The function of criticism at the present time

What sort of people are we dealing with? A couple of stories from an immigration lawyer friend about what the Trumpists have done to the DOJ:

Neither of these involve me, but I wanted to pass them along.

First, female immigration lawyer who is 8 months pregnant and lives in Baton Rouge. She has a client scheduled for an in-person merits hearing at the Dallas TX immigration court. 4 weeks out from the scheduled date, she filed a motion to appear virtually as she cannot travel at this stage of pregnancy. Motion denied, good cause not shown. Did not move to continue the case, just to appear virtually. She now has to fly to Dallas to appear tomorrow at the hearing or her client will be ordered removed.

Second, attorney files emergency motion to continue a non-merits hearing because his father died the day prior. Motion denied, good cause not shown.

We (Am Imm Law Assoc) are organizing a media blitz to let people know about these cases and the utter lack of humanity, empathy, compassion … decency. There is not another court in the country that would deny these motions. But immigration courts are part of DOJ, not independent Article III courts so this comes directly from the Trump administration. Purposely making things harder for practitioners just because.

Just more space on the gallows if we ever get Nuremburg-style trials of these people.

That last sentence will still cause much pearl-clutching among members of the Merrick Garland Appreciation Society (Hundreds of convictions! A criminal investigation of a sitting president was in full swing!), but I believe it should be taken both literally and seriously, just like we should take Donald Trump’s all but completely explicit threats to never leave office as long as he’s still breathing.

Denverite, LGM commenter, distinguished member of the bar, and graduate of the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle Law School (nttawwt) has a question:

Paul, it’s totally understandable that your views have taken a darker turn in this direction (it would be surprising if they haven’t), but at some point you need to spell out the “and then we need to do.” OK, the American liberal democracy is failing. OK, traditional means of removing an American government are no longer feasible (or at least not reliably so). OK. So what do you think we should do about it? Are we in cock-a-roach territory? Do we need to be sharpening machetes? . . .

I’m serious. If we’re in the revolutionary paradigm, what does that mean going forward? We’ve seen civil wars in western countries in the past century (in addition to the Balkans, the Northern Ireland Troubles probably fit the bill). If that’s what Paul thinks will be necessary, he should say so.

It’s a fair question, which I’m going to respond to with a point that may seem like pedantic quibbling, but isn’t.

The revolutionaries here are the Trumpists.

Trump and his cult are at this moment using state violence to attempt an overthrow of the American legal-political system. This internal coup has been going on since at least November of 2020: an LGM commenter whose nym escapes me at the moment made the excellent point yesterday that people focus far too exclusively on 1/6/2021 and not nearly enough on everything that Trump and his traitorous band did in the two months leading up to that day.

Resistance in this context is resistance to a violent illegal coup attempt. A violent illegal coup attempt is what the second Trump administration is, even though this violent illegal coup attempt was made possible by a putatively legal election. (In fact the re-election of Trump wasn’t legal, because seditionists aren’t constitutionally eligible to hold any federal office at all, let alone the presidency, absent an enabling act (dyswidt?) of our increasingly useless and supine legislature).

What are the appropriate steps to take when one is living in the midst of an ongoing coup attempt? This may sound like what they used to call back in the day a cop-out, and it may well be one, but practical political tactics and strategy are not my strengths, and I’m not going to pretend they are. I’m well aware it’s useless for fans to tell the coaches to call the touchdown play so I’m not going to do that. I’m serious: there are literally hundreds of people on this blog who are far more capable of figuring out what practical tactics and strategies make the most sense when living in the middle of an ongoing coup attempt than I am.

What I’m good at, if I’m good at anything, is pointing out that we are in fact living through an ongoing coup attempt, right here right now, and that this still almost completely repressed fact about the present situation does have implications for practical political tactics and strategies. This has some tiny marginal value in the present situation, I believe, given that the first step toward doing something about any situation is recognizing that this is in fact the situation, which again is something that we continue to live in almost complete denial about, because so much of the opposition party remains in the Merrick Garland fan club, where bipartisanship is still a worship word, and the House minority leader having a secret meeting with a nepo failson bought and paid for agent of the Saudi government seems like a fine idea, at least until said nepo etc. decides to leak this information, because (surprise!) he, too, is part of the ongoing coup attempt.

One final note for the moment: I want to emphasize again that the acid test for my little theory — that we are in fact living through a revolutionary moment, because the revolutionaries are trying to illegally overthrow the government sub silentio as lawyers like to say — will be whether Trump attempts to remain in office by any and all means necessary, either by staying in office beyond January 2029, or via what will be all too obviously a hand-picked puppet successor, as opposed to the winner of a genuine party primary. One thing I think it’s important to avoid in this context is an emerging underpants gnomes/green lantern response to this test, which is the claim that Trump won’t be alive or sufficiently functional to pull this off. That of course is possible, but it’s highly unlikely. Note that “this” is about. eighteen months away at most, as that will be the latest moment in the election cycle when it will be undeniable that what’s happening is happening, if indeed it happens.

No one has a more prayerful attitude toward the eventual arrival of Trümpentod than I do, but banking on a deus ex machina is always a bad betting strategy and I don’t recommend it.