“But That Was In Another Country…”

 This is:

1/4. On the White House’s theory, if they abduct you, get you on a helicopter, get to international waters, shoot you in the head, and drop your corpse into the ocean, that is legal, because it is the conduct of foreign affairs.

How El Salvador "disappeared” people. They just sort of voided habeas corpus. And inconvenient stories about prisoners. It was legal because it was the conduct of a military dictatorship.

We are learning from older dictatorships:

2/4. The entire practice of the Holocaust of the Jews involved zones of statelessness. It is easier to move people away from law than it is to remove law from people. Almost all of the killing took place in artificially created stateless zones.

We don’t have to let this happen:

3/4. If we accept the idea that moving a person from one place to another undoes rights and disempowers the judiciary, we are endorsing the basic Nazism practice that enabled the killing of millions.

The Supreme Court has, in fact, specifically rejected that. Which means the courts have rejected it. And arguably, even Pam Bondi understands that:

The president was musing about sending some of the most horrible people in this country down to that mega prison," said Watters, later asking, "Is that legal to do? Is that something you're allowed to do?"

"Well Jesse, these are Americans that he's saying committed the most heinous crimes in our country. Crime is going to decrease dramatically because he has given us a directive to make America safe again. These people need to be locked up as long as they can, as long as the law allows. We're not going to let them go anywhere. If we have to build more prisons in our country, we will do it."

"Right," Watters replied with a chuckle. "That's what I thought."

Even Jesse Waters understands that. I think even Congress understands that. Watters and Bondi think it’s okay to ship off immigrants; but citizens is another matter. (It’s a distinction without a difference when the administration is deporting without due process anyway, but it’s a starting point.)

The fight for Garcia, and the others, goes on. But the fight to make this acceptable, to make it the new normal, is going to be very uphill, indeed. Ideally we’d be arguing the rule of law, but I remember how that worked under the Warren Court. A great deal we take for granted now (Miranda warnings, for one) were wildly controversial (“technicalities” that “let criminals off the hook.” The entire character of “Dirty Harry” was a reaction to Warren Court due process decisions.) for a very long time. The Niemoller argument really doesn’t rally people against inchoate injustice that doesn’t yet touch them. 

Making it very, very clear they are next, is another matter.