Comment by areoform
6 days ago
It's not.
The rubicon has already been crossed. If you asked some of the framers of the US constitution - beyond all other factors, unelected powers etc - what was the one defining trait of the government structure they wished to avoid; they'd have replied with arbitrary imprisonment and the suspension of due process.
Please don't take my word for it, hear it from the Prosecutor's Prosecutor. The SCOTUS justice, former AG and former USSG who led the American prosecution against the Nazis at Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson,
No society is free where government makes one person's liberty depend upon the arbitrary will of another. Dictatorships have done this since time immemorial. They do now. Russian laws of 1934 authorized the People's Commissariat to imprison, banish and exile Russian citizens as well as "foreign subjects who are socially dangerous."' Hitler's secret police were given like powers. German courts were forbidden to make any inquiry whatever as to the information on which the police acted. Our Bill of Rights was written to prevent such oppressive practices. Under it this Nation has fostered and protected individual freedom.
The Founders abhorred arbitrary one-man imprisonments. Their belief was--our constitutional principles are-that no person of any faith, rich or poor, high or low, native or foreigner, white or colored, can have his life, liberty or property taken "without due process of law." This means to me that neither the federal police nor federal prosecutors nor any other governmental official, whatever his title, can put or keep people in prison without accountability to courts of justice. It means that individual liberty is too highly prized in this country to allow executive officials to imprison and hold people on the basis of information kept secret from courts. It means that Mezei should not be deprived of his liberty indefinitely except as the result of a fair open court hearing in which evidence is appraised by the court, not by the prosecutor
There is a reason why citizenship was not a requirement for receiving due process under the law. Citizenships are bestowed by the government. They can be taken away by the government. The framers held certain rights to be unalienable from human beings - something that no government can take away, and that was the right to not be unjustly detained for your beliefs, your behavior, your dress, your religion or composure.
Suspending due process for anyone is fundamentally un-American. But we have crossed that threshold. What comes next is fairly inevitable - if the process isn't stopped now.
The more fundamental corollary is that the US government does not grant any rights. We have them by default and cede limited power for the benefit of an orderly society. Within such a framework, it should be impossible to disenfranchise people by denying them due process.
I've posted here before that this idea that we just have rights is actually problematic, not the least reason for which is that whether we have such rights or not, their mere existence has never and will never actually defend anyone from any violation of them.
Rights are just the concessions that the less powerful have extracted from the powerful by virtue and utilization of power. This perspective has the double benefit not relying on the imaginary and making it clear that if you don't fight for your rights you will not get to keep them. Rights may be God given, but God isn't going to come down and rescue you from a concentration camp if you get put there by an autocrat who doesn't like your "free speech."
All that matters is whether we will personally tolerate abuses against human beings and what we are willing to do to prevent them. If I had my way, talk of rights qua rights would be swept into the dustbin of history with other imaginary stuff like religion in favor of concrete, ideally evidence based, free human discussion about what human beings want from the universe and what we are willing to endure to get it.
Precisely. If only the people who worship the Declaration of Independence and recite it like parrots singing a psalm, actually understood what the document was saying.
Unfortunately, those people have a lot of practice worshipping a text that they have not read.
>Within such a framework, it should be impossible to disenfranchise people by denying them due process.
Yet, US was systematically disenfranchising people for centuries
Within the lifetimes of some of us, lynchings were still common.
> The rubicon has already been crossed
So when would you consider the US crossed this threshold? Guantanamo Bay? The internment of ethnic Japanese in WW2? The Trail of Tears? Or is there something about the excesses of this particular administration that makes this an unprecedented and irreversible step, if I understand your metaphor correctly?
Respect for rule of law and democratic norms. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
> The framers held certain rights to be unalienable from human beings - something that no government can take away
Unless, of course, the government considers you to be 2/3 of a person
Distinction without a difference, but it’s 3/5.
