The Machine-Wreckers

 Yesterday—for the second time in as many months—Trump proposed sending U.S. citizens to prisons in El Salvador. And, before we all scoff and move on, saying, "well, that would be illegal and unconstitutional"—let me just point out that I would also think the Constitution has something to say about deporting noncitizens to El Salvador without any due process. But Trump did it anyway. 

Just last week, he designated noncitizens as foreign gang members without any way for them to contest this allegation. He deported them to the waiting brutality of El Salvador's most notorious jailers, without even first securing a removal order from an immigration judge. This would seem to violate both the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment and the principle of habeas corpus. But Trump did it anyway. 

And the administration plainly knew there was something constitutionally suspect about what they were doing. This is why they issued a proclamation authorizing these removals in the middle of the night, and tried to spirit people away before the courts and advocates could respond. This didn't work. The court ordered them to stop. But then, they violated these oral instructions by removing people anyway. 

So—let us not be too swift to conclude that Trump would never try his idea of deporting U.S. citizens to El Salvador. The country that has held people for decades in Gitmo and practiced extraordinary rendition to black sites in Third World dictatorships might try such a thing. And with the administration now seemingly ignoring court orders, it's not clear how even the best constitutional arguments would save us. 

And what brought on this latest proposal for another extra-constitutional abuse of power? Trump was responding to a handful of reports of property crimes against Tesla facilities around the country. In recent days, the administration has tried to cast these arson and vandalism incidents as "domestic terrorism." And now, Trump is proposing that the people responsible should be sent to El Salvador's prisons. 

Now, let me be clear: I do not approve of throwing Molotov cocktails at parked Tesla cars—or spray-painting doors. Not only is this a futile and counterproductive form of protest; it's also dangerous. Even if no one has yet been hurt in these attacks—every time you are deliberately setting fire to things, you increase the risk of unintentionally harming someone. So, this is about more than just inanimate cars. 

But still, I would think that we have a host of state and federal laws already on the books that can adequately deter reckless property crimes of this sort—without trying to elevate them absurdly to the level of "terrorism"—or without (even more outrageously) completely shredding the Constitution and the principles of habeas corpus by deporting U.S. citizens to be brutalized in another country. 

Here, I would like to channel the shade of Lord Byron in his maiden speech to the House of Lords (His Lordship was not a very active member of parliament, but he made his rare appearance count, at least on this occasion). Byron used the opportunity to speak out against a proposed bill to impose capital penalties upon people involved in property destruction. (This was in the era of the Luddite machine-wreckers.)

Byron's speech starts by acknowledging that no one should go around sabotaging stocking-frames—not even as a form of protest. But then, he suggests—with delicate irony—it should perhaps be conceded that the policies of the government and the parlous economic conditions of the time had played some role in prompting a normally quiescent populace to feel the need to resort to such unprecedented measures. 

He then argues that there are perhaps more than enough capital punishments on the law books already, and that there is no reason to add to them. The statutes already provide the government with means of deterring property crimes. And, if the goal is to prevent destruction of stocking-frames in future, perhaps a policy of addressing some of the protesters' grievances might go further than more threats of death. 

He concludes that the legislature—which had recklessly and precipitously taken up consideration of this new bill to impose death on English subjects for wrecking inanimate machines—ought in this circumstance to do what it did so very well on most other occasions (whenever programs for poor relief, for instance, were being considered): namely, to "temporize." I.e., to dawdle and procrastinate. 

In perhaps his most indelible line of the speech, Byron suggests—with deliberate understatement and parenthetically—as if the thought had only just occurred to him incidentally and by-the-by—the most perverse of all features of the proposed capital legislation: namely, that it was—if criminal law is meant to be proportionate—thereby setting the worth of a human life at less than that of a mechanical device.

Say what one will of Byron. His personal character has certainly been vilified on a host of grounds over the last two centuries. The fact remains that he had excellent politics; politics that have scarcely been improved on in two hundred years. Every chance he got, in his era, he took the part of the underdog. And, in his brave and idiosyncratic defense of the machine-wreckers, we see His Lordship at his finest. 

May we do justice to the memory of the poet-hero today. Because Trump's proposal to ship people to El Salvador for daring to raise a hand against the inanimate property of his billionaire crony, Elon Musk, is plainly setting the value of a human life at less than that of a Tesla car. And however much one disproves—like Byron—of willful property destruction, one cannot possibly see this as the correct proportion.

A human life is worth more than a stocking frame, or a Tesla car. Even if sabotaging either is a futile and unhelpful and even reckless form of protest—it shouldn't cost anyone their life. There are other means already on the books for deterring such offenses. Let us conclude with Byron's words on the subject: 

"Setting aside the palpable injustice and the certain inefficiency of the bill, are there not capital punishments sufficient on your statutes? Is there not blood enough upon your penal code! that more must be poured forth to ascend to heaven and testify against you? How will you carry this bill into effect? Can you commit a whole county to their own prisons?" 

Or—to someone else's prisons, for that matter?