Trump V The Judiciary

How will it be inforced?

It seems as though the Trump administration has been scouring old laws to try to find ways to get around new laws. Or to put it another way, to get away with the inhumane, horrible, undemocratic things they are doing (I had another word that had four letters, but chose to try to remain civil). They found an 18th-century wartime law which the president invoked to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang, and allows federal agents to enter homes without a warrant. The very old law was intended to be used in wartime; if the president is thinking he can find a way to explain how we are at war with Venezuela, then maybe it will stick. I’m being facetious, but he might.

This approach to the law will infringe on people’s civil liberties. Today, immigration authorities detained a researcher at Georgetown Universtity because he supposedly had ties to Hamas. Badar Khan Suri is an Indian national on a student visa in the US, and his wife is Palestinian. That she was born in Gaza City and was previously employed at Al Jazeera was, to Trump and Marco Rubio, proof of her support for Hamas. He and his lawyers of course deny that he did anything illegal. This is outrageous.

It’s scare tactics.

Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist, said he has never seen anything like what is happening now in this country, that it’s beyond the scope of what other authoritarian regimes have done.

“We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” he said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”

What I want to know, and I asked this on my live broadcast yesterday, is what happens when Trump defies the judiciary. What happens when a judge says don’t do that, and then he does the thing. I know he is testing the courts, he hopes a lot of these Federal court decisions against his actions will be heard by the highest court. If they do (and some will), and the Supreme Court says no to Trump, will that stop him? And if it doesn’t, if he keeps going against the constitution, can we arrest him? And who would be doing the arresting? Vance and Trump’s border czar said the following.

“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” Vice President JD Vance declared last month. “I don’t care what the judges think — I don’t care what the left thinks,” Mr. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said this week during an appearance on “Fox & Friends recently.

This NY Times article discusses this critical dilema, but offers no solution. It states that in Israel, recent public protests were so large and caused so much disruption to Israeli busines and society, that it forced Netanyahu to change his plans of restructuring the country’s courts. But they are a small country, we would have to have huge protests in multiple places; sadly, it would not have the same impact. Musk is throwing money at the GOP to assist in Trump’s control of the Legistlative Branch of our government.

It’s sad to see so many members of Congress willing to be bought.

There have been calls for new leadership in the Democratic Party, that Chuck Schumer needs to step down (in an interview on MSNBC, Schumer said there is not a constitutional crisis yet, our democracy is not in danger yet…). I agree, but things have to move fast.

Thanks for being here, everyone. I hope your Thursday is a good one, as good as it can be, considering. I don’t really understand how this will all turn out, but I have hope. But we have to be doing everything possible.