This is the reason I don’t wake up every morning hoping that Trump died peacefully in his sleep last night the way I did in the first term. I certainly didn’t love Mike Pence. But he wasn’t a total psychopath.Rolling Stone’s Nikki McCann Ramirez at Rolling Stone reports:
In a lengthy X post published on Tuesday, JD Vance wrote: “To say the administration must observe ‘due process’ is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors. To put it in concrete terms, imposing the death penalty on an American citizen requires more legal process than deporting an illegal alien to their country of origin.”
It’s a nonsensical interpretation of due process rights. At their core, rights are not supposed to be negotiable based on how much resources the government has, or the amount of people they’re looking to deport. The Constitution includes legal protections to ensure the system is as fair and unbiased as possible. Is this always the case? No. Does the executive get to do away with these protections because they run counter to his political platform? Usually only in crumbling fascist regimes.
“Here’s a useful test: ask the people weeping over the lack of due process what precisely they propose for dealing with Biden’s millions and millions of illegals. And with reasonable resource and administrative judge constraints, does their solution allow us to deport at least a few million people per year?” Vance added. “If the answer is no, they’ve given their game away. They don’t want border security.”
He’s a sick piece of work. This country is totally capable of dealing with immigration in a humane fashion. It is also not an emergency, they have made that up out of whole cloth. Arresting students and detaining them in prisons far from where they lived for their political views, turning border crossings into dystopian hellscapes for travellers, deporting people without notice and putting them into foreign gulags is completely beyond all imagining in the past. Now they are talking about doing this to American citizens.
And then there’s this:
Vance is not the only White House official defending the administration’s attempts to skirt the rule of law. During a Fox News interview on Tuesday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller argued that Kilamar Abrego Garcia — a migrant living in Maryland who the Trump administration admitted was sent to a gulag in El Salvador due to an “administrative error” — was not entitled to due process.
“He’s an illegal alien from El Salvador with a deportation order from the United States. He is not legally even allowed to be in our country,” Miller said. “Under due process that these Democrats so venerate for illegal invaders, it is legally impermissible for him to have one more minute in this country. So we honored the law and obeyed the law by getting him out of the country.”
He’s lying, of course, He was here legally through a judicial order that gave him protection and they snatched him up and threw him in a Salvadoran gulag without even getting a hearing. It’s pure fascism.
Ramirez concludes:
It’s never been about securing the border, as Vance claims, it’s about a consolidation of authority in the presidency that would allow the executive to abuse the powers of his office with impunity. Undocumented migrants, legal immigrants, and green card holders have already been used as test subjects. There’s no telling what comes next.
Oh I think we can see where this is going. His attacks on higher education, science, expertise of all kinds shows that he is already using the power of the federal government to intimidate and deconstruct all liberal institutions all across society. His order to go after Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, who he believes betrayed him in the last election was the first shot at explicit political vendettas being carried out by the Department of Justice. His enthusiastic hatchet woman Pam Bondi is happy to oblige.
If Trump does shuffle off his mortal coil and Vance takes the reins I think it’s possible he might even be worse. There’s something purely evil in him.
