What is this "Constitution" of which you speak?

AP reported recently that an internal ICE memo being used to train new ICE thugs declares that they can smash their way into private homes without the need for a judicial warrant required by the 4th Amendment.

All they need, according to the DHS Office of the General Counsel (in other words, DHS's own lawyer) is an administrative arrest warrant issued by the agency for someone with a final order of removal and the Constitution is totally cool with it.

What could go wrong? Oh, wait....

This news came out in the immediate wake of the case of American citizen ChongLy "Scott" Thao, the man who was dragged out of his home in St. Paul in his underwear in freezing temperatures after ICE secret police thugs smashed their way in with no warrant, screaming and pointing guns at his family. (And because of a delay in posting this clearly before the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.)

The Tonton Macoute (I keep telling you: Look it up!) wannabes were supposedly after "two convicted sex offenders." In other words, it went just like the memo described and "we don't need no stinking (actual proper) warrant."

Sadly, the AP meekly described the memo as "a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches." This is no "reversal of guidance" as if it's a matter of opinion or worse, convenience, and the agency is not to "respect" such limits, it is to obey them.

What this is, is an immoral, illegal, improper, infuriating rejection of a base Constitution principle on the sanctity of the home that dates back in English law to at least the early 1600s and can even be found to date from ancient Rome.

Our 4th Amendment protections have already been undermined and restricted (for example to the point that your car is often referred to as a "4th Amendment-free zone") but this is not just a bright red line, it's a line of flashing beacons and blaring klaxons.

In an earlier version of the story, one that got updated while I was first writing this, the AP reported that ICE agents sometimes wait hours for a targeted person to leave a house. Apparently we are now to accept that the Constitution must yield because their constitution cannot bear such a burden.

My January 20

A group of folks centered around Toms River, NJ have a weekly Tuesday protest downtown. We knew of the January 20th walkout, but as most of us are retired and/or disabled, we really didn’t have anything to walk out of.

So we decided to do our own version. We agreed to join in by having our usual protest at a different site and then walking as a group (which means marching, really) over to the office of our local Congressional rep (Chris Smith, R-NJ4).

Which we did, about 125 mostly oldsters in 25 degree weather with wind chill in the teens, first waving signs at the traffic and getting responses that featured far more thumbs than middle fingers raised, then marching down the sidewalk (which provoked at least a few déjà vu comments) to his office where we lined up to either request a meeting (which we knew would not happen; he hasn’t has a town hall since 1992, according to his staff) or deliver prepared letters.

I was among those with a prepared letter and the whole selfish purpose of this was to have a reason to post it here. Which I now will. :-)

-

Congressman Smith:

 

Despite the range of issues on which we don’t agree, I’m sure there are some on which we do.

There is one in particular facing us at the moment which I hope fits in the second category: The violence and political terror being visited on our cities and communities in the name of combating “illegal immigration.”

There are at this moment 3000 masked armed federal agents in Minneapolis, in effect a secret police who are masked for the avowed purpose of preventing them from being identified (and thus being held responsible for their actions) and there is a threat of 1500 active duty troops being added to that total. They have been sweeping up the innocent (including citizens and non-citizens legally present), repeatedly exceeding their authority, brutalizing and now even killing, while utterly failing in - to the point it can be said lying about - their stated mission of going after “the worst of the worst,” as even DHS admits that less than a majority have any criminal record.

And they are doing all this, note well, not at the request, or with the approval, of state and local officials but over their direct opposition, with many of then calling it an “occupation.”

If we are not to have open borders, then there must be some kind of border control and someone to enforce it. But that is a role which DHS and ICE have proven themselves incapable of carrying out in any humane or even Constitutional way. DHS, consisting of an amalgamation of formerly-separate operations and which was formed only in 2003, should be abolished entirely. ICE should be stripped down and restructured from scratch under strict guidelines; to express it in a way you might find familiar, it should be “repealed and replaced.”

So I call on you to reject any spending for either DHS in general or ICE in particular until we determine how to deal with immigration without resorting to secret police terrorizing communities.

Having returned to New Jersey less than three years ago, I was not here at the time but I’ve been given to understand that during Donald Trump’s first term you were “something of a thorn in his side.”

Certainly, the same cannot be said now. You can do better. You can be better. Please do so.

So I said - bits and pieces

Another gathering of random comments on various things posted by others, arranged chronologically. 

2026-01-08
Everything you need to know about today’s GOPpers in one headline: “House fails to override Trump’s vetoes of 2 bills that passed unanimously.”

Not every GOPper voted against overriding the veto, but quite enough to generalize. Craven weaklings unworthy of public office.

==

2026-01-09
ICE has become little more than an armed, masked, secret police, increasingly populated with Tonton Macoute wannabes.

If we’re not going to have open borders (which I do think is an arguable position*) we have to have some kind of border control and some way to enforce it, roles for which both ICE in particular and DHS in general have proven incapable of fulfilling in a humane or even Constitutional manner.

Thus my new slogan, deliberately intended to tweak the MAGAs:

“ICE: Repeal and Replace!”

==

2026-01-09
[Background: An attorney was fined $400,000, upheld on appeal, for informing a school that one of their staff was previously involved in sex with a minor on the grounds that it violated a confidentiality agreement regarding a bankruptcy case. The judge said the fine was based on the cost of the investigation.

The question was are the courts at in any way at fault for what seems to be an injustice or were they just constrained by the law.]

Of course both the district and appeals courts at least potentially bear some of the blame.

Is there a law saying that the fine must be based on the “cost of the investigation?” If so, the courts should have required a proof of that cost - meaning receipts, detailed accounts, and not vague items like “hours billed.” If there is not such a law, the court should have ignored that cost as a basis for the fine. In either event, the district court could have withheld judgment for the moment while encouraging the sides to negotiate a lesser amount.

So unless there is both a law specifically stating that the fine is to be based on the cost of the investigation and a detailed proof of those costs, then either court could have at the least found the fine excessive and even included in their rulings (even if it didn’t affect the judgment) some reference to the potential harm avoided by [attorney Richard] Trahant’s actions.

I’m reminded yet again of Joni Mitchell’s lyric (in “Sex Kills”): “Is justice just ice/Driven by greed and lust?/Just the strong doing what they can/And the weak suffering what they must?”

=

2026-01-12
I will not forward, “like,” or discuss memes or vids or whatever that do not source the claim made.

I’ve had more than enough experiences of asking for a source (which you’d think the poster had) only to be told some version of “find it yourself” to have confidence in the conclusion that they don’t have one, they either just made it up or, more likely, are just reposting something that itself had no source.

==

2026-01-12
[Background: Responding to Congressional Democrats failing to oppose an anti-trans law, someone asked “Do they still expect trans people to vote for them despite this harm they’re causing us?”]

The answer to your question is yes.

