trump may not have the skills to effect the permanent transformation of his despotic dreams. Despite the chaos of the moment, it is possible that freedom-loving Americans have gotten the luck of the draw. Our most serious would-be tyrant is also among our least capable presidents, and he has surrounded himself with people as fundamentally flawed as he is.

On Inauguration Day, Donald Trump seemed to be on top of the world. One hundred days later, he’s all but a lame duck. He can rage and he can bluster — and he will do a lot more damage — but the fact of the matter is that he can be beaten. Now the task is to deliver him his defeat.

About ten days ago, I began to sense that people and institutions were pulling themselves together to fight the MAGA authoritarian onslaught. Folks are taking on Tesla, immigration prisons, even the defense of ultra-rich Harvard. We going to be badly damaged in this fight; some people -- as usual those who were always in the most need of support from society -- will not make it to another side. But there is no reason to give up the fight now.

Victorious Canadian leader brings more than sticking it to Trump

I was so glad to pass along that Canada had repudiated Donald Trump in an election in which the American bully had made himself an issue, I didn't do much research on Mark Carney, the guy who led the Liberal Party victory. 

It turns out, according to US environmentalist champion Bill McKibben, Carney is not just some smart, central banker turned politician who grabbed a chance to save his party from electoral purgatory and stick a nationalist finger in Donald Trump's eye: 

... though he was elected a little by accident (albeit after a brilliant campaign) it means something far more: in Carney we now have the world leader who knows more than any of his peers about climate change. And who knows roughly twenty times as much about climate and energy economics as anyone else in power. He may turn out to be a truly crucial figure in the fight to turn the climate tide.

I’ve been watching Carney for a long time. A graduate, of course, of both Harvard and Goldman Sachs, he was governor of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crisis and performed admirably enough that the queen asked him over to run the Bank of England.  (It’s probably not quite how that works, but close enough). While in that job, he had the fun of trying to deal with the UK’s Brexit decision, and by all accounts again performed better than one might have expected. So now he gets the task of cleaning up after Trump’s insane tariffs. 

But actually it’s the much bigger mess—the one in the atmosphere—that I suspect has long interested him most. In 2014, at a World Bank panel, he quite forthrightly pointed out that we would need to leave the “vast majority” of fossil fuel reserves in the ground if we were at all serious about holding the increase in the temperature of the planet below two degrees. This was, on the one hand, clearly obvious to anyone who had looked at the physics, but on the other hand not something that most leaders were willing to say at the time, or to this day. Those of us who had recently launched the fossil fuel divestment campaign found it to be a great boost—one of three or four crucial moments that turned this into one of the largest anti-corporate campaigns in history. 

McKibben credits Carney with helping win the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, the high water mark of international recognition of the planet-wide emergency we are living. 

[Carney] now finds himself leading a nation hard hit by climate change: Canada has a front row seat the melt of the Arctic, which is the fastest-heating part of the earth; it has watched its boreal forests burn like never before in recent years. ...

... I’d say that the rest of the world is going to recognize Carney as the most likely person to midwife us through this transition. I think he’s not done playing a world-historical role, and for that if nothing else we can thank Donald Trump.

• • •

Karen Kelly pointed me to this updated version of a Canadian nationalist statement even more appropriate to the moment. Enjoy.

Canada strikes back

The election up north demonstrated that our neighbors aren't having any of the Orange Bully. 

This is old, but I think captures the sentiment:

 

Doing democracy

I've never been very good at the necessary task of agitating my own Congresscritter for more action for better policies. I think I've been on two visits to Congressional offices in the last 35 years  -- of course for me the target has been Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi which gives me a sort of an excuse: for most that period her real constituents were not her local voters but more the recalcitrant members of her fractious Democratic caucus. As constituents, we felt a little beside the point and we were.

But I love reading accounts from people newly inspired to do this work of direct democracy. In the present moment, agitating slow poke Democrats and useless Republicans is part of the necessary struggle.

At my core I’m a storyteller. I love probing the past and the present to learn the “story of us” and how these true-to-life tales might inspire us to become better humans.

Dr. Jemar Tisby is an historian of religious faith focused on racial justice and a prolific writer and preacher. But he'd never done a Congressional visit before this past month: 

People Power

I'll be marinating on my time visiting offices of representatives and senators for a long time.

This was precisely what our government was set up to do--provide an avenue where constituents can let the elected officials who represent them know their concerns and have a reasonable expectation of being heard.

In its most basic sense, democracy means "people power."

That day I felt like a person who at least had the power to express my views to the people empowered to make policies.

The experience made the work of the federal government less opaque and intimidating.

At the end of the day, all the bills, all the laws, all the deliberations are done by people.

Regular human beings.

They are imperfect, they have fears, hopes, and worries.

