Justice for Hire

 Apparently, in Pam Bondi's incredibly self-degrading career in sycophancy, it's no longer enough merely to grovel on behalf of Donald Trump personally (the "greatest president in American history," Bondi called him—during Trump's notorious visit last week to DOJ headquarters). Now, Bondi also has to toady to Elon Musk, who has become a kind of outward extension of Trump's ego. 

I don't know how else to describe the revolting spectacle this week of Bondi trying to cast a handful of minor property crimes against Tesla facilities as "domestic terrorism." 

Plainly, there is a kind of principle of lèse majesté at work here. Spray-painting most doors in the country would count at most as a state law misdemeanor of vandalism. But if you do so against a door owned by one of our new Trumpist billionaire overlords, then it is suddenly elevated into "terrorism"—and the U.S. attorney general will pursue you to the ends of the Earth with maximum penalties. 

Meanwhile, this administration—so solicitous of the property rights of billionaires (or at least, of MAGA-approved billionaires)—is trampling on the constitutional rights of the poor. In the past week, after all, they deported Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, knowing full well that the Salvadoran regime planned to jail them in a hideous prison upon landing. 

They deported these Venezuelan immigrants to an unknown term of confinement with zero due process. Some of them had not even received removal orders yet from an immigration judge. This violates untold parts of the U.S. Constitution—not least the Fifth Amendment and the Suspension Clause. 

Where was the habeas corpus for these men deported to indefinite imprisonment without charge or indictment or trial or conviction? 

The administration has claimed the authority to do this under an eighteenth century statute—part of the notorious "Alien and Sedition Acts"—which were passed before any modern Bill of Rights case law had developed—and which were seen even in their day as a gross threat to our then-nascent republic. 

The administration claims that these men who were deported were "bad men" and gangsters, who deserve whatever horrors are now being inflicted on them in El Salvador. But I would think that criminal allegations of this sort are for a court to decide, under our system of law. 

And as for their supposed gang ties, the men's lawyers and family members say several of them were targeted for deportation and perhaps permanent incarceration in El Salvador (a country of which they are not even nationals) because they happened to get the wrong tattoo. One of the men's sisters swore in a court filing: her brother had gotten the tattoo because he thought it looked cool. 

So that is this administration's conception of the rule of law and our constitutional order: overwhelming force to protect the property rights of billionaires, on the one hand. And total disregard when it comes to the legal and constitutional rights of the poor—who may be shackled and deported to unimaginable horror and indefinite confinement at any moment, in a country they've never even been to. 

One could not ask for a more stark illustration of a proposal for a two-tier justice system. Bondi's Justice Department sees itself as the hired servants of billionaires like Musk for the sake of better grinding the faces of the poor. 

I quoted recently Edgar Lee Masters's poem "Carl Hamblin," about the concept of a two-tiered system of class justice in America. And I find it applies all too well to Pam Bondi's approach to our legal order and Constitution today. 

Masters—as part of his great poem cycle, The Spoon River Anthology, offering profound social criticism of American life in the early 20th century—had the following to say about an American justice system that had been transformed into a servant of the rich. 

Imagine Elon Musk as the rich industrialist tossing gold coins onto the scales of justice, and you have updated the poem adequately for our time: 

I saw a beautiful woman with bandaged eyes

Standing on the steps of a marble temple. [...]

In her left hand she held a sword.

She was brandishing the sword,

Sometimes striking a child, again a laborer,

Again a slinking woman, again a lunatic.

In her right hand she held a scale;

Into the scale pieces of gold were tossed

By those who dodged the strokes of the sword. [...[

Then a youth wearing a red cap

Leaped to her side and snatched away the bandage.

And lo, the lashes had been eaten away

From the oozy eye-lids;

The eye-balls were seared with a milky mucus;

The madness of a dying soul

Was written on her face

But the multitude saw why she wore the bandage.