This, bluntly, is SOP, par for the course, choose your cliché, but in any case long-standing policy for the institutional Democratic Party. It’s not just trans rights, it’s a range of issues where they figure that as long as they can be or at least present themselves as any degree to the left of the GOPpers, it’s “Hey, whadda you gonna do? Vote for that crowd? It’s us or nuthin’.” They see no downside to taking the left flank of voters for granted.

And if you dare to mutter phrases like “won’t vote” or worse yet “third party,” you’ll be treated as a child to be scolded and shamed rather than an adult to be engaged.

==

2026-01-14
In discussing oral arguments before SCOTUS on two suits relating to bans on transgender students in sports, Chris Geidner (Law Dork) suggested they revealed a shift in tone toward avoiding a wide-ranging decision with Constitutional implications, so that while the bans in question would be upheld, it would be done in a manner that it only applied to those particular cases and would leave open the option for other jurisdictions to allow students to participate according to their gender. That is, states could have such a ban but allowing participation based on gender would not violate Title IX, despite the plaintiff's claims.

Now, this of course was oral arguments so is no guarantee of the shape of the ultimate ruling, but according to Geidner the Justices seemed interested in avoiding basic questions about trans rights under the Title.

Which leaves me feeling if there is such a word quasi-optimistic, which is about as good as it gets on this topic these days. There are undoubtedly hard - make that even harder - times ahead but I still believe in the line about the arc of the moral universe.

So I take hope in the shift in tone represented by Kavanaugh’s remark that “one of the themes of your argument has been the more people learn, the more they’ll agree with you.“ I do it both because that is true and because perhaps that, again, shift in tone is the result of some members of the Court starting to think “um this whole business is more complicated than I originally thought.”

And consider that in the period 1998-2008, 26 states added to their state Constitutions provisions banning same-sex marriage at tine when opposition to those rights ran at about 60%. They did it because support was slowly rising and the reactionaries, aware of that fact, pushed these amendments to lock in their bigotry at a time when they could still get people worked up over it.

Despite that, it continued to be an issue, support continued to rise, in 2015 SCOTUS struck all of them down, and polls over the past two years show 67-69% of the public supporting same-sex marriage.

It’s unclear who originated the saying “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” (no, it wasn’t Mark Twain). No matter; with some recent polls saying that a clear majority of Republican voters think their party is way too concerned with trans rights issues, I don’t feel it remiss to listen for the perhaps faint but still perceptible sound of rhyming chimes.

==

2025-01-14
The Democratic-controlled New Jersey legislature has broken a promise to enact a trans shield law in the post-election session, generating a sense of betrayal.

It's a well-justified reaction, yet we should for the moment recall that NJ has an Executive Order in place that functions as a shield and that stays in force until it's overturned or superseded by law.

I have urged [out-going] Gov. [Phil] Murphy to call on the legislature to turn his EO into law without success, so now we have to push [Governor-elect Mikie] Sherrill to do it.

I rather suspect the lack of post-election action arises from a feeling of “We’ve got the shield EO, why raise what might be a contentious issue?” More specifically, I suspect the reason for the idea of a post-election vote was intended as a backstop against the possibility of a win in the governor’s race by Trump-lover Jack Ciattarelli, who certainly would have revoked Murphy’s EO. Since the moderate Mikie Sherrill, who has a pretty good record on LGBTQ+ (including transgender) issues, won, the members of the legislature felt no urgency to deal with it.

None of which changes the fact that there should be a law, not just an EO, and we should be pressing for that.

==

2026-01-16
[Background: In response to a 2015 TikTok from John Cena about what makes an "average American," someone asked "WTF happened?"]

WTF happened is that we got lazy, we thought those issues were pretty much settled, that the bastards, bigots, and buffoons had shrunk far enough away that we could coast to the finish line, ignoring or ignorant enough of the fact that the diverse America we saw emerging that was so pleasing to us - one with a “non-majority majority” in which no racial/ethnic group is a majority of the population - was instead terrifying to many of the existing majority whose internal conception of what it means to be “American” is being undermined by that reality.

 *See, for example, https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-erickson-report-page-4-longer-look.html

Votes: cast vs. counted

On January 14, SCOTUS ruled by 5-4 that candidates for public office by that very fact have standing to challenge state election rules regarding the counting of mail-in ballots received after election day.

Writing for the majority, Chief Injustice John Roberts offered a comparison to a foot race in which the length was changed from 100m to 105m while the race was going on, describing that as clearly unfair. But despite being (very) superficially clever, instead of supporting his argument the image reveals its hidden and fundamental weakness. It’s like, in an old saying, a house built on a foundation of stubble and straw.

That's because no one to my knowledge is talking about changing the length of the election campaign in the middle of it. No one, that is, is suggesting changing the date of an election during the campaign, which is what would be the equivalent of Roberts’ example.

What’s involved, rather, is counting mail-in ballots arriving after election day. That is, after the race is over. Every entrant knew the rules going in, knew the dates, knew what they had to do in what time frame, a time frame that ended on election day. Whatever the number of days allowed for mail-in ballots to arrive after that, they must have been posted, that is, cast, by then.

Which reveals the underlying failure of Roberts’ analogy: He is equating when a vote is counted with when it was cast. Which is both nonsense on its face and contrary to previous decisions, which have held that when that mail-in ballot is put in the mail, it is as that point cast.

So unless he is claiming both that all mail-in ballots must be received before election day and (to be consistent) that all counting of votes must stop at midnight (otherwise they would be counted after election day and so invalid), his argument is -

- well, I started to say vapor, but it does have substance in its impact: It empowers those with the contacts and cash needed to pursue suits intended to push the courts to embrace election rules tailored to a particular candidate's own selfish advantage. More broadly, it could result in tangling election rules to the point where not only are tens of millions of voters disenfranchised but, ultimately, no election outcome can be trusted, an idea decidedly not beyond the reactionaries' hopes.

But since Roberts hasn’t shown a lot of interest in fair elections - consider his gradual dismantling of the Voting Rights Act - I doubt he cares.

Footnote: A reply referred to Roberts’ “ridiculous” analogy in his confirmation hearings about “calling and balls and strikes,” saying the Court was instead narrowing the strike zone.

I replied that I think my favorite dumb Roberts’ aphorism was when he justified smacking down affirmative action by saying (as best as I can quote from memory) “The best way to stop discriminating by race is to stop discriminating by race,” which I at the time likened to saying “The best way to get from point A to Point B is to pretend you’re already there.”

I added that as for “balls and strikes,” that wasn’t just ridiculous, it was a flaming lie. But I did enjoy their use of the narrowed strike zone image.

A step toward the nightmare

I have several times referred to ICE and DHS agents as "Tonton Macoute wannabes." For those who don't know and don't want to have to look it up, the Tonton Macoute or just Macoute was a vicious "secret" police and paramilitary force who reported directly to Haitian dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. (I put "secret" in quotes because there was nothing secret about them; everyone knew damned well who they were.)

