By hook or by crooks
by Tom Sullivan
Even if Democrats occasionally win national elections, short of dramatic reform Republicans will continue to rule the country going forward helped along by efforts to rig the system to support minority rule both in the courts and via vote suppression. University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq told a panel of the American Constitution Society’s national convention in June defense of property rights over other rights is baked into the design of the Constitution. The left should be wary of believing the courts will protect them. Barring court reform, democracy itself is at risk.
“We don’t really know how committed the Republican Party is to the project of democracy,” Huq said. [timestamp 1:44:10]
Oh, I think we do, writes Aaron Belkin, professor of political science at San Francisco State University. He lays out a case with which regular readers of this space are familiar. Even if Democrats occasionally win national elections, short of dramatic reform Republicans will continue to rule the country going forward helped along by efforts to rig the system to support minority rule both in the courts and via vote suppression. The acting president is merely a symptom of that, not the cause. Defense of property rights over other rights is baked into the design of the Constitution, Huq suggests. The left should be wary of believing the courts will protect them.
But it is not necessary to rehash past anti-democratic maneuvers by the GOP. Every day brings a new one supporting that thesis:
When members of Congress reached a bipartisan deal to end the government shutdown in February, they gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement a simple instruction: Stop detaining so many people. Instead, ICE pushed its detention population to an all-time high of 54,000 people, up from about 34,000 on an average day in 2016 and well above the 40,520 target Congress set for ICE.
Now, just after Congress rejected another request for more detention money, ICE is continuing to spend money it hasn’t been given. Mother Jones has learned that ICE has started using three new for-profit immigration detention centers in the Deep South in recent weeks. One of them has seen the death of three inmates following poor medical treatment and a violent riot in 2012 that left a guard dead.
They don’t need no stinking badges … or congressional permission to do so.
The Trump administration continues to dodge the ruling of the Supreme Court on the adding a citizenship question to 2020 census questionnaires. They seem very determined:
A federal judge in New York on Tuesday denied a bid from the Justice Department to replace the team of lawyers on the case about the census citizenship question, writing that its request to do so was “patently deficient.”
The department had earlier this week announced its intention to swap out the legal team on the case, without saying exactly why.
They don’t need no stinking reasons either.
The administration hopes to swap out attorneys versed in administrative procedure with a “a truly random assortment” drawn from the Department of Justice’s consumer protection, civil fraud, and office of immigration litigation divisions, Justin Levitt told the Washington Post. Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Law School, was a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has never seen the department attempt to swap out a team in the middle of a case.
“It’s a hodgepodge of people whose roles have absolutely nothing do to with the conduct of the census or with proper administrative procedure,” Levitt said. “That should give everybody pause about what’s coming next.”