Reading You Your Rights.
March 15,
2025, updated March 16, 2025.
Things
continue to happen fast. Today, March 15, has been extra busy.
Blueprint
for Autocracy, posted February 19, overlooked a key element for dismantling
American Democracy -- oppress individual rights.
I realized the
omission March 9 and drafted a version today before the Washington Post
reported that President Trump declared the 1798 Alien Enemies Act gave him the
authority to use wartime powers against a Venezuelan gang that he claims has
invaded the US.
A few hours
earlier than that, a federal judge issued a ruling blocking him from doing just
that. It should not have been a surprise. Trump campaigned on it and included
it in his inaugural address.
There are
800,000 Venezuelans in the US, many under temporary protective status set to
expire soon. Estimates of the number of gang members among them is .001%, or hundreds.
Read Your Rights
When the Constitution was ratified in1788, the belief that it explicitly limited the powers of the new government prevailed over calls for it to spell out individual rights. Just a year later, James Maddison introduced seventeen amendments to the Constitution in the House. By 1791, ten were ratified by enough states to become our Bill of Rights.
Here are
three particularly worthy of a reread today.
The First
Amendment : “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and
to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The Fourth
Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be
violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by
Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and
the persons or things to be seized.”
The Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The Bill of
Rights was challenged almost immediately. The tensions between government and
individual rights, federal and states’ rights, and what it means to be an
American have been inherent in our government from the start.
George
Washington was unanimously elected our first president in 1789. He had no
political party. Delegates cast two votes each. John Adams received the second
most votes to become vice-president.
During
Washington’s presidency, wars roiled Europe and threatened to involve America.
Washington carefully maintained American neutrality, but his cabinet and his
country became increasing divided among those sympathetic to the ideals of the
French revolution and those fearing it and sympathizing with Britain. Many
French citizens fled the French and Haitian revolutions and found refuge here.
Less than
two months before election day in 1796, Washington announced he would not run
for a third term. Game on.
Alexander
Hamilton formed the Federalist Party with Adams and John Jay. Federalists
believed in a strong central government and sided with England.
Jefferson
and Aaron Burr, the anti-Federalists, founded the Democratic-Republican Party
or “Jeffersonian Republicans.” They resisted a strong central government in
favor of individual and states’ rights and sympathized with the ideals of the French
revolution.
The election
was close, with Adams prevailing over Jefferson. Jefferson declined active
participation in the Adams administration. Americans have been dueling, pun
intended, over the issues that shaped the 1796 election ever since.
Understand Your Rights
In 1798,
with the Federalist-controlled Adams government aligned with the British and on
the brink of war with France, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, four
controversial pieces of legislation aimed at curtailing criticism from
Jefferson and friends.
The most highly
charged at the time was the Sedition Act, which was viewed as undermining the First
Amendment. It made it a crime for American citizens to "print, utter, or
publish...any false, scandalous, and malicious writing" about the
government.”
The other
three Acts were aimed at immigrants. The Federalists were concerned that
non-citizen “aliens” would align with the Jeffersonian Republicans.
Specifically,
the Alien Enemies Act permitted the president to arrest, imprison, and deport
aliens during time of war.
The
Federalists acted quickly. Sedition trials, all targeting Jeffersonian Republicans,
and Senate contempt actions followed. The Alien and Sedition acts quickly
proved hugely unpopular.
Adams served
only one term, losing to Jefferson in 1800. He was the only Federalist elected
President.
Strikingly, Hamilton
was a partisan politics victim in more ways than one. He drafted much of Washington’s
Farewell Address, in which Washington bluntly warned of the dangers of political
parties.
“They are
likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which
cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power
of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying
afterward the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion,” he said.
The last
time the Alien and Sedition acts were broadly used was during WWII, when FDR
invoked them to inter more than 110,000 primarily Japanese foreign nationals.
The scars of that experience have yet to heal.
FDR’s
successor, Harry Truman, told Congress in 1950, “Once a government is committed
to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to
go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it
becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where
everyone lives in fear.”
Balancing
the internal and external security of our country has always been difficult,
Truman said, placing special emphasis on preserving our individual liberties at
the same time. He invoked the Bill of Rights and Sedition Act as important
precedents.
Apply Your Rights
Things are
happening quickly.
On March 4,
President Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, “All Federal Funding will
STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests.
Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which
they came.”
The BBC
noted Trump did not define “illegal protest.”
This is not
a free speech issue, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a CNBC interview
the same day, “This is a safety and civil rights issue.”
On March 8,
ICE agents broke into the apartment of Mahmoud Khalil, a legal resident of the
US to arrest him for a visa violation that did not exist.
Khalil is a
permanent green card holder and is married to an American. ICE initially said
Khalil was arrested so they could revoke his student visa. When told he did not
have one, they said they would revoke his green card instead.
Khalil, a
graduate student at Columbia University, was a leader in campus protests
against Isreal last year. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson
confirmed Khalil’s arrest, describing it as being “in support of President
Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”
On March 9,
Senator, astronaut, and combat pilot Mark Kelly posted on X, “Just left
Ukraine…We all want this war to end, but any agreement has to protect
Ukraine's security and can't be a giveaway to Putin."
X owner, sometimes
DOGE leader, spaceman-wanna-be, South African-Canadien-American, and
billionaire Elon Musk replied, “You are a traitor.”
On March 14,
DHS announced a second Colombia protestor has been arrested and a third has
fled to Canada.
Today, March
15, the US President invoked wartime powers not authorized by Congress, in a
war he declared, but Congress has not, within our own borders, and against no
foreign state.
Washington
and Truman warned us. We did not listen.
In Blueprint
for Autocracy, I noted Trump was proceeding as if seeking to end American
Democracy. I was hoping and waiting to be proved wrong. I am still waiting.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8503618/
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1784-1800/french-rev
https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/the-first-president/political-parties
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CDOC-106sdoc21/pdf/GPO-CDOC-106sdoc21.pdf
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-day-the-constitution-was-ratified
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/duel-federalist-and-republican-party/
https://www.studentsofhistory.com/ideologies-flip-Democratic-Republican-parties
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqly0zrnnv3o
https://apnews.com/article/columbia-university-mahmoud-khalil-ice-15014bcbb921f21a9f704d5acdcae7a8
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/alien-and-sedition-acts
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/musk-calls-sen-kelly-traitor-trip-ukraine/story?id=119640282
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rnzp4ye5zo
https://apple.news/AE7AjUo-1TmeHjewBcvozXg
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/burr-vs-hamilton-behind-the-ultimate-political-feud
You’re on fire, John. Do you think people aren’t tuned in to what’s happening to individual rights because they haven’t had to think about it or don’t know life where their rights were ignored? He has no boundaries and very little to stop the total destruction of our democracy.
ReplyDeleteI started this because many are underestimating how different this is from our lived history. This is not business as usual. Individual rights is just one area being subverted as part of a larger planned effort. Thanks for commenting, may lead to a future post.
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