It was regarded as among the most brutal such forces in the entire world and its criminality extended beyond suppressing any and all opposition: Its members were effectively a law unto themselves, able to steal, murder, torture, and rape as they pleased both because resisting or objecting was a death sentence and Duvalier didn't give a damn as long as he was in his palace and the grift kept rolling.

Well, it appears our own masked secret police is a step closer to achieving its dream.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon has decided not to investigate Jonathan Ross, the ICE good who murdered repeat murdered Renee Good.

Not only will he not be prosecuted, not only will he not even be charged, he will not even be investigated. The regime can't even be bothered to, indeed refuses to, look at what happened because they are terrified of the meaning of what they would see, what they already have seen, what they already know. Better to evade the knowledge he would be - and through that their embrace of thuggery would be - convicted. Better to pretend it didn't happen the way they know it did, better to smear accuse and blame and investigate the victim (Renee Good - say her name) on some impossibly vague charge of being "involved with the activist groups that have been protesting Trump’s immigration agenda," better to try to turn "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances" into "domestic terrorism."

Better to put Ross - whose name, interestingly, is pretty much absent from news coverage, where he is just "the ICE agent" - beyond the law, the better to ignore what he represents, let him be answerable, it seems, only to the Orange Overlord - who, like Duvalier, just doesn't give a damn as long as he is in his palace and the grift keeps rolling.

And the ghost of Papa Doc smiles "Now you're getting it."

Sometimes pushback works

Nice to know some people still believe freedom of expression does not require universality of opinion.

The board of the Adelaide [Australia] Festival runs as part of the overall event Adelaide Writers Week, the nation’s largest free literary festival .

On January 8 the board announced that they had disinvited Australian-Palestinian writer Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah from the event. They cited “her previous statements" and the "cultural sensitivities“ surrounding the antisemitic mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach - even as they admitted her writings don't “have any connection with the tragedy.”

They didn’t cite any specific statements by Abdel-Fatah, but we can safely assume they are to referring to her support for Palestinian rights and her denunciation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, especially given that her exclusion came as the result of lobbying by the Jewish Community Council for South Australia and South Australia state premier Peter Malinauskus.

The upshot? By January 13, 180 speakers - amounting to about 70% of those invited - had withdrawn as had some sponsors of the event, the Festival’s director had quit, the whole event had been canceled, remaining board members were to resign, and the future of the wider Adelaide Festival was in question.

There is to be a new board, hoping to keep the wider festival, now in its 40th year and a major draw for the state of South Australia, going.

Footnote: The statement announcing the cancellation offered Abdel-Fattah a non-apology apology referring not to the actual decision but only to “how the decision was represented” while claiming "this is not about identity or dissent."

Yeah, sure. Whadevah you say, Mac.

Kennedy Center to support art by suing artist. It's not political. Really.

So NPR reports that the Kennedy Center says it’s going to sue Chuck Reed for $1 million for cancelling his annual Christmas Eve Jazz Jam. Reed cancelled the show after the Orange Overlord’s hand-chosen board stuck his name on the Center even though it’s not theirs to rename, as the name was set in the founding Congressional legislation.

(BTW, all praise to NPR for consistently referring to it as "the Kennedy Center," not the "Trump-Kennedy Center.")

Sounding like a petulant 6-year-old screeching “You’re mean!” Center rep Roma Daravi called Reed “selfish” and “intolerant” and as having “failed to meet [his] basic duty” as an artist, which apparently is performing when and where Daravi wants him to.

For his part, Center President Richard Grenell sniveled quite non-politically that the cancellation was a political stunt in a way that renaming the Center obviously was not. He called it an example of “sad bullying by certain elements on the left,” and pouting that it’s all happening because “the Left is mad” that the Orange Overlord “is supporting the arts” in some no doubt special and impressive yet invisible manner. The Arts are indeed magic.

Grenell said “we will not let them” - we can assume he means those “elements of the Left” - “cancel shows without consequences.” The Center says the suit will come after the holidays.

Interestingly, no basis for the suit was mentioned and it doesn’t appear that any suits were filed against other artists - including Issa Rae, Rhiannon Giddens, Peter Wolf, Low Cut Connie, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC, and the production company of “Hamilton” - who previously canceled appearances in protest over the name change. Apparently, this one hurt their fee-fees more than usual.

Footnote: In late November, Democrats on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works announced an investigation into “cronyism [and] corruption” involving “millions in lost revenue, luxury spending, and preferential treatment for Trump allies.” The investigation is being undertaken at a time of, NPR reports, “declining audiences, artist cancellations, layoffs and resignations at the Kennedy Center.”

So I said - something about, well, a bunch of stuff.

A series of comments on posts that I thought worth repeating. Adds some content here, anyway.

2025-12-26
One point I wish people would make, indeed emphasize, is that the Orange Overlord’s toady hit man Marco Rube is decrying supposed “suppression of free speech” (i.e., consumer protection rules) in Europe at the same time that his demented boss is demanding various people be fired and outlets have their broadcast licenses be stripped for saying things he doesn’t like.

-

2025-12-26

When I was in college, a silly joke made the rounds “proving” that Alexander the Great had an infinite number of limbs and never existed in the first place.

The first line was “All horses are black. Proved by blatant assertion.” (I'll only tell the rest if someone asks.)

I’m reminded of that by RF “My father would be ashamed of me” Kennedy’s assertion that gender affirming care is “neither safe nor effective” despite multiple decades of experience and studies showing otherwise. It is a blatant assertion untethered to facts and just as accurate as “all horses are black.”

-

2025-12-26
I’d like to share others’ vision of appropriate retribution being meted out to the grifters and ghouls of the court of the Orange Overlord for their various crimes and cruelties, but I have a genuine fear that come 2027 for Congress and 2029 for the White House, we will be hearing from the Dem misleaderhip a chorus of “We must look forward, not backward!” coupled with official amnesia.

They did it in 2009. They did it in 2021. It will be up to the mass of us to stop it from happening again - because we can’t depend on the leaders of the institutional Democratic Party to do it on their own.

-

2025-12-26
So redactions in the Epstein files can be removed because the incompetent bozos of the White House didn’t use the right version of Acrobat.

So WHERE ARE THEY?

No one publishing them can be accused of wrongdoing; those documents should have been released unredacted (save info IDing victims) on 12/19.

-

2025-12-27
[one person suggested SCOTUS would strike down a proposed Shadow Docket Sunlight Act]

I would argue that a law saying that SCOTUS must explain the basis for its decisions, including those on the shadow docket, is well within the authority of Congress.

