Comment by candiddevmike
1 day ago
The people who need to see/understand this live in a different reality where uncomfortable things like this are ETL'd into righteous anger towards people they don't like.
This is the deep state they've been worried about, this is the boot that will tread on them.
EDIT: parent comment was highest ranked comment for the article and is now at the bottom?
A twisted justification for suggesting someone who broke serious laws not face consequences.
We live in a nation of laws, whether or not conspiracy-minded individuals prefer to follow them.
> We live in a nation of laws
You stopped living in a nation of laws a while ago. Now you live in a nation of might makes right.
We'll see.
The thing about the law in the US, it's slow and heavy. You'll need to be pretty mighty to move it if it catches up to you.
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That law now officially includes an individual who is immune from the law and who can issue pardons to anyone for anything. So you live in a nation with optional laws.
Federal laws only. There is some daylight there.
All the evidence is contrary to your assertion that we live in a nation of laws.
We live in a nation of peers before we live in a nation of laws.
Laws are only as strong as the enforcement.
One of the things that is being exposed by the current administration is that, even though the Judiciary is an arm of the government, and supposed to provide a check on the Executive, the reality is that the Executive has the power to pardon anyone it sees fit, voiding the power of the judiciary (the argument is that the ultimate power lies with the voters who can pass their judgement on the Executive, and its use of its powers, by voting them out, hopefully)
> Laws are only as strong as the enforcement.
This is one of the fundamental issues that underlies our broken system in the US. The gaps between what the law actually is, what people think it is, what people want it to be, and what it in practice is, are enormous.
Some of the recent deportation cases highlight this. You have cases where people were living in the US illegally for decades but faced no repercussions, and now people are upset because they were suddenly detained and/or deported. Virtually all the framing I see is about how it's a sudden and horrible injustice that they were detained during a "routine" ICE check-in --- very little about how we have accumulated this palimpsest of rules and enforcement policies resting on laws which don't actually encode the state of affairs most people want.
If we want people to be able to immigrate easily and safely (and I do), we need to stop breathing sighs of relief when a new president comes in and issues some kind of temporary executive order that makes things okay in the short term. We need to fix the laws at all levels, including criminalizing enforcement actions that are contrary to the law. That would likely mean massive purges of many individuals in local and state governments and law enforcement agencies, with many of them sentenced to considerable prison terms for the kind of enforcement discretion that we currently accept as normal. It's not going to be pretty. But it has to be done if we want to return to a system grounded in the actual rule of law and not the rule of law enforcement.
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