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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   29683 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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TDS in real life

Yes, that's my point. Trump sycophants constantly dismissed his critics as hysterical, but they keep being right.

They are arguing they did by dint of completing the removal prior to the judge issuing the order which therefore would not apply.

I am saying that that is comical bullshit, they know it's bullshit, and their actual argument is "who is going to stop us?"

  • -13

You're getting too inflammatory here. Accusations of bad faith require a more careful, substantive argument.

It really is funny to me. First there is a very real question about who is breaking what norm—namely there is a real core question as to whether the judge had any business doing anything here. He may be the one acting lawlessly.

Second, if the argument is “his policy is right and he is technically legally right but we think the spirit of legal process precludes him from acting in a way” then I don’t think you’ll find many takers.

If the judge was acting in good faith, I would accept the legal process argument. Thing is, I don't think he was; I think he's just using whatever power at his command to stymie the administration. And having seen the lower courts do this for 17 years (since Heller) AND COUNTING on the Second Amendment, I'm not particularly impressed with the idea that one should always obey and let the proces play out.

The relevant question is whether the decision is correct. There is an appeals process to decide that. Disobeying an order because you don’t like it has far more destructive downstream effects.

The relevant question is whether the decision is correct.

This question becomes not relevant if the case isn't finally decided until Trump has left office, and even less so if, once the case has already been decided (in the administration's favor), lawyers still file for injunctions based on an incompatible view of the law, and lower courts still grant them. That's just abusing process to gain an undeserved outcome.

We had laws that imposed significant restrictions on immigration. People who disagreed with those laws could have abided by them until such time as they could change them. Instead, they organized at a national level to simply ignore them. What you are seeing now is the destructive downstream effects of that decades-long policy.

I stopped believing in naive "rule of law" some time ago, and for what seem to me to be solid, objective reasons. I fundamentally do not believe that we have been operating in an environment of rigorous rule of law, which Trump is now violating; rather, it seems to me that Trump is simply playing the game the way it has been played for decades now.

What’s the limiting principle here? What principles could Trump violate that would give you pause? Or is your judgment based solely on whether he is, at any given moment, helping the people you like and hurting the people you hate?

What’s the limiting principle here?

What was the limiting principle under the previous regime? "Whatever we can get away with"? Why is a more rigorous standard necessary now, all of a sudden?

My preferred end-state here is the tribes undergo a soft divorce and our system devolves into robust federalism, where we stop trying to rule each other and simply try to leave each other alone. I'm not looking for a restoration of our previous system because I do not believe that such a restoration is possible. I'm open to arguments that my assessment of the situation is wrong and that actually we've been living under robust rule-of-law all along, and I was deceived to believe otherwise, but my expectation is that I can win that argument pretty easily by pointing to a whole bunch of things that have pretty clearly happened. Absent a developed argument as to why all of the many, many previous times where Blue Tribe ignored black-letter law or court decisions they found inconvenient were different, actually, "but the judge said so" just isn't an argument I find persuasive especially in an area where the law has been chronically ignored for decades.

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