Losing My Perspicacity May 12, 2025

Good morning and Happy Monday! Thanks for reading today.

Happy to announce we survived our youngest’s college graduation this weekend at my alma mater, Indiana University. (Grandpa Simpson voice) Back in my day, everyone’s graduation took place at the same time in the football stadium on Saturday morning. But with campus enrollment exploding across the Big Ten, schools now are doing smaller, school-centric ceremonies where students walk across the stage (my kid graduated from the Media School), and then a big ceremony in the football stadium for all on Saturday night. I love Bloomington very much, but I love it much less when 40,000 parents and grandparents (that’s probably a conservative number) all descend on our little small town at once for 1) Parents’ Weekend; 2) Big football games (where do all these Penn St. fans come from, anyway?); and 3) Graduation weekend. It’s three days of gridlock, packed restaurants, and nowhere to park. Exhausting.

I was, however, gratified to see IU’s current President, Pamela Witten, get roundly booed the moment she stepped up to the mic, which was started by the students themselves. Whitten, for those who don’t know, received a vote of “no confidence” from the IU faculty, tried multiple times to shut down pro-Palestine peaceful student protests (including allowing a sniper on the roof of the Indiana Memorial Union with his sights trained on protestors), and has bent the knee to Donald Trump and Indiana governor Mike Braun. IU is and has always been a very liberal blue spot in the heart of deep red Indiana, and Witten is doing her level best to obey in advance. And apparently, IU doesn’t have commencement speakers anymore, so everyone just got to listen to Witten talk for 20 minutes — just like she did two years ago for my older son’s graduation. No one asked for that.

Witten aside, the ceremony itself was beautiful. You can see a bit of what it was like here.

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Anyway, all of this is to explain that I was mostly off social media and news sites for the weekend. So you can imagine my surprise when I sat down to catch up and saw that (checks notes) … habeas corpus might be suspended. Zoinks.

The notion of habeas corpus (literally, in Latin, “to have the body) dates back to the reign of King Henry II (husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine and father of Richard the Lionheart and Prince John, or “PJ,” as my friends and I call him) in the 12th century.

At that time, people decided that throwing innocent people in jail was bad and that there should be some protection to prevent that. As you can see, England in the 1100s was far more advanced re: civil liberties than the current Republican Party.

“Habeas corpus” means that, should anyone within the jurisdiction of the United States (not just citizens) find themselves unlawfully imprisoned, they can apply to go before a court and argue their case, and the court hearing the case can order their jailer to release them, if warranted. And habeas doesn’t apply only to US citizens. In 2008, no less an authority than the Supreme Court of the United States held that habeas corpus is so important that it also extends to non-citizens held in foreign jails. Back then, that meant Guantanamo Bay, but CECOT in El Salvador works just as well. Three members of the current Court were involved in that decision: John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas. Unfortunately, they all dissented. Justices Anthony Kennedy, J.P. Stevens (one of my all-time favorites), David Souter (RIP), Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer made up the majority.

(There’s a great movie about Guantanamo prisoner Mohamedou Ould Salahi’s habeas corpus fight that I can’t recommend enough, called The Mauritanian.)

The right to habeas corpus was so important to the Founding Fathers that they put it in Article I of the Constitution of the United States, where they wrote: "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”

Much like the Alien Enemies Act was only invoked in times of war (1812, 1917, 1941), habeas corpus has been suspended four times in our entire 250-year history, and two of those times were in foreign lands. During the Civil War (1861), Abraham Lincoln attempted to suspend habeas corpus and was quickly met with pushback from the Supreme Court, which rightly pointed out to Lincoln that only Congress had the power to do so. Imagine what it was like to have a Supreme Court that defended the Constitution rather than a megalomaniacal President! What a time to be alive.

Habeas corpus was suspended again during the Reconstruction Era, mostly to put down violent conspiracies and deal with the Ku Klux Klan. It was again suspended in the Philippines in 1905 and in Hawaii in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor (before Hawaii was a state). I would argue that suspending habeas corpus is never warranted, and that, during wartime, we need our civil liberty protections more than ever. But at least the prior suspensions of habeas weren’t based on some made-up “invasion” of the US by undocumented immigrants.

