The Day the Government Stops Explaining Itself
I spent twenty years as a criminal law paralegal. What this administration is doing to habeas corpus should make every single one of you fucking furious.
If the government ever asks for the power to detain people without explanation, assume it plans to use it on someone you didn’t expect, and eventually, someone you are.
Stephen Miller walked out the front door of the White House and told the cameras the administration was actively looking at suspending habeas corpus.
Just said it. Out loud. Into microphones. In public.
Trump had already floated it days earlier, pointing to Lincoln and Roosevelt like a man who has definitely never read a single word about Lincoln or Roosevelt. Then Kristi Noem sat in front of Congress and explained that habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has the authority to remove.
She was wrong. Not complicated wrong. Not wrong-on-one-interpretation wrong. Just wrong. Embarrassingly, publicly, someone-please-take-the-microphone wrong.
They kept going anyway.
I spent twenty years as a paralegal in criminal law litigation. I have sat in courtrooms and watched habeas corpus be the last thing standing between a human being and a cell they had no goddamn business being in. I know what a bond hearing looks like. I know what it takes to get one. I know what happens to a person while they’re waiting. I know what it looks like when that process gets honored and I know what it looks like when it gets deliberately fucked with.
These shit weasels are fucking with it. Deliberately. And they know exactly what they’re doing.
Habeas corpus is not a technicality. It is not a loophole. It is not some procedural nicety that defense attorneys exploit to spring guilty people while prosecutors tear their hair out. It is the requirement that if the government locks you in a cell, it has to explain why to a court, right now, today, and that court has to agree the explanation holds.
Eight hundred years. That’s how long this protection has existed. The Founders didn’t invent it. They inherited it, recognized it as the thing that separates a country from a dungeon with a flag, and built it into the Constitution because they had watched kings disappear people and they were not fucking doing that again.
And now we have Stephen Miller.
Reuters reported this week that the push is ongoing. The justification is invasion. That word is load-bearing in their argument because the Suspension Clause allows habeas corpus to be suspended during rebellion or invasion. So if you can call the border an invasion, and if you can find a court drunk enough to agree, suddenly the executive branch has a lever it was never supposed to touch.
Courts become optional. Hearings become optional. Explanations become optional. The government locks you up and doesn’t have to tell a single soul why, for how long, or under what authority.
That is not border enforcement. That is not keeping America safe. That is a detention state with the serial numbers filed off, and they are building it while people applaud.
If you’re not subscribed yet, you’re reading this the hard way. I do this daily. No sponsors. No filter.
Subscribe if you want it in your feed instead of chasing it down.
The Suspension Clause is in Article I of the Constitution. Article I is Congress. Not the president. Not the executive branch. Not Stephen Miller, who has a law degree he has apparently been using as a coaster.
Congress.
Antonin Scalia said so. Amy Coney Barrett said so before she was confirmed. Federal judges appointed by both parties across the entire country have said so, over and over, in case after case after case. This is not unsettled law. This is not a space where serious legal minds line up on both sides. The argument is wrong, and it falls apart the second it touches the actual text of the document.
Which is exactly why they stopped trying to win the argument and started trying to make it irrelevant.
Bond hearings vanish. Entire categories of detainees get labeled mandatory detention so the question of a hearing never comes up in the first place. The Alien Enemies Act gets hauled out and used to move people across borders before a judge can issue a stay. Thirty thousand lawsuits filed. People fighting not to win, not to walk out free, just to get in front of a court at all. Just to have someone with actual authority look at what is being done to them and say whether it is legal.
The courts keep blocking it. Case after case, the answer is no. And the administration keeps going, because they were never trying to win in court.
They are trying to outlast it.
Move fast enough, jam enough gears, overwhelm enough dockets, and eventually the machinery breaks down, and you point at the wreckage and tell everyone the system is still technically functioning. I watched litigation for twenty years. I know exactly what it looks like when someone is fighting through a process versus deliberately destroying it from the inside.
This is destruction. Calculated, intentional, and funded by your tax dollars.
Now let’s talk about the people cheering.
Because there are a lot of them, and I have things to say.
A significant portion of this country has looked at all of this and decided it is fine. Good, even. Because the people losing their rights are immigrants. Criminals. Bad people. People who shouldn’t be here. People who don’t deserve the same protections as real Americans, a category that somehow always seems to include whoever is doing the talking and excludes whoever they’re talking about.
Here is what those people have not figured out yet.
The mechanism does not give a shit about your approved target list.
Once the executive branch establishes that it can detain a category of human beings without judicial review, that power does not stay pointed at the original target. It never has. Not once. Not anywhere. Not in any country in the history of governments deciding they no longer need to explain themselves to courts.
Any group can be an invasion. Any movement can be a rebellion. Protesters have already been called terrorists. Journalists have already been called enemies of the people. Opposition politicians have already been investigated, prosecuted, and threatened. And we are nowhere near the point where the courts have been fully neutralized yet.
You think you are cheering for the removal of rights from people who don’t deserve them.
You are cheering for the removal of the thing that decides who deserves them in the first place.
You stupid, shortsighted, self-defeating bastards.
It is going to come for you. Maybe not today. Maybe not this administration. But you have handed whoever sits in that office next, and the one after that, a template. Not a precedent. A fucking template. For declaring whatever emergency they need to declare, labeling whatever group they need to label, and locking up whoever they need gone without explaining themselves to a single judge.
And when that morning comes, and it will come, you are going to want habeas corpus very badly.
It may not be there anymore.
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and still went to Congress. Roosevelt used emergency detention powers after Pearl Harbor during an actual declared war against an enemy that had just bombed an American military installation. Those men understood they were doing something extraordinary that required justification and oversight.
This administration is trying to turn a policy dispute about immigration into a permanent emergency because permanent emergencies don’t require the same explanations that governance does. There is no declared war. There is no rebellion. There is a political problem they want to solve without the inconvenience of courts, hearings, judges, or the Constitution getting in the way.
The courts are still holding. Barely, in some places, but holding. The argument hasn’t succeeded yet. But it keeps coming back. Louder each time. And thirty thousand cases are grinding their way toward a Supreme Court that has already told you where it stands on executive power.
So here it is, stripped to the bone.
If the government decides tomorrow that you are a threat, do they still have to tell you why?
Right now, yes. And the people running this country are spending every single day trying to change that answer. Not someday. Now. Through cases you’ve never heard of, involving people whose names you’ll never know, sitting in facilities you cannot visit, waiting for hearings that keep getting pushed.
You cheered for this.
You might want to think about that while the lock is still on the door.
TRUTH BOMB
The moment a government no longer has to justify locking you up is the moment freedom becomes something they let you have, not something you’re guaranteed. And the people cheering that moment on are the last ones who ever see it coming.
Upgrade
I’m retired. This is reader-funded. No sponsors. No corporate leash. No one telling me to tone it down.
Paid subscribers get bonus rants, full archive access, priority Q&A, and deeper dives that don’t make it into the free feed.
Upgrade and support independent work that doesn’t play nice.
If you want the same reality with a quieter voice and sharper claws, go check out Lotus Purrspective.
That’s where the judgment is calmer, cleaner, and somehow even more brutal.
Buy Me A Coffee
If this hit, consider supporting the work—because yelling “what the fuck are we doing?” at the news doesn’t pay for itself.
#HabeasCorpus #SupremeCourt #CivilLiberties #ExecutivePower #Constitution #ImmigrationPolicy #RuleOfLaw #SeparationOfPowers #Democracy #DueProcess