If you missed my column on Monday, I mentioned that I’d be posting parts of a debate I’ve been having with a good old friend of mine who is a committed lefty. I value his friendship – and that of a handful of other long-time leftist friends – in part because knowing him reminds me that everybody on the other side isn’t like the morally bankrupt dullards who make up the elite left, and run the national Democrat party!
There are good Democrats out there, and we shouldn’t be enemies, or let our differences end friendships. (Unless they make that choice by demanding our agreement with, or submission to, their ideas.) Their arguments can clarify issues, sharpen our thinking, and sometimes change our minds.
And while life is too short to get upset over politics, a spirited debate with a good-faith interlocutor who is open to reasonable argument is one of the pleasures of a well-rounded life. So I thought I’d post some excerpts in the hopes that at least some in CO nation will find this discussion interesting.
I’ve done some editing to remove some personal information and summarize some context, and my friend’s framing of the issues. (So this won’t really be a debate, as much as my half of it, responding to the topics he raises.)
This discussion started with him advancing the idea that Trump has repeatedly acted lawlessly, citing the many court cases against him in 2023-24, his conviction on so many counts in the Stormy Daniels case, and especially his defiance of SCOTUS and resistance to giving due process to many deportees, and especially Kilmar Garcia. And he ended his email to me with a rhetorical challenge as to whether I think everyone should follow “the rule of law.”
I discussed the many flaws in the lawfare cases against Trump, but I agreed with him that Trump would have been better served just bringing Kilmar back – but only to a detention center, where he would get a quickie hearing confirming the original two judges’ decision that he was here illegally, and associated with MS-13. Then he could be immediately re-deported, but just not to the CECOT prison.
What follows are my thoughts on the “rule of law” as national Democrats are using it, and then on the way Biden and Obama adhered (or didn’t) to the rule of law:
“Moving on to something that I think we might only mostly agree on, but you can tell me: yes, we should abide by the rule of law. But as a blanket statement, that hides several types of complications that I’m sure neither one of us would agree to. To take the most glaring type of examples: If you and I were alive in 1858, the law of the land included the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) and the Dred Scott decision (1857), which meant that blacks could never be citizens, and if an escaped slave made it to your farmhouse, you’d be required to hold him at gunpoint and give him back to his master. A century later, we’d both have to accept segregated schools, because “separate but equal” was the law of the land until Brown v Board of Education changed it. And Lincoln famously suspended one of the central legal concepts in our system, habeas corpus (for years, and in contravention of multiple specific rulings from the Taney SCOTUS that he had no authority to do so), when the alternative was to make it harder to fight the South.
So neither of us would accept “submit to the rule of law” as a universal statement. I’m obviously not comparing any action of Trump or any of our courts now to Dred or Brown. I’m just pointing out that the rhetorical question, “do you believe in rule of law or not?” creates a false binary that you would not accept 100% any more than I would.
But let me get to a relevant, real-world application of the rule of law idea. Over 100 legal cases have been filed, and district court judges’ TRO’s have been put on practically every action Trump has taken (from hiring and firing in the executive branch, to enforcing our immigration laws, to stopping Harvard from allowing bullies to violate our civil rights laws in their attacks on Jews, to stopping biological males from going into women’s sports, showers and bathrooms) which is unprecedented.
By comparison, I think I remember that the first TRO ever filed by a district court judge in US history was in the mid-1960s, and the total injunctions against all presidents before this year is around 100. (As I understand it, before then, nobody ever thought that a local judge – one of 677 nationwide – had the authority to dictate legal and political action in the entire country. I’m not sure how or why that understanding, which seems like commonsense to me, has morphed into our current situation, in which we now have 677 unelected, de facto shadow presidents who can dictate nationwide policy and paralyze the executive branch, potentially for months or years on end.) In other words, more have been filed in Trump’s first 90 days than were filed in all of prior US history.
The right-wing commentariat sees that as proof that the left is engaging in a defiant, lawless wave of “lawfare” and an assault on democracy, since it is meant to deny a legitimately elected president whom they hate the ability to carry out the constitutionally prescribed duties of the chief executive.
