Defund DHS!

New from @libmeyer: Joni Ernst backs the sending of federal officers to places like Portland. "We are not going to stand idly by and let people destroy federal property," she said this morninghttps://t.co/GLonApRBer

— Iowa Starting Line (@IAStartingLine) July 21, 2020

Neatly sidestepping the question of snatching people off the street into unmarked vans, detaining them illegally, and then releasing them without saying what agency or officers were involved (which makes it harder to file complaints, eh?).  And frankly, graffiti is not exactly "destroying" federal property.  Aside from the fact no federal property in any other city Trump wants to send federal officers to is under threat at all.  But while we're on this subject:

NEW: Ex-Wisconsin Senator @RussFeingold voted against creating @DHSGov in 2002 and warned that a future president could use it as an unaccountable federal police force.

He says that's exactly where we are today with @realDonaldTrump's war on Portland.https://t.co/BrwJ8rz8aj

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) July 21, 2020

Defund the police?  Maybe.  Defund DHS?  Absolutely!

Paul Rosenzweig, who served as DHS’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy during the George W Bush administration, said the prospect of a president using DHS personnel to police American streets was one that opponents of the agency’s creation raised during debate over the 2002 Homeland Security Act. Rosenzweig recalled that he and other proponents of the bill dismissed such worries at the time.

“There were many who thought that DHS should not be created precisely because they were worried that it would be essentially an internal police force, and there were many like me, who said: ‘Oh, that's absurd. Come on. You know we need a coordinated unity of effort against terrorism, and this is a good way to do it,’” Rosenzweig recalled. “But there’s a lot of justice to that now.”

He added that proponents of the bill, which combined agencies from across the government into one sprawling entity charged with preventing terrorist attacks, ”never imagined” that the US would have as aberrant a chief executive as Donald Trump, or a Senate that is as “supine and subservient” as the GOP-led upper chamber is today.

But one of the nine Senate Democrats who voted against creating DHS, former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, said the possibility of a lawless administration abusing the broad powers granted to DHS was the reason he cast the lone vote against the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act. That legislation expanded the executive branch’s law enforcement and surveillance powers.

“When you see in Portland, people that were trained to handle drug smugglers being used to go after Americans protesting racism, it reminds me very much of the stuffing into the PATRIOT Act, provisions that were really not used for terrorism at all, but were being used for drug cases,” said Feingold, who is now president of the American Constitution Society.

Feingold said both the Trump administration’s actions in Portland and President Trump’s threats to send federal agents to patrol cities with Democratic mayors are part of a “truly dystopian picture” that is worse than anything that was imagined during the George W Bush administration. These actions, he added, are more appropriate for “a completely lawless country without any protection of the rule of law” than the United States of America.

“This is right out there in the open and is a direct affront to American democracy. People should be able to express their political views consistent with the First Amendment and not be afraid of reprisal from the federal government,” he said. “What I was warning about in 2001 was what would happen if we elected somebody who really didn't have any respect for our system of government, and that's where we are today. He [Trump] and his administration are doubling down on the most frightening series of threats that any of us have ever seen in our democracy.”

Yeah, it's partly Trump; but it's also a matter of "Be careful what you wish for" (isn't everything?)

While Feingold was adamant that what is happening today was clearly foreseeable, those who’ve served in DHS and its constituent agencies say the department’s descent into enabling Trump’s authoritarian impulses has only been made possible by the lack of strong leadership and a strong “rule of law” culture within the department.

Juliette Kayyem — who served as an Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2010 and was on the Homeland Security Council during Jeh Johnson’s time leading DHS — said Trump has turned to DHS because Defense Department leadership indicated that they wouldn’t follow orders to use National Guard troops against protesters as was done in Washington, DC last month.

“DHS is the weak link,” she explained. “The White House experienced considerable pushback from the Pentagon after Lafayette Square, but you won’t get that at DHS because its leadership is totally beholden to Trump.”

Yet the idea that DHS has “leadership” at all is one that strains credulity. For over a year now, the department charged with such diverse tasks as protecting the nation’s currency from counterfeiting (Secret Service), maintaining navigation aids on the country’s navigable waterways (Coast Guard), and leading the response to natural disasters such as hurricanes (FEMA) has lacked a Senate-confirmed secretary.

Moreover, nearly every single Senate-confirmed leadership position atop the 360,000-person strong department is either filled by someone serving in an “acting” capacity or by a “senior official performing the duties of” a position they are not legally permitted to hold in an acting capacity.

We're really got to revisit that Vacancies Act.  And it's not just DHS; it's agencies like the Border Patrol:

Budd also pointed to the example of a protester who told Oregon Public Broadcasting that he was seized off the street, taken to a federal building, and searched without a warrant as evidence underscoring the agents’ lack of familiarity with the Constitution.

“That's typical Border Patrol, because down here, they don't have to have a warrant to do anything,” she explained.

And despite their lack of familiarity with Americans’ basic constitutional rights, she said Border Patrol agents are eager to embrace their newfound freedom to inflict themselves on American protesters because doing so as a “national police force” has long been their goal. Because most Border Patrol agents hold what is known as “1801 authority” — which only grants the power to make arrests and enforce federal law but not conduct investigations — rather than the “1811” authority held by Special Agents at other agencies, Budd said the USBP has long had both an agency-wide inferiority complex and designs on a larger role in the nation’s law enforcement apparatus.

“The Border Patrol has always had this elective low self-esteem, that they're not considered to be like, ‘real cops,’ and they're just always pissin’ and moanin’ about how they feel that they should be able to go around and grab anybody up off the streets and do whatever they want,” she said. “And that's what you're seeing out there.”

Which takes the problem straight back to Trump, but also to Congress, which can easily write laws to constrain this kind of activity.  And really needs to reconsider the wisdom of a DHS in the first place. We've put all our bad eggs in one basket, and then haven't watched that basket.