With respect to Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s blowout, I can do no better than to quote Martha Wells: “The sense of urgency just wasn’t there. Also, you may have noticed, I don’t care.” Two malignant narcissists with more money and power than kindness or good sense want to get into a useless pissing match, well, that’s one more thing I don’t need to pay attention to. I highly recommend not paying attention to it yourselves.
Some people are making a big deal of Trump’s threat there will be “serious consequences” if Musk supports any Democrats in response to their blowout. Yes, the idea of a President threatening a U.S. citizen for their peaceful exercise of their First Amendment rights is troubling, but no, not in the case of Musk. I’m pretty sure he can afford a good civil rights attorney. Afford every good civil rights attorney in the nation, come to think of it. Trump’s talk is useless bluster, as useless as the rest of him.
The Kilmar Abrego García case is revealing people’s profound ignorance of logic. We are being constantly presented with a binary choice between Abrego García being a bad guy who deserves to be in an El Salvadoran secret prison, or an undocumented immigrant innocent who’s being horribly mistreated by the government.
The problem with this logic is simple: that’s not how binary choices work. A binary choice does not ask us to choose between A and B; it only asks us to accept or reject A. The moment you introduce alternatives it stops being a binary choice, and I can’t believe I have to remind people of that.
This is my longwinded way of saying: yes, we mistreated him, denied him due process, and shipped him to an evil and ugly place in violation of our binding promise to him we wouldn’t. That doesn’t mean he’s a good guy or that he shouldn’t be deported or anything else: it only means we wronged him.
García is being extradited back to the United States to face federal charges which, if found guilty of, will qualify him for the express train straight back to El Salvador… and, I have to be honest, I’m fine with that. He’s got a huge amount in his legal defense fund and will have his pick of fine attorneys and all the criminal protections found in the Constitution: if the government convicts him it will only be by the overwhelming weight of evidence, as it ought be. And if, either subsequent to conviction or follow-up immigration court proceedings, he’s ordered out of the country, I’m fine with that, too.
Trump is mobilizing 2,000 California national guardsmen and, it’s said, a detachment of active-duty Marines so that he may “restore order” in a lawless Los Angeles where about two dozen people are actively resisting ICE raids. Mark my words: in the next 24-48 hours the State of California is going to head to federal court to get an injunction against this, as federal law doesn’t authorize the President to take the lead on state-level rebellions.
(Well, maybe it does. See 10 U.S. Code § 12406, which is written so broadly as to arguably be unconstitutional.)
Rather, the Constitution says the opposite: the President is required to support the state governor in putting down the rebellion, which means that without a declaration of rebellion from the state governor there’s nothing for the President to do. But this is a level of Constitutional analysis that a reasonably bright middle school student could understand, meaning it far escapes the President’s meager facilities.
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