The Constitution gives Congress a fair degree of latitude to regulate the courts, including SCOTUS. Article III, Section 2, Clause 2 says:

“In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be a Party, the Supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all other Cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

A law that doesn’t in any way impact the powers of the Court but only requires that it explain the reasoning for its actions cannot by any rational argument be said to be outside the limits of “Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

-

2025-12-28
[A comment raised two versions of a “forced outing” law of transgender students by schools: A)employees must notify parents or B)they can notify or not at their discretion with no requirement either way.]

Bluntly, it doesn’t matter. Either way puts trans students at significant risk of unwanted outing and strips them of privacy rights.

I’m old enough to remember when children would be told that if there was trouble at home they should find an authority figure to talk to - including, specifically, “a trusted teacher.” Now, amid all the pushing for outing laws, that advice should be “except a teacher - unless you can be absolutely certain they will never mention to anyone at any time, even in passing, even at the risk of their career.”

The only acceptable version I can see is (B) with the word “their” replaced with “the student’s.”

Remigration - the one word to rule them all

Welcome to all Jon Swift Roundup readers.

 

I write on a variety of political topics, so if you find my writing interesting or worthwhile, I invite you to check out my blog (whoviating.blogspot.com) or my free Substack (whoviating.substack.com).

 

Comments and other reactions are always welcome.

 

 [This should have gone out a few days ago, but production was slowed by events of the past week involving a fainting spell, a trip to the ER where it was discovered that I had a heart rate repeatedly dropping to like 22 with a BP of something like 85/13, a heartbeat ever more irregular than it already was, and oh by the way I have COVID. 

I left with a pacemaker and (due to wrestling with that damn hospital bed while wearing a heart monitor) a pinched nerve with the result that I can only work for about 10 minutes before my shoulder hurts so much I can't concentrate and have to take a break. Hope it was worth the wait....]

They said it. Not by second-hand reference, not by implication or suggestion or as a passing reference buried in a longer list, but right out. And not for the first time. But this time in shouting all caps.

Just before midnight on Thanksgiving, our rapidly-decomposing Orange Overlord turned to his sickenly-misnamed “Truth” Social for a deranged screed labeling immigration as the root of all our evils¹ - one punctuated with “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can finally cure this situation.”

And there it is. Maybe this time we will finally notice.

“Reverse migration,” you see, is a longer version of “remigration,” once a neutral, descriptive term with no overlying meaning. It meant simply homecoming, of a return to a place you previously lived. It was used, for example, following the end of World War II to refer to Jews who had fled Nazi Germany or Nazi-controlled territory in Europe who were returning to where they had lived before.

However over past couple of decades, particularly over the last 10-15 years and particularly in Europe, the right wing has taken hold of it and as often happens when the right wing grabs onto something, it has been twisted into a vile encapsulation of their inhumanities and unreasoning hatreds.

Put perhaps over simply but still accurately, the right wing saw an opportunity to spread their bigoted, racist xenophobia by amplifying the increasing resentment about both immigrants from Africa and refugees, particularly from Ukraine. “Remigration” was twisted from a straightforward reference to relocating to a previous home into a rallying cry first for kicking out any refugees and then to kicking out all foreigners, whether they had legal status or not.

The concept expanded, as such fanaticism invariably does, in this case to pushing for the “forced return” - the active expulsion - of all non-white immigrants and their children, regardless of their birthplace or citizenship; indeed, it meant forcing them back to their “ancestral home,” their home of racial ancestry, no matter how long their family had lived in Europe.

In other words, “remigration” is a wink-and-a-nod substitute for ethnic cleansing and racial-cultural lily white hegemony.

The driving philosophical idea - although I feel dirty using a fine phrase for such a low concept - the driving idea has been a rebirth in Europe of the idea of “Völkisch” (“people”), an ethno-nationalist movement from the late 1800s which under the Nazis became a policy in law of having to be, it was said, German (mostly, non-Jewish) “enough” to be a citizen.

After the defeat of the Nazis, those laws were scrapped - but like the man said, “Fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.”² “Völkisch” was rebranded as “Völkisch nationalism,” basically the same racist ideas with a little bit of dressing up - replacing references to “race” with “culture,” for example - without being explicitly antisemitic.

For example, in France, the Nouvelle Droite (“New Right”) emerged during the late 1960s to argue that different ethnicities require their own segregated living spaces, creating a need for remigration of people with “foreign roots.” The ND, as it’s called, gained some importance in the 1980s amid right-wing cries of “La France aux Français” (“France for the French”).

In Germany, the slogan is “Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus” (“Germany for Germans, foreigners out”) - bringing us to elections in Germany this past February in which the extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) - the AfD³, you remember, the party that Elon Musk and J.D. Vance wanted Germans to support - got 20.8% of the vote, making it the largest opposition party in the Bundestag and the second largest overall.

That degraded duo of Musk and Vance serves to bring it home to the US version.

On October 27, 2024, at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, Stephen “Voldemort” Miller, the driving force for this in the campaign (and now in the White House) declared in a deliberate echo of the extremist cries in Europe, “America Is For Americans And Americans Only.”⁴

As I wrote at the time,

I’m surprised that more people have not emphasized the fact that the references have moved from bizarrely false claims about “illegal” immigrants to being about immigrants, period, claims given an exclamation point by Steven Miller’s goose-stepping.

No more the fig leaf of “if only they’d do it legally, there would be no problem.” No more the differentiation of the “bad hombres” from the “good hombres.” Just naked hatred for and irrational fear of any and all among “the other.”

This is fascism fulfilled, paranoia as policy, systematized xenophobia.

It was explicit, it was overt; the extremism, the meaning, was there for all to see - and most of the media to ignore.

And while this was perhaps until that time the most emphatic revelation of their intentions, it was definitely not the first. Mother Jones, for one, flagged it two months earlier, quoting a post from the Orange Soon-to-be-Overlord referring to “return[ing] Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration)” and Voldemort reposting it with “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!”

It was out there - but even then, even after Miller’s invocation of the overtly racist slogans of the furthest of Europe’s far right, still too much of the media (and, bluntly, too many of the rest of us) essentially sleep-walked our way through the declarations, preferring to see it all as a re-run of the old “illegal immigrants invading our country/stealing our jobs/blah-blah-blah” rabble-rousing bullshit.

But it wasn’t. Or, perhaps more accurately, it was the smokescreen. Because it isn’t about undocumented immigrants and for people like Miller it never was. For them, it’s always been about immigrants, period - or, again more accurately, non-white immigrants.

As soon as they got into office, they went to work. The Spray Tan Who Would Be King suspended the nation’s 40-year-old refugee resettlement program on his first day in office.

A few - emphasize few - highlights from the rest of the year:

In April, the White House cabal filed a brief in federal court claiming they can deport someone for their “beliefs, statements or associations.” This came the same day that ICE shared (and then deleted) a social media post saying that it is responsible for keeping illegal “ideas” from entering the US.

