In case you missed it, we’ve just had another officially approved Stomp-on-the-Constitution Day.
I guess this may have been routine back whenever it was that Donald Trump believes America Was Actually Great, but in more modern times, it’s not exactly a good look and especially not when it’s the once-hallowed U.S. Supreme Court doing the actual stomping.
If I don’t sound alarmed enough for you, don’t worry, I’m just getting started.
As we know, there are way too many assaults on democracy taking place during the Trump restoration to rank them, but this one is near enough the top that it should worry/scare everyone, and not just people with brown skin, although they should be especially worried/scared.
This time, it’s the Fourth Amendment being trampled. That’s the one, if you’re not up on all the amendments, which protects individuals from being detained by jackbooted thugs or other federal agents without reasonable suspicion that a specific individual had committed a specific crime.
The amendment covers other issues — like illegal search and seizure — but what we have here is racial or ethnic profiling, which for decades has been considered clearly unconstitutional.
And when roving bands of armed, masked federal agents — from ICE or the Border Patrol or, I don’t know, maybe the Marines — were raiding Home Depots and car washes in greater Los Angeles to detain as many Latino-looking, Spanish-speaking people who work as day laborers as they could find, a federal judge ruled that the agents were clearly racially profiling. And that it must stop.
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SUBSCRIBEAnother federal court agreed that there must be reasonable cause, and that reasonable cause didn’t include the detainee having calluses on his hands or speaking English with a Spanish accent.
I don’t know that any court has noted the irony of a Trump who attacks all DEI programs by saying that we must be colorblind as a nation (implying that white people are the ones getting the shaft) and then saying, straightfaced in a court of law, we can’t afford to be colorblind if there are too many brown-skinned people lurking about in parking lots.
But there’s only one court that counts, and that’s the Trump-accommodating Supreme Court, with its 6-3 right-wing majority and its use of emergency dockets to temporarily, at least, give Trump basically whatever he wants.
There have been roughly 20 of these emergency-docket cases, and Trump has won nearly every one, including the right to fire seemingly protected government workers, to stop the payments on congressionally passed foreign aid, to shut down legally created government departments, etc., etc.
These cases are heard in a hurry, and the “temporary” decisions are made even more quickly, usually without any explanation other than for the court to declare “We’re in charge and we say so.”
In this case, Trump, who already has Supreme Court-granted immunity, also got a quick free-to-ignore-the-Constitution card, saying — yes, without explanation — that it was OK to stop and detain suspicious-looking people — you know, brown-looking people — because there are so darn many of them in Los Angeles who probably aren’t citizens at all and how are we going to catch them if we don’t break a few rules?
As Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote, in a concurrence to an unsigned decision, what else could the government do here because the lower court decisions “substantially hamper its efforts to enforce immigration laws”?
In Kavanaugh’s fantasy view of how the world works, those being rounded up are subject to “brief investigative stops,” and if the person is found to be here legally, the agents “promptly let the individual go.”
Has this man not seen the videos of how people are detained in real life? Has he not seen them cuffed and sent to warehouses for interviews without a lawyer?
And is he worried at all about those American citizens, unlike him and unlike me and maybe unlike you, who would have to carry their citizenship papers around with them wherever they go — and even that wouldn’t prevent them from being, say, thrown against a wall or gang-tackled?
Does Kavanaugh understand the expense involved in getting an attorney? Does Kavanaugh have any idea of the fear and trauma of being held despite having committed no crime and not knowing what might happen next?
In the real world, Kavanaugh believes in sweeping up people who look or speak the wrong way and says their rights are not really being violated because, in greater Los Angeles, where 20 million people live, he says 2 million of them are there illegally.
And so. And so.
The Constitution must give way?
It’s hard to know exactly what is driving Trump in his high-profile assault of cities run by Democrats in states run by Democrats. But I’m sure, whatever else, it’s not about the crime.
California’s governor and chief Trump provocateur, Gavin Newsom, has his theory, shared by many: “Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court majority just became the Grand Marshal for a parade of racial terror in Los Angeles. This isn’t about enforcing immigration laws — it’s about targeting Latinos and anyone who doesn’t look or sound like (Trump aide) Stephen Miller’s idea of an American…”
Trump has always based his strong anti-immigration policies on the dangers of crime in America, and especially crime by someone who, if he’s here illegally, is probably a gang member. Once it was Mexicans Trump railed against. Now it’s Venezuelans. Either way, you get the gist.
It’s because of, uh, crime that Trump sent the troops into Washington, D.C. — despite the uncomfortable truth that crime there is falling.
And now Trump has set into place what he called “Chicopalypse Now,” a parody poster of the great “Apocalypse Now” movie, in which Trump says, in an AI image of him as Lt. Col. William Kilgore, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”
You laughing? Me either.
Robert Duvall played Kilgore in the movie and the line was, as we all should know, that he loved the smell of napalm in the morning. He was crazy, of course, but also fictional. And Trump?
Let’s just say the post is juvenile and it’s sophomoric, but I’m not here to say it’s beneath Trump. There is nothing beneath Trump, who just blew up a ship full of alleged Venezuelan cartel members because they were somehow an imminent threat to the United States.
But there is something lower, and that would be the Supreme Court justices, who presumably know better but still are willing to help him find a way to ignore the Constitution.
I don’t love the smell. And neither does Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote for the two other liberal justices on the court, that “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
Dissent is still legally protected by the Constitution. Use it while you can.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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