You asked for it, America
President-elect Donald Trump signaled in a Truth Social post on Monday that he means to declare a national emergency as a component of his plans for mass deportations (CNN):
CNN reported over the weekend that Trump’s team is evaluating a national emergency declaration to unlock Pentagon resources and tailoring that declaration to pave the way for expanding detention space.
In his first term, Trump declared a national emergency on the border with Mexico to circumvent Congress and use Pentagon funds for his border wall—a move that was faced with numerous lawsuits.
The incoming administration’s sweeping immigration plans are beginning to come into focus, sources previously told CNN, including implementing strict border measures, striking down Biden-era policies and kicking off the detention and deportation of migrants at large scale.
People close to the president-elect and his aides are laying the groundwork for expanding detention facilities to fulfill his mass deportation campaign promise, including reviewing metropolitan areas where capabilities exist.
But they are also preparing executive actions that are a call back to his first term in office and could be rolled out as soon as Trump takes office, the sources said.
I remember when the right-wing panic of the day was mythical Obama FEMA camps. Digby reminded readers last February that the huge conspiracy theory died off as soon as Trump took office (like the stolen-election conspiracy this year). Also, detaining vast numbers of “undocumented Central American residents and 4000 American citizens whom the US Attorney General had designated as ‘national security threats’” was originally a Reagan-administration idea:
It’s a Republican thing.
Trump’s top henchman Steven Miller has been floating the idea of “deportation camps” and one of Trump’s big plans is to do sweeps in American cities and put the homeless into camps as well.
Camps are on the GOP agenda.
The camps idea gets Discount Goebbels hot and bothered. But that’s not all, reports The New York Times:
[Trump’s] team plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship.
David Badash, founder and editor of The New Civil Rights Movement, writes:
Constitutional law professor and political scientist Anthony Michael Kreis last week said, “Birthright citizenship is a foundational concept in American constitutional law. It is a betrayal of the 14th Amendment to suggest otherwise or that it can be discarded with ease. We settled any doubt about this in Wong Kim Ark in 1898. We should not budge one solitary inch.”
But Trump himself has declared, “going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.”
That would, as Professor Kreis notes, directly contradicts the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which also bans Americans who “have engaged in insurrection” from holding office.
If Trump is allowed to revoke the citizenship of some people born in the United States, what’s to stop him from expanding dispossession to anyone he deems insufficiently servile, including Black Americans for whom the post-Civil War amendment was principally written? What other amendments or clauses might Trump dismiss with a wave of his stubby fingers?
Defiance of the 14th Amendment regarding U.S.-born citizens sets up a showdown (or not) between the U.S. Supreme Court and Dear Leader. We’ve already established that if a Republican Senate confirms Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK Jr. to Cabinet positions, an utterly cowed GOP caucus will do anything their liege lord asks. (Trump made new health czar RFK Jr. eat McDonald’s, observes late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. “That’s what he does, these are subservience tests.”) Trump’s open defiance of the Constitution would leave the Court with an unsolvable problem once His Lordship’s actions are challenged in court.
JV Last writes:
They have immunized a man whose administration is openly toying with the idea of defying their authority.
Let’s think through this dynamic together.
If Trump were to pursue a case all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Court were to rule against him, and Trump were to decide not to abide by that ruling . . .
What happens next?
Sorry, wait: What happens next if the attorney general, the head of the FBI, the secretary of defense, and the Joint Chiefs and their general staffs are all personally loyal to Trump and Trump has both (a) blanket criminal liability for himself and (b) the power to pardon anyone who commits a crime he orders?
There’s your worst-case scenario.
So here’s the logic chain:
- SCOTUS must understand that it has put itself in this box.
- It also must understand that if it ruled against Trump on a matter of sufficient importance, then Trump might be inclined to defy its ruling.
- And if the president exhibited such defiance, then the high court’s position in American politics would be utterly, irrevocably exposed.
- Ergo, the chief justice would not—under any circumstances—allow the Court to rule against Trump if he believed that Trump might attempt to defy the ruling.
And that, my friends, is the sum of all fears. A system of government so fully perverted that it is not possible to chart a path back to liberalism and the rule of law.
Is this scenario likely? No.
Is it possible? Let’s call it 1-in-100 odds.
Then again, what were the odds you’d see a losing presidential candidate attempt to overthrow the election? What were the odds you’d witness a violent mob storm and sack the U.S. Capitol after battling police for hours while said loser watched on TV and did nothing? For that matter, what were the odds that a sitting president would threaten this little blog?
“If we assumed—just for the sake of argument—that Trump was trying to bring about this worst-case scenario . . . what would he be doing differently?” asks Last. “Nothing.”
Which is to say: Trump’s actions to date are entirely consistent with a man looking to remake our system of government. If he was intent on the worst-case scenario, there is nothing he’d be doing differently.
Should Trump attempt to revoke birthright citizenship, he will set up the nine SCOTUS justices to somehow accede his demand or else become legal eunuchs.
I’ve watched too many unimaginable scenarios play out in my life not to worry.