In May, the White House announced that an agency called the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, historically involved in supporting refugee programs, would be restructured to “reflect core administration priorities,” including an Office of Remigration to “revers[e] the flow of migrants” and focus on “Western values.”

In June despite the suspension of refugee resettlement, a group of about 50 white South Africans entered as “refugees” fleeing a non-existent “white genocide,” not only going to the front of the line for vetting, but skipping over it entirely.

In July, AttGen Pam Bondage⁵ directed that federal application forms and processes must only be in English, a step to implement the executive order declaring English the official language of the US.

That same month, “border czar” Tom Homan⁶ said ICE and Border Patrol don’t need probable cause to detain and question someone; their “physical appearance” (read: skin color) is enough, a notion to which the Scurrilous SCOTUS Six later gave their blessing.

In September, the Orange Overlord declared that no more than 7500 refugees would be admitted in 2026, just 6% of the number in Biden’s last year. Most of those slots will go to white South African farmer “refugees” like the group that arrived in June.

Over the course of the year they have attacked the idea of DACA and have seized people under its protection.

They have striven to strip protection from temporary protective status (TPS) recipients, more than 1.2 million people who fled wars, oppression, natural disasters, poverty, and more and who have permission to live and work in the US.

They have made a practice of rejecting the concept of due process, dismissing it in theory and denying it in practice.

They’ve openly talked about denaturalization, stripping people of their citizenship, even aggressively pursuing cases.

They’ve even attacked the notion of birthright citizenship, including pressing the Supreme Court for support.

Which brings us to November and Thanksgiving and the deranged post I mentioned at the top, the core of which multi-screen screed can be found in just three statements, which in a way can sum up the entire argument. In order of appearance, they are:

One: The “foreign population stands at 53 million people, most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.”

The population figure is from the Census Bureau and it is a count of all “foreign-born” residents of the US, no matter their status - which means it includes not only the long-demonized “illegals” but any who are here legally, including those covered by DACA or TPS, who have asylum claims pending, who have green cards, and who are naturalized citizens, all thrown into one, we might call it, basket of deplorables to be condemned and reviled for the ethnic crime of being foreign-born.

Two: This supposed “refugee burden” is “the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II.”

The other side of the always-evil present in these xenophobic dreamscapes is the always-glorious, wonderful, mythologized past, one in which, we are here told, there was no crime, no shortage of health care or housing, no urban decay, and no student failed or was failed, at least not enough to care about. It depends on both ignorance of the present and amnesia about the past. That is why history is their enemy and why they’re looking to, for one example, scrub LGBTQ+, particularly trans, history: not just to sanitize US history, but to fantasize, to infantilize, it, the better to turn the past into a weapon of control.

Three: He wants to “deport any foreign national who is ... non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

Which, we can safely assume, would exclude any non-Christians - especially Muslims, indeed I expect it was said with them in mind. (I suppose Jews would be okay. For now.) But questions of “non-compatibility” are not limited to religions but can include cultures. Remember the French New Right and the argument that different ethnicities require segregated living spaces.

Which brings up another, related, and final point. Although I’ve been addressing immigration mostly, don’t think for a moment that this is unrelated to, in fact do know it is wholly intertwined with, their attacks on DEI. Because diversity is exactly what repels them, inclusion is exactly what they can’t abide, and equity is exactly what denies their racial supremacy.

It’s all part of the same overriding racist, xenophobic, white supremicist, Christian nationalist worldview, an openly and consciously fascist ideology, rooted in a vision of racial and ethnic purity that sees non-white people as undeserving of citizenship or even basic human rights.

It is a worldview, an ideology, the Orange Overlord and his minions, most particularly Steven Voldemort Miller, have firmly embraced and are pushing for, trying to wrench our society into their personal warped, evil, dreamscape of a white ethno-state untouched by the contamination of lesser beings.

That’s what they’re after, those are the stakes. And as their speech becomes more openly exclusionary, more eliminationist, it’s ever more important that we never forget and we never let them pretend otherwise.

1 And here you thought it was the love of what he most passionately desires: money. (1 Timothy 6:10, Luke 12:15, Matthew 6:24)
2 Clarence Darrow during the Scopes Trial, Dayton, Tennessee (July 13, 1925). (Yes, the movie used an actual trial quote.)
3 In May, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor” that “threatens democracy.” The classification was suspended a week later, awaiting a final court decision.
4 If you want to see the video, it’s here.
5 Because she keeps getting tied up in legal knots trying to make sense of the regime’s legal arguments.
6 Good last name for him because, y’know, it’s almost human.

So I said - something about AI in healthcare

Another in an occasional series of trying to provide some more content here by posting worthwhile comments I’ve posted elsewhere.

In this case, I took a YouGov survey related to public perceptions about the use of AI in healthcare. Three of the questions asked for general responses rather than picking from among multiple choices.

-

November 26, 2025

What ethical considerations are most important to think about when adding AI tools to healthcare?
I was told by my surgeon some years ago “You treat the patient, not the X-ray.” The more we use AI, the more that adage is reversed.

During my recent hospitalization my PCP came by on their rounds, during which they displayed not through words but tone and demeanor a genuine personal concern for my health, something of which AI is incapable of expressing or feeling, at best offering instead merely an algorithmically-driven facade of concern, a programmed pretense, which well could be likened to the comforting reassurances of the scammer.

  

What is your overall impression of AI in healthcare?

Not ready for prime time. For now, it’s a bandwagon promising what it can’t (and perhaps never will) deliver, driven less by public health than by the profit-driven preferences of the corporate spectrum of health care (i.e., hospitals and the insurance industry) who pursue a goal of “efficiency” (read as “fewer employees”) and would, as I suggested earlier, “treat the X-ray, not the patient,” with us coming to exist less as patients than as datasets.

Is there anything else about AI in healthcare that you would like to share with us?
AI is good for, indeed excellent at, analyzing large amounts of data, producing results that can be viewed and considered mathematically because that’s what they are - mathematical derivations from mathematical data.

But healthcare in general and medicine within that reach involves more than mere data but also includes personalities and foibles and trust and other human interactions along with unavoidable judgment calls driven by such non-mathematical considerations, all of which are beyond its capabilities.

Which, by the way, makes the use of chat boxes by consumers for health information advice fraught with risk and worse as shown by recent suits against various companies whose chat boxes are accused of having encouraged teenager users to commit suicide. AI simply is not up the task to which the health care industry is trying to set it in pursuit of profit.

Liars figuring

I am sick to flaming death of our senile buffoon president claiming that in the wake of COVID we had “the highest inflation in the history of our country” and nobody ever, ever, calling out that transparent lie. I know it's a lie because remember, I saw, higher inflation than during Biden’s term.

