LAUGHatLEFTISTS
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- Jan 22, 2020
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‘The Trump administration pushed forward into a new phase of the rolling national constitutional crisis over the weekend, reportedly defying two different federal court orders imposing limits on its deportation of immigrants without due process. First, immigrant authorities deported Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown University, despite a judge’s Friday order halting her removal. Second, authorities deported about 250 Venezuelan migrants, flouting another judge’s explicit directive to turn around American planes that hadn’t yet landed in El Salvador, where the migrants were being sent. The Justice Department claimed that it could not comply with the order barring Alawieh’s removal because it arrived too late. But the White House defended its defiance of the order prohibiting deportations of Venezuelans, insisting that the judge had no jurisdiction over the migrants—and that Trump holds absolute, unreviewable constitutional authority to expel noncitizens.
Taken on their own, these claims would be chilling enough. But they were coupled with another novel late-night claim of presidential power: On Monday, Donald Trump purported to reverse President Joe Biden’s pardons of Jan. 6 committee members. In a Truth Social post that came just after midnight, Trump claimed the pardons are now “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” asserting the power to undo their clemency because Biden allegedly signed it “by Autopen.” (It is the official position of the executive branch, unchallenged by the courts, that autopen qualifies as a valid presidential signature.)
Taken together, these actions and declarations amount to a significant escalation in Trump’s transformation of his own presidency into an autocracy or, perhaps more accurately, a monarchy. His Justice Department has taken vague claims of “Article II authority” to new extremes, ascribing to him an unchecked right to expel immigrants with no semblance of due process—and as his defenders have asserted all weekend, to ignore lawful court orders that stand in his way. Meanwhile, Trump himself has made it clear that this extreme and dangerous new vision of executive power does not apply to the presidency, but only his presidency: It is not a set of neutral principles, but an ever-evolving pretext for his own personal whims and cruelties, dressed up in legalese concocted by the conservative legal movement for precisely this purpose.
It’s clear by now that when the second Trump administration tests the limits of the law, it prefers to create enough chaos and confusion to cloud the true extent of its lawbreaking. That’s evidently what happened when it raced to expel Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese immigrant who specializes in kidney transplants. Alawieh has a valid visa to work at Brown Medicine, but immigration officers detained her anyway on Thursday and began rapidly preparing for her removal. We still do not know the basis for this deportation.’
We’ve Officially Entered the Next Phase of Trump’s Dictatorship Era
Taken together, these actions and declarations amount to a significant escalation in Trump’s transformation of his own presidency into an autocracy.slate.com
Trump is a criminal, convicted felon, and absolutely corrupt; Trump is unfit to hold any public office.
Sounds scary. You should put two masks on and curl up in your safe space.
