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.