Start with the fact that the peak year-over-year (YOY) inflation rate during Biden’s term was 9.1% in June 2021.*

In 1974, YOY inflation was 12.3%.

In 1978, it was 9.0%.
In 1979, it was 13.3%.
In 1980, it was 12.5%.

The highest in any year since 1929 was 18.1% in 1946.

Okay, next: For the year 2022 as a whole, (based on December end of year figures, the standard method) YOY inflation was 6.5%.

In the period 1941-2024, there have been 12 years with YOY inflation rates above 6.5%.**

Third: Over the course of his presidency, average YOY inflation under Biden was 4.95% - lower than under Nixon (6.10%), Ford (8.11%), or Carter (9.85%) and just a bit higher than Bush the elder (4.8I).

Has inflation been a struggle recently? Is it still a struggle, especially with slow growth and stalled real income growth? Absolutely freaking yes.

But “the highest in the history of our country?” Not even close. And dammit, some one of the White House reporters should have the guts to say it out loud to his face.

I may be considered old, but I damn well can remember 1974. And so can the Orange Overlord - unless his dementia has erased that part of his memory. Either that or he’s just a damned liar.

Actually, I suspect it’s both.

*All data via Investopedia.com.

**The years were 1941, 1942, 1946, 1947, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 2021.

So I said - somethng about elections

As it has developed, I’ve written very little here of late, partly because for whatever reason I’ve found it difficult to compose a piece of any significant depth or length - I guess you could call it some sub-variation of writer’s block - and because as I noted recently, I don’t feel that I’m adding anything of sufficient value around here to justify having a readership. The two are likely connected in some way, but that’s rather more self-analytical that I care to be right now.

Anyway, the point of this is that I thought I’d try to from time to time post some substantive comments I’ve made on others’ posts, not single line or toss-off reactions, but something that makes some kind of point. I’ll date each one and include a heading sufficient, I hope, to provide enough context for the comment to make sense. All such posts will be headlined "So I said."

This may not produce a lot of content and no guaranteed regularity because it depends on how wordy I’ve been elsewhere, but maybe enough to make it worth checking here from time to time. I’ll start with this one and thanks more than I can say for bothering to read.

-
November 10, 2025
[SCOTUS will review the question of counting mail-in ballots received after election day]

This is inane. Elections are supposed to be directed and controlled by the individual states, not the federal government - including accepting mail-in ballots postmarked on or before but received after election day.

The only - the only - argument I’ve heard to the contrary is the real reach that the Constitution sets election day, so you can’t count votes cast after it.

But to do that, they have to be arguing that a vote is “cast” when it is counted, not when it’s actually cast. Which runs into two major problems. First, if they want to be consistent, that “one set election day” argument would not only require banning early voting entirely (which, admittedly, is also part of the right-wing agenda), it ignores the fact by previous decisions the votes in question were cast when that envelope was put in the mail. Cast before, not after, not even on, election day.

“Oh yes, but they were still counted after,” they say? Okay, so suppose you vote in person on election day but because of turnout, vote counting isn’t completed by midnight. Must the counting stop and remaining votes be discarded? They would, after all, by the logic of the argument be "counted after election day" and therefore cast too late, so making the very argument self-defeating.

The issue at hand is not when votes are counted but when they are cast. The power of the states to count mail-in ballots postmarked by but received after election day is not in rational question, the arguments to the contrary are flat-out voter suppression, and it's a disgrace - a revealing one, but a disgrace nonetheless - for SCOTUS to even have taken this up.

Two new rules!

One of my more popular offerings is my "Rules for Right-wingers," a compilation of tricks, deceptions, evasions, and misdirections right-wingers use to avoid honest debates, answering questions, responsibility, and truth.

 

It made its first appearance in June 2009 with 13 rules, since expanded several times with additional rules, reaching a total of 22 rules in February 2024.

 

Well, guess what. It's time for two more.

 

Rule #23: Screw the forest, look at the trees!
Drown the argument in details to distract from the overall point. Gaza again is an example, where disputes were created and questions were raised over just how many Palestinians were starving or had been killed to avoid accepting the fact that Palestinians were starving and had been killed.

Rule #24: Use passive voice as a weapon.
To illustrate, look once more at Gaza. The October 7 attack must always be called “a terrorist attack by the terrorist organization Hamas.” When forced to admit to the destruction in Gaza, refer to it only in terms of “the humanitarian situation” as if it was the result of a hurricane or tidal wave with no human agency involved. The words “Israel,” “Netanyahu,” and “IDF” must never be employed in this context.

Okay, I need help

Or maybe advice is a better word.

Y’see, up until relatively recently I kept up a reasonably steady output of political commentary both through a website (okay, a blog, as old-fashioned as that sounds now) and a web channel which also served as a local-access cable TV show in about five states.

I was never a big dog; my audience was in the hundreds, but dammit I felt useful because I knew that audience consisted mostly of people whose news sources were largely limited to things like the nightly TV news - so I knew that I was giving them information and a perspective they might not see anywhere else.

But here nowadays I feel like I’m surrounded by posters who are heavily into news and politics and related commentary. I’m neither a known quantity nor one with any special expertise or background on any particular topic, with the result that I feel I have nothing to contribute here, nothing that is not being said equally well if not better by louder voices (i.e., bigger audience), nothing that adds to the conversation other than the occasional comment. Put simply, I feel useless.

So I guess I’m asking if anyone has any guidance.

If you want to see what I do/did, you can check out my stuff here or at my Substack (whoviating.substack.com). I haven’t been able to do the videos for the last two years, but the ones before then can be found at YouTube; just search on “whoviating.”

Let me be clear: I am not asking you to subscribe. This is not a pitch. You can subscribe if you want, of course, but the idea here is that if you’re moved to consider offering any ideas/suggestions/hope, you might want a sense of where I have been up to this point.

Thanks for reading.

The next level

The fascists and the self-interested camp followers are working up to their campaign to "destroy the left" and its "terrorism networks" and we accept the threat is real because we seem to have finally embraced Maya Angelou's famous quote, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." As I remarked a little while back, "It is possible to overstate their power; it is not possible to overestimate their intentions."

But I also have a next-level concern, beyond the coming attempts at repression, that I wanted to raise, one to be filed under "be ready for the fallout from unintended consequences, even if they’re not your own."

It's what happens when the MAGA Masters can't make good on their promises to "destroy" the left? Because they won't. They can't. Oh, there may be, probably will be, some show trials or at minimum multiple prosecutions; there will be a lot of "investigations" and a surfeit of accusations; there will be repression of speech and assembly; there will be a lot of pain for those directly and the much greater number indirectly impacted - but no, while the left may even be significantly injured it will not be "destroyed." We survived the Palmer Raids, we survived McCarthyism, we survived the conspiracy trials of the 60s, we will survive this. Maybe scarred and limping, but alive and continuing and re-building. And truth be told, every time we have gone through one of these cycles, at the end of it the country is a little better than it was before. The moral arc of the universe and all that, I suppose.