They can also be influenced.

The most frequent refrain I heard throughout my day on Capitol Hill was, "Your voice matters." ...

... when we speak, we disrupt complacency. We remind officials and politicians that the people still have power.

As I looked back at the marble of the Capitol, I felt it again: this is our building, our Congress, our country. Our democracy. And we must never let them forget it.

If we can possibly stand it, more of us need to do it! Or at least call these reps up, frequently.

• • •

Tisby is author of several books. I've just finished reading one as an audio book and looking over the young adult version of the same material snagged from the wonderful Cape Cod library system.

Both tell stories of individuals central to the US Black experience -- central to "doing democracy" in the context of the long freedom struggle -- that may be unfamiliar to most white readers. Tisby is particularly attentive to the roles and accomplishments of women. Highly recommended.

When the people lead, our leaders will follow

It was great to see that House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Cory Booker held a "sit in" on the Capitol steps this Sunday morning to denounce the Trump regime's budget plans. 

“Republicans in Congress are proposing cuts that will take food from children, health care from the sick, and dignity from those already struggling," Booker said. "It's wrong. To stop it, we all must say so — clearly, courageously, and together. Speaking out and speaking up is how we will convince four Republicans in the House and Senate to do the right thing and vote no.” NorthJersey.com

Senator Chris Murphy reported one phase of Democratic Senators' push back.

Last night in the Senate, something really important happened. Republicans forced us to debate their billionaire bailout budget framework. We started voting at 6 PM because they knew doing it in the dark of night would minimize media coverage. And they do not want the American people to see how blatant their handover of our government to the billionaire class is.

So I want to explain what happened last night and what we did to fight back. The apex of Republicans’ plan to turn over our government to their wealthy cronies is a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations. And they plan to pay for it with cuts to programs that working people rely on. Popular and necessary programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP, are all being targeted. In order to pass the tax cut, Republicans have to go through a series of procedural steps. Last night, they took the first step which requires them to pass an outline of their plan, but with it, any senator can offer as many amendments as we want. So my Democratic colleagues and I did just that. ...

So what did we propose? We proposed no tax cuts for anyone who makes a billion dollars a year. We made them vote on whether or not Elon Musk and DOGE should have limitless access to Americans’ personal data. We made them vote on whether to protect IVF and require insurers to cover it. Every single amendment Democrats proposed was shot down. On almost every single amendment, Republicans universally opposed it. Every Republican voted against our proposal to prevent more tax cuts for billionaires. The corruption and theft is happening in the open here.

The whole game for Republicans is taking your money and giving it to the wealthiest corporations and billionaires — even if it means kicking your parents out of a nursing home or turning off Medicaid for the poorest children. They know what they are doing is deeply unpopular. They are offering a tax cut to the most wealthy that is 850 times larger than what they are offering working people. Oh and by the way, any tax cuts for working people are going to be washed out by higher costs for basic necessities, like health care and food. It’s a fundamental injustice ....

Dems don't have the votes to completely stop Republican priorities, but they've gotten around to fighting. Angry constituents in town halls and all those phone calls are making a difference.

Senatorial signs of life follow Cory Booker's 25 hour filibuster at the beginning of the month and Senator Chris Van Hollen's trip to El Salvador to check on abducted Marylander Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Several Congressional reps followed after Van Hollen. 

It's notable that Trump doesn't even bother to try implement his wish list by passing laws, instead issuing a blizzard of executive orders. He can't rule with even the pretense of regular process. Republicans have tiny, fractious majorities and couldn't pass most of this stuff. And a multitude of people's lawyers are doing a lot to stymie the executive orders.

Meanwhile Representative Jaime Raskin and Senator Richard Blumenthal are demanding that the big law firms which have capitulated to Trump's threats to their business must reveal what they've promised to our law-breaking president. Legal ethics complaints in the states where they have business could seriously impact their standing; so could the refusal of law students to seek jobs with them. 

Harvard University's vigorous pushback against the Trump regime's attempt to control institution has freed up nearly 500 colleges and universities to affirm their intent to maintain free speech and free inquiry under the First Amendment.

As Josh Marshall has reminded us: All political power is unitary. ... It’s all one thing. Everywhere that Trump/Musk/MAGA meets resistance helps every other form of resistance to tyranny. That's the other side of Republican's "flood the zone with shit" strategy; as the push back grows, they'll find a free people sniping from every side. 

We are doing this. Find a May Day rally near you.

The disappearance of Andry José Hernández Romero

One of the fascinating findings in the slew of polls surfacing reactions to Trump's 100 day bundle of blunders is that people now recognize the name Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The story has broken through of the Maryland sheetmetal worker deported illegally (and in error?) to a Salvadoran torture prison. Kudos to his wife and his lawyer for their continued legal agitation for his return. 