The left-wing commentariat sees that as proof of Trump’s lawlessness. “Look at all of that smoke – there has to be a fire there! These judges are only taking their constitutionally sanctioned jobs seriously, and checking an executive whom they believe is ignoring the rule of law.” In fact, most of the legacy media lefties are treating the amount of judges ruling (temporarily) against Trump as prima facie evidence that he’s in the wrong.
I think that’s a fair summary of the two sides’ positions, and there are two ways to decide who is closer to right. The one that we should all do as citizens is to look at the cases and the arguments, and use our God-given reason to evaluate the evidence to come to a conclusion. (I expect that you and I will do a lot of this in the coming weeks or months, and I look forward to it!)
But the one way that matters most in the real world is obviously what happens when all of these cases are settled, either at the appellate level or the SCOTUS level. If the lawyers you cited a couple months ago are right, and Trump loses the vast majority of these cases on appeal or at SCOTUS, and he then defies those rulings, you’ll be able to say that he’s violating the rule of law, possibly even as much as Biden did. (More on that below.)
If, on the other hand, I’m right, and Trump wins the majority of these cases – either because an appellate court found for him and SCOTUS didn’t take it up on appeal, or because lower courts found against him and SCOTUS reversed them – will you then agree that “the rule of law” dictates that you and all of the progressives in the nation cannot legally prevent Trump from carrying out Obama-style deportations, streamlining executive agencies, protecting women from biological males in sports and bathrooms, forcing the Ivy League to either comply with federal civil rights laws or lose federal funds, etc.?
I’m going to guess that’s a hard NO! 😊 If so, will you then be a proud conscientious objector to “the rule of law?” And if that’s the case, are you sure that you’re as devoted to the rule of law as you’ve thought you were? I’m not trying to irritate you, but I think that’s worth contemplating.
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Finally, I share some of your concerns about the role of SCOTUS, but I’d like to save that for my next email. Instead, I’d like to end with 4 examples (not counting Biden’s systematic breaking of our immigration laws) of issues on which Biden and the Dems have openly violated and flouted SCOTUS rulings, and see how many of them you agree with me on. I’m not bringing them up to make a tu quoque argument, but to explore your ideas about rule of law.
The four issues are: illegal student loan “forgiveness,” forced covid vaccine use, illegal eviction moratoria, and sanctuary city/state violations of the supremacy clause. I’ve summarized them, but if you already know them well, you can just skim to the bottom.
1. The student loan “forgiveness” program. This was obviously popular with a couple of groups who are (unexpectedly!) a big part of the Democrat support base: students who had school loans, and universities who would profit greatly from more students attending in the belief they would be able to stick the taxpayers with the bill.
If Biden wanted to do this legitimately, he could have tried to get a bill passed through congress and then sign it. But he knew that he couldn’t do that, because the majority of Americans hated the idea. (That pesky democracy again!) So he acted unilaterally, and simply declared that many billions of dollars of school debt was no longer the responsibility of those who had borrowed it and benefited from it, but of the taxpayers. He first attempted to do it in August of 2022, and even NPR admitted that “its warm reception by younger voters may have contributed to Democrats’ better than expected showing in the midterms.”
Of course Biden didn’t care that this cynical, illegal vote-buying scheme was clearly unconstitutional – it helped him stop a GOP “red wave.” And by the time SCOTUS shot it down (duh!) in June of 2023, he’d unethically gotten the result he wanted. But Biden still didn’t abide by the rule of law; instead, he pushed the work-around SAVE act, which tried to do the same thing, except by instituting an income-based repayment plan, with a shortened time until the remaining balance would be forgiven. (The result was the same: billions of debt transferred from those who owed it to those who didn’t!)
By August of 2024, that plan too had been stopped by appellate courts, and SCOTUS finally killed it on the same grounds as before: a president isn’t a king who can unilaterally stick a bunch of poor and working-class people with the debts voluntarily taken out by generally richer college graduates.
And rather than accepting that the courts had gone against him, Biden demonized the GOP and the courts, accusing them of “literally snatching from the hands of millions of Americans thousands of dollars of student debt relief that was about to change their lives. These Republican officials just couldn’t bear the thought of providing relief for working class and middle class Americans.”
Ugh! You can’t get more dishonest than telling people that the GOP wouldn’t let him “forgive their student debt,” when he knew damn well that he couldn’t legally do that. If that wasn’t bad enough, he then bragged about defying the rule of law: “The Supreme Court blocked us. But that didn’t stop us. We continued to find ways to reduce student payments.”