So anyway, getting back to the point, what happens when after the MAGA Masters have gotten their rabid followers all pumped up, they can't produce the ultimate victory they promised? How far will they go, how desperate will they be, to keep that loyalty, to hold that blind commitment?

And will those followers try to make that victory come true on their own? It wouldn't be the first time that leaders of a movement lost control of their creation. We've already seen it here on a small scale in the refusal of some of the MAGA crowd to accede to the attempts of the Orange Overlord and company to drop the whole Epstein file business. So yeah, that could happen.

If it does and the MAGA Masters start to lose control, lose their grip on the formerly obedient, will those Masters turn on their own followers? Again, it has happened before.

And don't anyone tell me "that'd be good" because now we're talking about literal blood in the streets and guerrilla warfare and if you think that wouldn't affect you, wouldn't come to your door (it's often been said, with cause, that civil wars are the worst), you're an idiot.

This doesn't mean, of course, that other than the moves at repression this will happen. Of course and yes it's a string of "what ifs." I only raise it as a scenario for which we should be prepared - because even if you think it unlikely, you, I think, have to agree it's plausible.

And I raise it for another reason: to remind ourselves that, in another old but true phrase, the best defense is a good offense. The more strongly we today, now, don't just defend our rights but press our commitments to justice, the more strongly we don't merely say "no" to what shouldn't be done but also say "yes" to what should, the more prepared we are to sacrifice in the present for the sake of the future, the sooner and more clearly we can show "destroy the left" to be the pipe dream it ultimately is, the less pain there will be in the end to us and, more importantly, everyone else.

So carry it on. Except more.

Speaking of Kirk

What follows is rather meandering and I probably should go to bed and do it tomorrow, but I'm worried I would cool off to much by then. So with that warning and the understanding that I may feel compelled to edit this later to straighten out spaghetti syntax, I'll proceed.

When anybody among the wingnuts of the right says anything about "free speech," you can be pretty damn sure that they mean free speech for them but not for anyone else.

If it wasn't already obvious, the wave of firings, suspensions, and other penalties we've seen imposed on workers for failing to react in a MAGA-approved manner to the killing of the sexist, racist, xenophobic, trans-hater that was Charlie Kirk drove home the point.

Well, here's another example: Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau is urging people to respond to Kirk's killing by reporting to the State Department people "who glorify violence and hatred" so officials can "undertake appropriate action." What constitutes such “action” is left unsaid along with how far it can and will extend.

Why is that concerning? For one, the meaning of "people" is curiously limited to "immigrants and foreign visitors." That could be taken as an admission they can't touch US citizens, except that stripping citizens of their passports is already under discussion, the DOJ is "is aggressively prioritizing efforts" to denaturalize citizens, and there is the on-going effort to repeal birthright citizenship - so that admission-that's-not-an-admission is at best cold comfort and the phrase "can't touch US citizens" must be modified with "yet."

For another, while the meaning of "people" is curiously limited, the meaning of "glorify" is curiously broad, embracing "praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event," none of which need describe anything approaching "glorify." "I'm glad he's dead" isn't "glorifying" the murder, "he made his name spewing hatred so we can't be surprised if he generated a hateful response" certainly doesn't, and "I guess if he'd used a hammer instead of a rifle it would've been okay," while crude, likewise doesn't make the cut.

The real point, however, is that none of that matters even if any of it actually did "glorify" the murder because all of it fits quite comfortably under the banner of the "FREE SPEECH!" the reactionaries will screech at the least challenge to their vile and often enough violent rhetoric. Because that human right does not rise or fall depending on citizenship or even legality of residency. It is a right, not a privilege to be dispensed to a favored few.

But not as far as the right wing is concerned, oh no. Note that Landau's whole premise by definition excludes anyone who has used Kirk's death to issue calls, no matter how violent, for "war" against those in any way on the left, regardless of their status as "immigrant or foreign visitor" or citizen. As long as it is said in praise of Kirk, it's fine.

Well, sauce for the goose and all that and if anyone objects to you having excoriated Charlie Kirk in death for the execrable person he was in life they should just be told "It's free speech. Do you believe in it or don't you?"

Trans killers? Or killers of trans rights?

So it's being reported that senior officials at the DOJ are talking about a possible federal ban on transgender folks owning guns.

This is building on the right-wing meme machine's notion that trans folks commit a disproportionate number of mass shootings and the ban would be justified on the grounds that people with gender dysphoria are mentally ill and unstable.

If this were a rational world, it would be enough to simply dismiss this as the twisted fantasies of trans-hating bigots politicizing a tragedy to advance their paranoid fears and political ambitions - but unhappily, it is not.

So let's go through it. Note at the top that I’m not going to bother with any arguments about “but the Second Amendment,” questions that seem to be the focus of too many words on this because, y'know, guns and freedom and all that. Not only because I’d be happy to see that widely misused and historically misinterpreted provision dumped from the Constitution, but because it’s actually irrelevant. Instead, a few facts.

1. Gender dysphoria is the stress that arises when there is a conflict between someone's sex, based on their primary and secondary sex characteristics, and their gender, that is, their sense of self. It is not a mental illness. In fact, therapists will often prefer the term “gender incongruence” specifically to affirm that the issue is one of dealing with stress, not in any way one of sanity.

2. Not only are trans folks not over-represented among mass shooters, they are if anything underrepresented.

Snopes and Media Bias/Fact Check both looked at the question of a supposed overabundance of trans mass shooters and the conclusion was the same both times. Snopes called it "False" and Media Bias/Fact Check bluntly called it a "Blatant lie."

The primary sources for each were the Gun Violence Archive and the Violence Prevention Project, which use somewhat different measures for inclusion. The Gun Violence Archive records mass shootings, meaning a shooting in which at least four victims are shot, not including the shooter. The Violence Prevention Project tracks mass killings, one in which at least four people are killed, again not counting the shooter. Despite that difference in focus, their answers to the overall question were the same.

The Violence Prevention Project recorded 195 mass shootings committed by 200 people between 1966 and 2024. Of those 200 shooters, only one was listed as transgender. That's 0.50% of the shooters.

The Gun Violence Archive reports that from January 1, 2013 to August 29, 2025, there were 5,729 mass shootings - involving just five confirmed transgender shooters. If you include a few cases in which the gender identity of the shooter was unconfirmed, there may have been eight. That's between 0.09% and 0.14% of all mass shooters in the GVA database.

So transgender folks, who by varying estimates make up about 1% of US adults, make up something between 0.1% and 0.5% of mass shooters.

Which means that to what should be no one’s surprise, the Department of Injustice is either lying or so wrapped up in their paranoid hatred that they can’t even count.

