Comment by awesome_dude
1 day ago
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.
>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
I believe the concern is the cases where the person had a temporary stay.
Bruh, do you think people are pissed about the deportations just because they’re immigrants?
Deport them all if they came here illegally and that was _proven_, but the government just skipped all due process and as we’re seeing and as the government already admitted, people are being mistakenly deported to these camps and then the same government says they can’t do anything to reverse it.
You can’t be waxing poetic about the rule of law and how we need to enforce everything when they can’t even follow due process
Following due process is part of enforcement, and yeah, it needs to be done in accordance with law. But we've had problems with due process for a long time. One example is that our court system is not remotely adequate to handle the load it actually needs to handle. The result is long delays in justice (which usually benefit those with enough resources to wait it out), as well as a heavy reliance on plea bargains (which can act as an end-run around due process by applying pressure on vulnerable accused people to essentially waive their due process rights).
I don't disagree that there are huge problems with how enforcement is currently happening. My point is that we've had those problems for a long time and the current situation is just pushing things to the breaking point along the same axis.
Do you believe there should be criminal prosecution for state and local government officials currently refusing to to work with ICE in its current form in the Trump administration?
In a sense, yes. I lean more and more toward the idea that we're not going to get out of this mess without "hitting rock bottom", so to speak. That means we have to somehow confront people with the reality of the laws we actually have, not the imaginary ones we've convinced ourselves we have. If we had those kinds of criminal prosecutions we might get riots in the streets and revolutions that would result in changes to the laws. Moreover, if we had had those kinds of criminal prosecutions in the past (e.g., George Wallace), we might have been able to fix things with less pain than will be required now.
2 replies →
What crime is that?
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> 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.
This is never going to happen - politics aside of what you might or might not believe about the current situation.
It's about as likely to happen as every religious individual on the planet obeying every rule in their sacred book.
The reason that they don't happen is because peoples' ideas on what is acceptable and isn't in a society changes, sometimes quite rapidly - note that the current US Administration was (attempting) to use a statute from the 1700s, are you obeying all the laws (that haven't yet been repealed) from then?
edit: An obvious example is the fact that the USA exists - it's on land that was acquired via theft, and murder. Therefore every person living on that land is receiving stolen property - let me know when that law is being enforced.