2. Biden and the Dems did the same thing with the covid vaccine mandates. In 2022 – over a year after we knew for certain that the vax did not prevent you from getting it or spreading it, and after a lot of evidence of the danger of sometimes deadly and often lifetime-injury-causing heart damage (myocarditis and pericarditis) in young people, especially males – Biden rammed through a requirement forcing federal employees to take the experimental shot or lose their jobs. (No more spouting off about “my body, my choice!”) He also tried to force large private employers to coerce their employees to take the shot. Even as he was doing that, he admitted that SCOTUS might say that it was unconstitutional…but he did it anyway. Eventually SCOTUS slapped down those policies, but not until millions of healthy people had been strong-armed into submitting.
3. When he first came into office, Biden pushed a moratorium on tenants having to pay rent for a few months, and then he extended it for 3 more months. At least he tried to use congress to pay for this, though he only secured $25 billion in aid, which was already $80 billion short of what was needed to cover the rent that tenants had stopped paying by late spring. A responsible pol would have either gone back for more cash, or else told the public the free rent had to stop. Instead, Biden extended his federal eviction moratorium that Congress had NOT authorized (and which was clearly unconstitutional on its face) and that he knew wouldn’t be paid for, forcing landlords to allow their tenants to squat in their properties for the foreseeable future.
As you can imagine, that was personal for me, since it threatened to bankrupt me. I know some lefties loved the idea of poorer tenants getting to stick it to “rich” landlords, except that many small landlords like me rely on rents being paid to survive. (Not to mention the fact that stealing is wrong, even if you empathize with the thief and hate his victim!) And of course the Dems didn’t force the REALLY rich – huge corporations like Deutsche Bank, Chase, Bank of America, etc. – to take it in the shorts. Only guys like me.
So my tenants could tell me to suck it, and sit in my houses without paying. But I didn’t get a “mortgage moratorium” – if I had stopped paying my mortgages to Chase for six months, they’d have taken my houses from me.
SCOTUS finally ruled the obvious way in June of 2021, ordering the Dems to stop boning landlords. So what did the “Rule of Law” party do? (Can you tell this example gets me especially pissed? 😊) They told SCOTUS to stick it, and kept screwing landlords for three more months, forcing them to apply for emergency relief, which SCOTUS finally gave them in a pointed opinion at the end of August, after 8 months of Biden-caused losses.
(I didn’t have any losses, because I live in a state with a great governor who declared that squatting wasn’t going to work in Florida. And because I’ve got good tenants. And because any tenants who tried to stiff me would have seen the murder in my eyes, as well as the likelihood that I’d burn my own property down before I’d let some deadbeat squat in it. Because: Appalachia!)
4. The sanctuary city/state policies that many progressive local governments have are also clearly illegal as well. But when some GOP governors and pols (and now Trump) started talking about withholding federal funds to get compliance, the progressives said that the GOP was the law violator. Because sanctuary cities should be able to break federal laws at will, while still being entitled to full funding from the government whose laws they are breaking, I guess?
This despite a lot of precedent from the 1970s and 80s, in which multiple SCOTUS rulings said that the federal government could withhold federal highway funds (for one example) to coerce states into following federal wishes (not even laws, but just things the feds wanted!), e.g. changing speed limits or drinking ages to ones the feds approved of.
In all of the above cases, when SCOTUS – not a partisan lower court judge, but the highest court – ruled against lefty wishes, Biden and Dems showed no respect for the rule of law. He defied one ruling after another, demonized SCOTUS on student loan “forgiveness,” said that the vax ruling was “a mistake,” and also smeared the obviously correct affirmative action/racial discrimination ruling against Harvard as evidence that “this is not a normal court.”
And I don’t remember Chris Van Hollen or any other national Democrat excoriating Biden for flouting the rule of law! (In fact, Chuck Schumer directly threatened SCOTUS judges whose rulings he didn’t like: “You’ll never know what hit you, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, you’ll reap the whirlwind…”)”
Okay, this hasn’t been my usual snark-fest of a column, but I’m curious to hear CO nation’s thoughts.
For those who are willing to persevere, I’ll post more tomorrow, this time on the likelihood of an actual “constitutional crisis” if this lawfare persists…
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 