Meanwhile, cis men, who make up about 47% of the US population, commit about 96% of all mass shootings. What were you saying about over-representation?

We need to talk about the "Unitary Executive"

A couple of seemingly disparate points that will come together in an unholy embrace:

First, there have long been philosophical debates among Constitutional scholars about the role and nature of the office of the presidency, which are not as defined as those for Congress.

The debate has revolved around two lines in Article II: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President” (Section 1) and the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” (Section 3).

The latter provision, it has been argued, means that the role of the president is to carry out, to execute, the will of Congress as expressed in the laws. Through the veto power, the president has a say in what the laws are, but once a law is passed, that say is limited to what Congress allows - somewhat like a CEO subject to oversight by a board of directors. In its extreme versions, the president is reduced to little more than a functionary of Congress.

The former, on the other hand, claims that “as night follows day,” in the words of one advocate, giving the president “the executive power” means giving them direct and personal control over all matters that could be considered executive functions, including those related to staffing and the heads of agencies, distribution of funds, establishment and administration of regulations, and more. In addition, any federal-level board or agency carrying out any executive function such as regulatory oversight or enforcement is likewise under the president’s control, as are, therefore, their staffs.

That theory of the presidency is known as the “Unitary Executive”* and perhaps because of the enormous amount of power this would concentrate in one person’s hands, it was long considered a fringe theory, only to emerge from the shadows in recent decades, particularly since about 2010.

Okay, point two is that the Supreme Court has something called the “emergency docket,” where it takes up “emergency” appeals of lower court rulings, usually injunctions of some sort, in cases where the issue is at least supposedly of such immediate and pressing importance that it can’t wait to go through the normal appears process. The rulings are made without a full briefing, without oral argument, and, it appears, often with the justices discussing them at all. It seems to often be just “Here’s the appeal, how do you vote?”

The decision is issued often without any legal reasoning and frequently with no record of who voted which way. Because of the opaque nature of the whole business, this “emergency docket” is often called the “shadow docket.”

Point three is a Supreme Court decision called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. The case dates from 1935 and in it, the Court unanimously held that Congress has the authority to create independent agencies, not under the direct management of the president, and to insulate their members from presidential removal unless a good cause for the firing existed.

Okay, how do these points come together?

Over recent months, various federal courts, at both district and appellate levels, have blocked the Orange Overlord and his minions from carrying out mass firings and mass deportations, kicking trans folks out of the military, cancelling various grants, moving to dismantle the Education Dept., undermining birthright citizenship, trying to take over various agencies by firing their boards or administrators, giving DOGE’s (pronounced “dodgy”) band of grizzled veterans of high school access to our personal data - and more. And SCOTUS has repeatedly used the shadow docket to get rid of many of those injunctions, letting King Spray Tan continue his rampage. (It should be noted - while unnecessary to say - that almost all of these were by votes of 6-3, so “who voted which way” isn’t exactly a Final Jeopardy!-level challenge.)

Most recently, on September 8, they declared both that a)Rebecca Slaughter, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, can be, sure, why the heck not, fired and b)that those roving bands of masked government thugs can continue to strut around LA assuming anyone non-white who happened to be near, for example, a car wash is a potential “worst of the worst” “illegal alien” to be assaulted, cuffed, and hauled off - y’know, just in case.Um, but hold on a sec there. By any rational standard, in at least a great portion of those cases there is no “emergency.” There is no irreparable harm to either the Big Brother-wannabe in the White House or his coterie of clowns if courts freeze things in place during appeals - which is the idea behind an injunction. Indeed there is no harm to them at all, except to their egos and dreams of unrestrained power. So why were these on the shadow docket at all?

Perhaps even more to the point, a good number of these rulings are in stark contradiction to the Humphrey’s Executor case, the one which found that Congress could put precisely the sort of limits on Executive action that the Scurrilous Six (AKA the SS) are allowing.

“Piffle,” the SS reply. “We’re not deciding these cases. These are not final decisions.” Oh, yeah, that’s right. They are just “while appeals continue.” No harm, no foul.

Except, of course, to the irreparable harm that is done to those who, to name a few, will be kicked out of their jobs or their careers or the country, the irreparable harm done to scientific research, to health care, to the environment, the irreparable harm to the aspirations for justice among those, like trans folks**, who are stripped of anywhere to seek it if “the Messiah of America” (as wild-eyed Xian fundamentalist Shane Vaughn calls him) is given continued free rein. Or reign.

Which is the real point. In a technical, legal sense, it’s true, these actions are not final. But in a practical sense, for those people and agencies impacted they are.

And it’s more than that, which is the ultimate point I wanted to make, what brings this all together. Because it won’t be the end. By consciously choosing to allow the slaughter of reason, of ethics, of functioning government agencies built up over decades to continue, by empowering the mass firings, the mass deportations, the stripping of rights, the destruction of independent agencies, and doing it all in direct defiance of 90 years of Supreme Court precedent, these reactionaries in robes, the Scurrilous Six, have de facto embraced an extreme version of the Unitary Executive, one in which, as a mirrored version of the alternative that could make the presidency just a functionary of the Congress, could and if they have their way would make Congress little more than a piggy back for an Executive Branch controlling all the levers of power in the federal government.

So don’t be fooled for a minute, a second, by the “while appeals continue” blather. I see no reason to think that if and when an appropriately useful case gets to them, they will not contrive some reason, some justification, for kicking Humphrey’s Executor to the curb in favor of centralized power, even if that power is not in the hands of our present pretender to a nonexistent throne.

This does not mean give up, it does mean stop going to the federal courts, if only because SCOTUS can’t take up every case, with some wins at the district and circuit levels having gone unappealed for just that reason.*** And it definitely does not mean not hitting the streets or ignoring state-level pressure and organizing.

It does, however, mean that this is the reality of the legal universe in which we are operating and we have to be prepared to fight on that basis.

I gave a much-shortened version of this to a group of folks with who I join in a weekly rally and was chided by one afterwards for not including something hopeful. I’m afraid on this matter I don’t see a lot of cause for hope at least in the short make that middle run - but I will say it makes whatever we actions we do take even more vital.

*Curiously, the term originally arose in the discussion at the Constitutional convention over if the presidency should be held by one person or a council.

**If you’re one of those “LGB without the T” folks, do you really think that if the fascist reactionaries who dream of, to quote George Will, “back to 1900" do succeed in driving trans folks out of society, do you really think you won’t be next? Really? At a time when right-wing voices are starting to openly talk about overturning Obergefell and two members of SCOTUS say it should be “re-visited,” do you really think that? Really??

***To the contrary, it suggests filing more suits, as many as can be justified and maybe some that can’t, flooding the system with more cases and findings than SCOTUS would have the room on its docket to overturn even if the SS wanted to.