IOKIYAR
Time from this morning:
The U.S. is showing signs of undergoing a “rapid authoritarian shift” as civic freedoms in the country decline following President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, a group that tracks the status of such liberties and the threats they face around the world is warning.
CIVICUS, an international network of civil society groups that advocates for stronger civil liberties, downgraded its assessment of U.S. civic freedoms from “narrowed” to “obstructed” in a new report on Tuesday, months after it added the country to a global human rights watchlist earlier this year.
“Long-established democracies are showing signs of rapid authoritarian shift, marked by weakened rule of law and growing constraints on independent civil society. Argentina and the USA exemplified this trend,” the report said.
Perhaps you noticed. Trump is weaponizing the rule of law against his enemies. Following the law and respecting civil liberties is now optional for those assigned to protect and defend yours.
“Somewhere along the line, [Democrats] decided that resisting Trump meant resisting the rule of law,” Laura Ingraham alleged on her Monday show. To illustrate, she played clip of people protesting an ICE raid in Tucson. Specifically, Rep. Adelita Grijalva. The freshman from Arizona, Ingraham claimed, was “brazenly” obstructing the agents. The rest was a predictable Great Replacement Theory rant about a Democrat plot to flood the country with noncitizen Democratic voters (or something).
I spotted several social media posts which featured Grijalva “breaking the law” for which she was noticeably not arrested (although she did catch some second-hand pepper spray). In the clip, Grijalva noticeably neither blocked, brushed, hit or attacked any federal officer. She just protested their presence and, presumably, ICE deporting peaceful undocumented residents without repecting their due process rights. I’ll have more to say on that another time.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration carries out extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean in violation of the rule of law, domestic and international. Here’s where this gets extra interesting for Pete Hegseth. The Society for the Rule of Law reports on a column in The Hill by Chris Traux, one of its members:
Truax establishes the legal distinction that prevents Hegseth’s actions from enjoying pardon protection. Although the President may pardon someone for offenses against the United States, “The War Crimes Act that authorizes the Department of Justice to prosecute war crimes using international law defines them as, among other things, a ‘grave breach of the Geneva Convention’ and violations of Articles 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the 1907 Hague Convention.” Since war crimes violate international law, and since those crimes can still be prosecuted by the U.S. government, Hegseth’s actions remove him from the protection that a presidential pardon could give. “While Hegseth could be pardoned for committing murder in violation of federal law, he cannot be pardoned for committing a war crime, any more than an American president could have pardoned the Nuremberg defendants.”
Truax emphasizes the unique breadth of war crimes law and the range of penalties that can be applied. These consequences extend beyond the ability of any single president to mitigate, and raise serious legal and ethical questions for not only the Secretary of Defense, but for any armed service-members involved. “If you commit an act that violates the laws of war — especially one that results in an intentional killing — sooner or later, you can be held accountable, and the president cannot save you.”
Fingers crossed. As for holding Kristi Noem’s stormtroopers accountable for flagrantly (if not gleefully) violating residents’ civil liberties, that’s TBD.
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