Partisan contest! You may start with principles, but — if you are careless — end up fighting, instead, for the things your opponent only thinks you stand for. You become the strawman your enemies put up as the dumbed-down version of your position.
This happens a lot: Democrats have long denied being socialists, but have accepted leadership from socialists; Republicans have long denied being authoritarian, but routinely act like authoritarians.
Case in point: the deportation of “criminal illegal aliens.”
This is not an authoritarian position as such; right or wrong, it can be done in a legally sane way.
But Donald Trump and Republicans have embraced an extremely authoritarian manner of deportation.
How? By denying the principle I defended in April: due process. Writing about the Abrego Garcia case, I made this simple point: “whether a dangerous criminal or an innocent, hard-working family man, Garcia’s status is hardly the issue. This is about whether our government must follow its written Constitution.”
Now we are learning a lot more about who has been sent to El Salvadoran dungeons: the innocent.
According to an informative Cato article, “of the 90 cases where the method of crossing is known, 50 men report that they came legally to the United States, with advanced US government permission, at an official border crossing point.”
This is important: “Dozens of legal immigrants were stripped of their status and imprisoned in El Salvador.”
We are, today, shocked to read of how the ancient Athenian democracy would expel citizens from the polis. But Trump’s deportations are much worse: they’re being done without constitutionally required due process . . . without any chance for the accused to defend themselves.
And the innocents are being sent to a hell-hole prison, not merely banished.
Trump and his willing government functionaries are conforming not to their principles, but the ones imputed to them by Democrats.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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5 replies on “Whose Principles?”
Since the Supreme Law of the Land — the US Constitution — says there can’t be any such thing as an “illegal alien,” and since, as pointed out in Madison v. Marbury, laws repugnant to that Constitution are void, no, it is not possible to deport those non-existent people in a “legally sane” way.
Where in our constitution does it say someone who willfully breaks the law and enters the US illegally is eligible for the same due process as a US citizen? Where does it grant someone who willfully breaks the law and enters the US illegally due process just because they request asylum. Sorry Paul, Abrego Garcia is just the next Democratic Communist poster boy and has now replaced murderer Luigi Mangione who replaced career criminal George Floyd. And they wonder why they lost to President Trump the “convicted felon”. They should be happy to have a convicted felony as POTUS..better than having a POTUS with
Alzheimer’s dementia, right?
Mr Knapp’s claim about the Constitution rests upon attending to the Tenth Amendment while ignoring Article I § 8 Clause 3 and § 9 Clause 1. Repeatedly, when the implications of those two Clauses are noted, Mr Knapp has abandoned discussion.
In brief, let me note that immigration is virtually always importation of means of production, and that § 9 Clause 1 doesn’t simply refer to the importation of slaves.
Finally, a post zi agree with. Republicans are violating the law! And they know it.
The intent of the Constitution was to protect against government tyranny. A stretch to believe that the authors had been able to conceptualize that a radical administration even could, let alone would import 15 million foreign nationals in such a short time and then require that they be accessed multiple years of court hearings and appeals, in the meantime staying here and being supported by the taxpayers.
Not believable that this was the intent.
This is Cloward and Piven, to our detriment.