Higher Law

 I attended a talk the other week about the state judge who was prosecuted—and convicted—last year for allegedly shepherding an immigrant out of the backdoor of her courtroom in order to protect him from ICE arrest. 

This incident always stood out from other times the administration has targeted or prosecuted people for First Amendment–protected activities because in this case, arguably, the judge actually did sort of kind of break the law. 

But if so, what does that tell us? It's not like the federal executive branch has shown any respect for the legal process either. Quite to the contrary. 

The Trump administration has been arresting and deporting people without regard to legality or court rulings. They have abducted people without warrants. They sent people to a torture prison in El Salvador in blatant—and willful—violation of a federal court order. 

One of the masterminds of that scheme to subvert the courts and expel 200 Venezuelan asylum seekers to a concentration camp has now been granted a lifetime appointment to a federal court of appeals, as a reward for his sycophancy and total lack of ethics. 

Until just days ago, the Trump administration was regularly loading people onto planes to be flown to secret detention camps in places like Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, and the Central African Republic, where they have been detained and brutalized indefinitely without charge or trial or any chance to contact their families and attorneys. 

The administration only halted this third-country abduction policy because a federal appeals court ordered them to. And now, they are appealing the ruling to the Supreme Court on an emergency basis, citing what they claim are irreparable harms to their government interests because they had to face the inconvenience of cancelling flights and pulling people off of planes that would have otherwise sent them to forever prisons in Africa. 

As the New York Times summarizes: "In the emergency filing to the justices, Mr. Sauer told the court that the block by the appeals court had led the Department of Homeland Security to cancel a flight to three separate countries carrying 70 immigrants. He asserted that the cancellation had 'required a new round of diplomatic engagement with each of the three countries.'"

Note the tone of sincerely aggrieved self-pity and woundedness here. These are the depths of narcissism this administration plumbs. 

People being shackled in full-body restraints without the use of a toilet for fourteen-hour flights, in order to be delivered up to prison guards in authoritarian states where they will be confined—possibly forever—and beaten and maltreated—have no cognizable legal interests, in this administration's view, that the government need respect. 

But the administration's own mild inconvenience—oh, we had to cancel flights and call up our authoritarian partners in this scheme again—that, in their view, is a real travesty, a real loss of freedom, requiring the emergency intervention of the federal courts to vindicate their interests. 

This is how the world looks to the genuine narcissist. Kidnapping and disappearing and torturing you is my right; whereas your request merely to live in freedom is an intolerable imposition on my convenience. 

So, if this administration is disappearing people without legal process or any respect for human rights—and it is—then can we really fault a state judge or anyone else for not handing people over to the custody of this government, even if refusing to do so means "violating the law"? 

Maybe "it is not the law-breaker we must fear today so much as he who obeys the law," as Dwight Macdonald once wrote. Perhaps, he added, "Only those who are willing to resist authority [...] when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code" are truly innocent in today's world. 

Perhaps the only thing that can save us now, Macdonald went on in the same essay, "is that we Americans have a long and honourable tradition of lawlessness and disrespect for authority." We must strive to keep it up!

May we all find the courage of the state judge who refused to hand men over to an agency that may kidnap and disappear them!

As Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, in her poem "Conscientious Objector": 

Am I a spy in the land of the living,

that I should deliver men to Death?

Brother, the password and the plans of our city

are safe with me; never through me 

Shall you be overcome.