Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 29
by Rex Huppke
I remember about five minutes ago when Republicans and right-wing pundits couldn’t stop prattling on about President Joe Biden being “lawless.”
They seem oddly quiet now as current President Donald Trump appears to be openly defying court orders, denying people due process and generally behaving like he’s never met a law that applies to him.
Trump border czar Tom Homan, responding to the administration’s apparent rejection of a court order halting deportation flights of alleged Venezuelan gang members, said Monday: “I don’t care what the judges think.”
Trump appears to be openly defying a judge’s order
This is one of those moments when I like to sit back and imagine how Trump and his Republican pets would have responded if someone in the Biden administration told a federal judge to pound sand. Fox News headquarters would’ve erupted with enough ferocious outrage to tear a hole in the fabric of space and time.
But now? I guess that kind of talk is just good, tough-guy rhetoric. Trump is standing up for America by not letting woke things like “the law” get in the way of his all-but-certainly illegal deportations. I mean, I didn’t have Republicans pegged as a big (expletive) the police crowd, but nothing much makes sense these days.
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is Trump’s desperate tool to look ‘tough’
To get a closer look at Trump’s actual lawlessness, consider the case Homan went all “Judges? Who even listens to them?” about.
On Friday, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 via executive order, saying it would be used to go after criminal members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.
The act was swiftly used to help round up about 200 alleged gang members for deportation to El Salvador without a hearing and without presenting evidence to prove the people were gang members.
A judge said to halt the deportations. They were definitely not halted.
A federal judge handling a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward, previously filed on behalf of five detained Venezuelans, turned it into a class action Saturday, covering all noncitizens who could be impacted by Alien Enemies Act.
District Judge James Boasberg told the government in a hearing: “Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States.”
That didn’t happen. The planes landed in El Salvador, and the people our government claims are Venezuelan gang members – again, no proof has been offered or due process given – were taken to a notoriously dangerous El Salvadoran prison.
Fast-forward to Monday, to the courtroom of one unhappy federal judge. Boasberg hauled the Justice Department attorneys back into court to figure out why his order was ignored. Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli refused to give the judge any specifics, citing national security, saying instead – with zero detail – that the government had not violated the judge’s order.
Oh, OK. If you guys say so. Still, it’s funny how those planes landed in El Salvador, and all those people are now very much not here, which is kind of the opposite of what the judge ordered.
There are legal ways to do what Trump wants to do. Why not go that route?
Look, I’m all in favor of removing violent Venezuelan gang members from our country. But there’s a way to do that, and it involves showing evidence that they are what the government says they are, and … you know … following “legal” avenues. There’s a way to do it that doesn’t risk innocent people getting swept up and deposited in an El Salvadoran hellhole.
But if the government can round people up without due process, put them on a plane, and then ignore a judge’s order to have the plane return, that means pretty much any of us could be swept up and unceremoniously dumped into what Trump keeps feebly attempting to call the Gulf of America.
That’s scary. We’re teetering on the edge of a constitutional crisis and dealing with a president who appears to be lawless. Which is a hoot, because “lawless president” is what these mopes called Biden for years when all he was doing was trying to help people out with onerous student loan bills.
Remember all those times Biden was called ‘lawless’?
In 2021, Fox News knob Mark Levin said: “Joe Biden is the most lawless president in modern American history.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board opined last year under the headline: “Biden’s Latest Lawless Student Loan Forgiveness.”
And in 2023 on Fox Business, former Home Depot CEO Bob Nardelli broadly claimed of Biden: “This environment under this administration is fueling a lawless society and we’ve got to get this back under control.”
I have to wonder what ol’ Bob has to say right now. It seems like a president defying a federal judge’s order might be the sort of thing that fuels “a lawless society.”
That which applies to Biden must never apply to Trump, apparently
Who knows? Maybe the “lawless president” folks who harangued Biden are afraid that if they say anything, Trump will unceremoniously dispatch them to an El Salvadoran prison. Or to the bottom of the Gulf of Whatever-We’re-Calling-It-Today.
At the moment, while we wait to see if Republicans and the judiciary are going to let Trump openly defy the law, that’s not an unreasonable thing to fear.