And kudos to Senator Chris Van Hollen who dared to travel to El Salvador to see a person taken from the state he represents. His mission alarmed me; I'm old enough to remember when Congressman Leo Ryan attempted such a mission to the Guyana jungle and was murdered for his pains. 

Following Van Hollen, several other members of Congress have made the trip. They have not been allowed to see the prisoners, but they can help make us all more aware of these kidnapped men.

On of those Congresspeople, Representative Robert Garcia, a gay Democrat from the Long Beach area, is trying particularly to bring light to bear on Andry José Hernández Romero, a gay, 31-year-old Venezuelan makeup. Hernández Romero was classified as a gang member because he has tattoos that say “mom” and “dad” with crowns....

no one ... heard from Hernández Romero, who has been documented to have no history of criminal activity, since March 14.

Jonathan Blitzer, a journalist at The New Yorker, found out a lot about tattoos and young Venezuelans. 

Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan journalist who’s reported extensively on criminal groups in Venezuela, published the definitive book on Tren de Aragua. “The truth is that a tattoo identifying Tren de Aragua does not exist,” she told me. “Tren de Aragua does not use any tattoos as a form of gang identification; no Venezuelan gang does.” In Rísquez’s view, tattoos are a completely unreliable indicator of someone’s criminal proclivities; rather, they reflect contemporary fashions and socioeconomic class. “Most young people in Latin America these days have tattoos,” she said. ... Rísquez went on, “People get a tattoo because it means something particular to them.”

Andry’s tattoos have an immediate significance to the people in [the small Venezuelan town of] Capacho. For a hundred and eight years, the town has held a special festival for the celebration of Three Kings Day, replete with elaborate theatrical acts, sets, costumes, and casts of dozens. The holiday is observed widely across Venezuela (and indeed throughout much of the Christian world), but the production in Capacho is legendary in the country and has been awarded distinguished status as a national patrimonio, or heritage. “This work represents for the community of Capacho the greatest cultural expression of street theatre,” Jorge Cárdenas, a leader of the Foundation of Reyes Magos of Capacho, told me earlier this week. “To speak of Capacho is to speak of the Reyes Magos.”

Cárdenas has known Andry since he was a boy, when Andry participated in the festival’s program for children. When we spoke, Cárdenas described Andry’s contributions to local theatre, including all of his roles in the festival itself, before leaving me a series of messages brimming with literary and religious detail. Andry was one of the thirteen main actors in the show, a makeup stylist for the others, and the costume designer for nearly two dozen dancers. One of the principal symbols of Three Kings Day is a crown. “Andry is a great lover of the festival, and the two crowns on his wrists are a tribute to his passion for it,” Cárdenas said.

Nobody has been able to speak to Hernández Romero since ICE secretly flew him away.

Andry’s American lawyers are caught in something of a paradox. They’re vocal about sharing the details of his disappearance, because, if he fades from the news, his situation may grow even more dire. Yet Andry is also an asylum seeker. Disclosing the full identity of someone fleeing persecution is inherently risky. ...

[Lindsay] Toczylowski and her colleagues had debated whether disclosing that Andry was gay would make him a target inside the Salvadoran prison. They decided it was pointless to try to hide it, and that maybe it would make the public more sympathetic to his case. Ordinarily, this would be a conversation they could have had with Andry. Under the circumstances, all they could do was discuss it with his mother. She told them, “Do absolutely everything you can to get him out of there.”

Congressman Garcia, himself an immigrant who came to this country as a child from Peru, gets the level of danger to Hernández Romero. 

“He clearly was scared for his life because he was gay,” Garcia said. “And then we picked him up and sent him to this horrific prison. He hasn’t had any access to his family or legal counsel or really anyone.” ...

...  Garcia said the situation is growing more alarming by the day, particularly in light of the Trump administration’s continued use of the Alien Enemies Act to remove immigrants without hearings — even after the U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency order blocking further deportations under the statute.

“Right now, Trump is still defying the Supreme Court,” Garcia told The Advocate. “He’s doubling down on the idea that Andry is not coming back when the Supreme Court is saying that he should.”

... “We have to highlight his case and make sure people know.” 

The Trump regime would like nothing more than for its victims to simply disappear. We can't let them get away with this.

Resistance is NOT futile

A new NYTimes poll [gift link] confirms what my spidey sense has been feeling: Trump is sinking in the esteem of the people as he blunders to the 100 day mark of his term. Even FoxNews has noticed he's stuck below recent presidents. That doesn't mean he's no longer dangerous, but there is a shift.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Simon Rosenberg's Hopium Chronicles project can come across as a little hokey. He's an FDR Democrat, forever believing that Democrats will someday push a social welfare state over the finish line. But in the present political situation, he deserves credit for building one community of resistance activists whose intensity is second to none, folks who diligently and strategically push Dems to act as their best selves instead of cowering in confusion. 