So how is this even happening? My guess is that Donald Trump, who may or may not be completely lucid, is upset that federal courts keep overturning his right to traffic immigrants and US citizens out of the country. This is undoubtedly also upsetting to Stephen Miller, who is neither a lawyer nor a decent person, and whose own family has spoken out about his white nationalism. Miller also hails from a family of immigrants, but he’s the kind of guy who will climb a ladder and pull it up behind him to maintain his lead on everyone else.

The narrative I’ve heard from the right-wing mafia this weekend goes something like this: “If the courts are going to refuse to follow the law, the President has no choice but to suspend habeas corpus in order to protect the American people.”

This, of course, is complete bullshit.

Aside from the fact that a suspension of habeas corpus has never been used in the way the Trump administration is attempting to use it, the Judicial Branch of the federal government decides what the law is. Do you really trust a President who took the oath of office twice and then claims he has no idea if he’s obligated to protect the Constitution to tell us what that all-important document says?

Of course, if habeas is suspended, it won’t just be used on ICE detainees. It will be used against all of us. But surely, Congress will save us!

Oh, right.

I spent a lot of time in the car this weekend wondering how people like Stephen Miler, Pam Bondi, JD Vance, and all the other Oval Office ghouls, who know damn well what the law is, turn into the types of people urging one of the most drastic steps a government can take simply to get rid of brown people and pad their own legal stats. I can’t fathom how people wind up like this. I’ll wonder about it until my last breath in this lifetime. But it doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that it’s never been more critical for Americans to loudly and pointedly defend their own freedom. Call your reps, post on social media, help whip up the backlash as best you can. Because suspending habeas corpus is the kind of thing a country doesn’t recover from.

ICE is the Gestapo

On Friday, I watched, mouth hanging open, as the elected mayor of a major US city was arrested by ICE for attempting to gain access to a facility in his own city for an entirely legal and legitimate reason.

Newark mayor Ras Baraka, seen in the middle of the fray in an olive suit and black hat, is clearly not the aggressor here — ICE agents are. And by the way, when did we start allowing law enforcement in this country to conceal their identity while on the job? Aren’t Republicans the ones screaming about outlawing masks for “safety reasons?”

There’s a question of whether this facility, which is run by a private company, has the proper permission to be open, working with ICE, and detaining people, and there are currently two lawsuits pending in that regard. In 2021, NJ Governor Phil Murphy signed a law barring the detention of immigrants in the state. That’s why Baraka was there, and why he was accompanied by three members of Congress, who ICE is now threatening to arrest.

Meanwhile, this person, who couldn’t even figure out how to introduce evidence into the record during a federal criminal trial, should not be anywhere near the words “law” and “legal.”

I don’t know if there has ever been anyone less qualified to be a lawyer, much less a US Attorney, than Alina Habba.

Baraka was released from custody Friday night, but not before ICE initially flexed on everyone by refusing to say where he was being held.

For no reason whatsoever, I will mention that the Gestapo was formed by Herman Göring and handed over to Heinrich Himmler because they weren’t brutal enough for Hitler. They operated as Hitler’s private police force and were secretive about their appearance, often wearing plainclothes and refusing to give their names. The Gestapo were used to harass and terrorize Hitler’s political opponents, protestors of Nazi policies, and especially Jews and homosexuals, though no one was truly safe from them. If you were arrested by the Gestapo, you were generally held without charges and without remedy. Sort of like, oh I dunno, if you didn’t have the right of habeas corpus.

ICE has effectively become Trump’s secret police. They encourage Americans to snitch on their neighbors, arrest Trump’s political enemies, hide their identities, and ignore the law and the Constitution with impunity. Worst of all, they appear to answer to no one but Trump and his cronies.

Now would be a really great time for Congress to grow a spine. Or for the American people to go on a general strike. Or both.

I don’t even have the words

I don’t know what to say. Nor do I have any analysis, except to say this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. My God.

The High Note

Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.

Here’s the moment Tufts’ PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk was released from ICE detention, six weeks after a bunch of plainclothes ICE officers grabbed her on the street and threw her into a van. Her crime? Writing an op-ed criticizing the school’s response to a movement asking the school to divest from Israel.

And, because we have to remember to laugh at the morons hellbent on destroying us. This is the flippin’ funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. All hail Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D - NM). Make sure to watch all the way to the end. The setup - Marjorie Taylor Greene used a doctored photo at a recent hearing.

I might have a new favorite Congressional rep.

Survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.