Last Friday, we talked a little bit about Stephen Miller trotting out onto the White House lawn out of seemingly nowhere to threaten the judiciary and folks who oppose the regime's fascist mass deportation schemes, with the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus; which means your right to challenge your detention in court. As I pointed out then, what Miller was proposing effectively, was enacting yet another emergency power based on a made up invasion that's already been rejected by (3 now) judges in court, to indefinitely cage or imprison anyone they want for any reason they want; this is of course because if you have no right to challenge your detention in court, it literally does not matter why the government says they're holding you - they just can. Of course Miller couched this in language that both threatened judges and implied this authority would be used to round up and deport migrants, but the power Trump's unofficial minister of nazism was proposing here could and likely would be used to target virtually anyone who opposes the regime and its fascist agenda.
As I also pointed out however, Miller's threat would be heinously illegal; the fascist administration would be effectively suspending the constitution, and the power to do that traditionally does not reside with the office of the President for very good reasons. There is only one time in US History where a President suspended the writ of habeas corpus on his own, and that president was literally Abe Lincoln during the actual fucking civil war. Furthermore, the situation was understood to be so extraordinary and potentially dangerous, that Congress got together after the fact and legitimized Lincoln's play; the other three times the government has suspended “The Great Writ” all required congressional authorization. All of which is of course to say nothing of the fact that doing so *requires* a threat to public safety that necessitates even considering suspending the writ in the first place; no such threat exists here obviously, Miller and Der Leader are simply upset that judges have insisted the government respect the due process rights of migrants.
Of course, I can tell you all this, but I am not a lawyer or a professor of law. So to make the point abundantly clear, I'd like to share this Truthout Article by Marjorie Cohn, who is in fact a law professor, to explain all the ways this is definitely illegal fascist bullshit.
https://truthout.org/articles/stephen-millers-argument-for-suspending-habeas-corpus-is-legal-garbage/
Stephen Miller’s Argument for Suspending Habeas Corpus Is Legal Garbage
“A suspension [of habeas corpus] is temporary, but the power it confers is extraordinary,” Barrett and Katyal wrote in their National Constitution Center article. “When a suspension is in effect, the president, typically acting through subordinates, can imprison people indefinitely without any judicial check.”
It is becoming increasingly clear that Trump will stop at nothing to impose his will – the commands of the Constitution notwithstanding. On May 4, Trump refused to say on “Meet the Press” that he was bound by the Due Process Clause of the Constitution.
For now, federal judges are serving as speed bumps in Trump’s cruel and illegal war on migrants. Trump has packed the Supreme Court with radical right-wingers who may well overturn some of those lower court rulings. But Trump has already defied the high court’s ruling that his administration facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador. We can only hope that the “justices” on the high court maintain their reverence for the Constitution, even though the president does not."
I know that legal language makes a lot of people's eyes glaze over, but I strongly encourage you to just read the whole article because it does a very good job of explaining precisely how illegal and authoritarian Miller's proposal to suspend the writ of habeas corpus actually is. The gist of it however is that president Trump doesn't have the power to suspend the writ without Congressional authorization, there absolutely is no invasion to justify doing so, and Miller is openly lying when he says that the Immigration and Nationality Act strips judiciary oversight and appellate review for the regime's mass deportation activities.
Of course as the author (and many others) point out, the illegality of their activities has only marginally stopped Trump so far; the regime is currently ignoring multiple court orders and the President is openly declaring that he's not sure if he has an obligation to uphold the US Constitution in media interviews; despite the fact that upholding the Constitution is one of the things all Presidents swear to do on live TV while being inaugurated. Miller was certainly trying to cow American judges to ram through Trump's mass deportation project, but we've seen the pattern of this regime transforming fascist musings into enforced reality far too many times to believe he's not being serious.