He sums up the present moment this way: 

... magical thinking in Trump’s diseased brain about how his “strength” will force the American people and the world to bend the knee is crashing hard against reality. He sees himself as a hero. The nation and the world increasingly sees him as a villain - a foolish, weak, failed, and ridiculous man with his painted face, orange hair and a girdle working overtime. A big blubbery baby man as we like to say here. ...

Like Putin’s delusional miscalculation in underestimating Ukraine’s fight and resolve, Trump has grossly underestimated the resistance he would face here and abroad. It doesn’t mean he won’t keep arresting judges on Trumped-up charges; or deporting an American citizen child with cancer; or keep trying to send people to his Salvadoran Gulag; or unraveling our public health system; or waging war against science, research and learning. All of that may continue and we have to keep fighting it all as hard as he can [fight us]. But this early version of Trump 2.0 has failed.

They are constantly in retreat. They’ve lost the country. Folks are not bending the knee. A majority of the country has come to understand the Emperor has no clothes, and has pulled the curtain back from the Wizard. Without his “strength” what many are seeing now is a desperate, pathetic old man, far more a fool, a fuck up and a lame duck than the strongman he sees in the mirror when he applies his spray tan in the morning.

... So, finally, friends, let us on this Saturday remind ourselves of where are now:
    •    We are stronger, he is weaker
    •    We have to continue to act with great urgency as he is breaking things that will be hard if not impossible to repair
    •    In seeing public opinion break against Trump we are getting confirmation that our work matters, that minds can change, things can be different and even - shall we say it - better?

Let's keep the pressure on from all our very different communities ...

Playing for the USofA: The Trump regime ignores the "L"

It's not just lily-livered libs who are worried. 

Mike Florio, who has written ProFootballTalk (now part of NBCSports) since 2001, took time out from his prep for the NFL Draft to express his distress about the lawless behavior of the Trump regime:

A quick break from football, for something more important

... Our country currently is in a crisis. It’s blossoming in multiple ways, through multiple pieces of litigation. The main issue that has been weighing me down mentally and emotionally in recent days is the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

My concerns are irrelevant to whether he’s a member of MS-13. Or whether he should or shouldn’t be deported. Or whether he is or isn’t a good husband and father. The source of my stress is that his case exposes a basic, fundamental threat to our system of government.

It’s hard to type those words without regarding them as over the top. I wish they were. They aren’t. At the core of all of the rhetoric and rambling and ad hominem attacks and both-sides, “what-about?” bullshit resides a core question of whether the executive, legislative, and judicial branches will continue to be co-equal. As the founders intended. And as the country has operated, for nearly 250 years.

... I worked in the legal profession for 18 years. When you win, you win. When you lose, you lose. You may not like losing, but you’ve lost. You deal with it, and you move on.

Not this executive branch. When this executive branch loses, the judges are vaguely threatened with impeachment. They are attacked as impeding the will of the government. And their orders are ignored.

Yes, they’re appealed. And appealed. At some point, the appeals have been exhausted and the “L” must be taken and respected.

... In the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — and in other cases — that’s not happening. The executive branch is openly refusing to honor the orders of the judicial branch....

He cites one of the judges who have tried to get the Trump regime to play by the rules.

... “We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos,” [conservative US Circuit Court] Judge [J. Harvie] Wilkinson wrote. “This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.”

The language is beautiful and poignant. The message is dire. Unless and until the executive branch commits to respecting all decisions of the judicial branch, our system will begin to disintegrate. And the executive branch will become a monarchy, an authoritarian regime, a dictatorship.

I know it sounds hyperbolic. In this case, it’s true.

Again, it’s not about the facts of any one case. It’s about the outcome of a process that has been in place since the birth of the republic to resolve disputes. In every case that is resolved by the courts, someone wins and someone loses. In the Abrego Garcia case and others like it, the executive branch has realized that a win remains possible, in the form of ignoring that it has lost....

... We’re playing for the United States of America. And if the current executive branch refuses to acknowledge the basic truth that it is, or should be, playing for the United States of America, the system has necessarily commenced its collapse.

Judge Wilkinson clings to the hope that the executive branch will abandon its current course. All Americans who truly love this country should have that hope. And we all should pray that it comes to fruition.

We might have known this was how Trump would treat the courts and the law. After all, he lost the 2020 election fair and square yet still tried to use a mob of dupes to overturn it. 

The NYTimes reports today that the ACLU is trying mightily to get the courts to curb Trump's lawless attempt to apply the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to a situation that is not a war, nor in any rational understanding "an invasion." Sheet metal workers and make-up artists are not enemy soldiers.