Due Process Is Central to Everything

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote what I'd call a colorful critique of the Democratic Party's leadership. Within it, I noted that they had "helped pave the way for palpable fascism to ascend in both the Oval Office and Congress." I hadn't set out to examine the Republican Party's relentless streak of frothing illiberalism, but a few people noticed that single line and called me on it. It's fair to question whether this kind of rhetoric is just the usual hyperbole you see from partisan extremes. 

I'm a Republican - not that I'm entirely sure what that means anymore. This version of the party is neither conservative nor liberal, neither libertarian nor constitutionalist. Are we witnessing "palpable fascism" in senior leadership? The answer is...kind of.

We're wired to recoil at the big, bad labels - dictator, Nazi, communist, Marxist, fascist - and rightly so. They're often misused, their meanings diluted into little more than rhetorical artillery deployed against political opponents. More often than not, they miss the mark and diminish the arguments being made. But these words exist for a reason. 

Donald Trump is not a dictator. But he's up to some shit that sounds like stuff dictators do. 

He's issued executive orders targeting specific law firms, stripping them of their security clearances. Their crimes? Representing entities or people Trump dislikes. He added another executive order encouraging the Attorney General to refer attorneys for disciplinary action if they have filed "frivolous" cases. Law firms have already started refusing to represent clients out of fear of presidential retaliation.

Mahmoud Khalil is a Syrian exchange student who led student protests at Columbia. Those protests turned violent, and my belief is he certainly broke the law, but he hasn't been charged with a crime. He has nonetheless been detained indefinitely. I understand the vitriol directed his way, so this isn't a make-or-break case for me. 

But Yunseo Chung is a permanent resident who has lived in the United States since her family arrived from South Korea when she was seven. ICE orchestrated a manhunt to locate Chung for taking part in similar protests against Israel. But unlike Khalil, Chung didn't lead or organize any protests and had no public profile. She's unlikely to be deported after securing an injunction against the government, but why are we looking to detain & deport people who participated in protests? 

Tufts student and Turkish citizen Rumeysa Ozturk was snatched off the street by masked DHS agents for "activities in support of Hamas." Ozturk's crime? She wrote an op-ed for the student newspaper. No charges were filed against her, and her lawyer was not made aware of her location after her abduction. I say abduction because if you watch the video, that's what it was. 

Russian scientist Ksenia Petrova, who expressed vocal opposition to Putin’s war and fled Russia to find work at Harvard, was detained at Logan Airport returning from a French academic conference and has been sent to an immigration detention center in Louisiana for deportation to Russia. She was allegedly detained for making an error in her customs declarations, an infraction punishable by fine. Should she be returned to Russia, she will certainly be killed. 

The Trump administration has deported hundreds of men to prison camps in El Salvador after invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, designating the deportees members of Tren de Aragua. One of Joe Biden's massive failures was opening the floodgates at the border, allowing members of this Venezuelan gang to run amok in American cities. But some of these men were refugees admitted legally with Temporary Protected Status. One in particular was a known refugee who had been tortured by the Maduro regime in Venezuela. No hearings were conducted for any of those detained, they were shipped off to Salvadorian dungeons without due process. 

The favored MAGA line in response to questions surrounding due process is "Laken Riley didn't get due process." I mean, yea. Victims of heinous crimes don't get due process. That's how crime works. Collective punishment of foreign nationals for singular actions of criminals is un-American at best. We certainly deported innocent people to prison camps. That's a chilling truth and I don't think people have fully realized the implications. 

You don't have to care about Khalil, Chung, Ozturk, Petrova, or Venezuelan men languishing in a gulag. But you should care about due process. It's a fundamental safeguard against arbitrary government power that dates back to the Magna Carta. It's so critical to the American experiment that it's in not one but two constitutional amendments. It applies to every person, citizen or otherwise. You should care when the president tests the limits of the law, seemingly (hopefully) just to see if he can get away with it. Because that power can be weaponized as he sees fit against whomever he likes. 

Trump issued an unrelated Executive Order giving him power over elections. It would provide DOGE, a haphazard operation run by unelected tech fucks that prioritizes breaking shit, unfettered access to voter rolls. The constitution gives the president no authority over regulating elections. I favor Voter ID. No one should favor this. 

The recent Signal scandal, where senior administration officials vomited up classified information on pending attacks against Yemen, has been all the rage this week. It's bad for a variety of reasons, but one in particular stands out. Conducting sensitive operations on Signal is intended to avoid the retention of data. Project 2025, which the President is implementing despite distancing himself during his campaign, specifically recommends using third party apps to discuss top secret matters that can never be subpoenaed. If you think Hillary was up to some shit, what do you think this is? She wasn't even President. 

Nowhere here have I mentioned the Republican-controlled legislature, which  has willingly ceded its enumerated powers to the whims of the executive. But those whims are starting to take a toll. You might find the word dictator extreme or unseemly - but superpowers don’t collapse overnight. It’s a slow erosion, a constant testing of what the public will tolerate. Just ask the Weimar Republic how that turned out.

If you’re unwilling to call out abuses of power when they come from your preferred politician, then you don’t have principles - you have a team. Integrity isn’t about selective outrage; it’s about holding power accountable, regardless of who wields it. 

If you dismiss what I've written as squishy nerd shit and insist I should just "get over it," at least recognize that what you truly crave is authoritarianism. It's not unnatural - for most of human history we have collectively gravitated toward strong, centralized rule. But that's precisely what makes the United States such a remarkable anomaly; the most ambitious and successful democratic experiment in the history of the world. 

If you want to throw that away for a grifting, conniving sociopath - that's your call.