Thank you! I had an emotional reaction to the founder worship.
the judge you are quoting literally worked in FDR's admin when they were deporting millions of Mexicans, regardless of whether they were born in the US. They didn't get due process
That judge was against the interment of Japanese Americans. He took a stand against anyone deprived of due process throughout his life.
The US came close to losing its democracy status with FDR, which is why after he died, the 22nd Amendment was quickly created - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-second_Amendment_to_the...
Perhaps but "the framers of the US constitution" are almost always over idealized. It was the very early stages of democracy (even if you can call it that). When elected to office they regularly used they official powers to supress political opponents, partisan enmity was endemic and the levels of corruption were pretty extreme (of course there was only so much money to go around due to very low taxes). Trump is unhinged of course but some of the founders or early US politicians weren't too far off...
The constitution was more of an aspirational ideal than a binding document back then since there were very limited ways too enforce it (e.g. the only way to repeal the Alien and Sedition Acts was by electing a new president/congress). The First Amendment was also interpreted and viewed extremely different that it is now before the 1900s...
What's your take on the government drone striking American citizens without any sort of trial?
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As soon as you carve out exceptions for who should and shouldn't have their basic rights, you've lost the plot. Someone with a little bit of authority only needs to claim that you are a part of that group that shouldn't have their rights, and then you get to experience a flight to El Salvador wondering where it all went wrong.
Question for you - if you don't exercise due process, how do you know if any individual is one of those 10 million you speak of, or someone who is here legally, or for that matter, a citizen?
...?
The same way you exercise it for 320 million other people. The same way it has been exercised for every person who immigrated to American soil. Including your ancestors.
Let's be clear about what you're actually saying and you're advocating for, you are advocating for the suspension of due process and fundamental rights to an entire class of human beings you see as the other.
If history has taught us anything, the definition of who and what is other changes over time. One day, you too shall be the other. And that day you will beg for the due process and fundamental rights you wish to deprive these people.
When the Benjamin Franklin said, "... if you can keep it." This type of thought process is precisely what he meant.
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Just to be clear, you are suggesting that it is fine to kidnap and send American citizens, ANY AMERICAN CITIZEN, to foreign prisons. They could come take you or any family member for any reason, and all they have to say is they thought you are a dangerous gang member. They don't even have to say anything! Once you are on that plane, it is a black hole, and they are grinning about the fact that you can't do a thing about it. That is why we have due process. This isn't about immigrants or cheap labor or anything. This is about disappearing political enemies for any reason. Flick off a Tesla driver? Gulag. Post on facebook that maybe we should be nice to gay people? Gulag. Trying to enter the USA on vacation with too much melanin? Guess what, gulag.
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If you want to reverse exploitation of cheap labor I suggest you turn to strategies which do not treat human beings like cattle or some kind of infestation to be shipped en mass elsewhere.
An economically viable solution to this problem would be simply force companies to pay all laborers, foreign or domestic, legal or illegal, a living wage, eliminating the benefits of bringing in illegal labor and maintaining a humane society. Furthermore, we should probably only trade with countries which have equal labor protections as our own, so as to ensure that jobs aren't offshored to save money, at least at the expense of human rights.
I'm sorry, I just can't buy that "treat a bunch of people like animals" is the humanist, labor friendly, perspective.
>An economically viable solution to this problem would be simply force companies to pay all laborers, foreign or domestic, legal or illegal, a living wage
Do you think that the law has a cut-out to allow for paying illegal immigrants less than minimum wage? This is like solving the murder rate by making murder illegal -- it's already illegal to employ these people and pay them below minimum wage.
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> because Wall Street wanted cheap exploitable labor
totally a ton of illegal immigrants running across the trading room floor yelling put orders and putting the real, American stock brokers out of jobs they deserve!
Wtf you talking about bro? Cmon buddy.
Bernie Sanders put it best: "open borders is a Koch Bros scheme"
You saturate the labor market with workers, it depresses wages, plain and simple. It's in the interests of shareholders to saturate the labor market to increase profits.
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