Those who wrote and ratified the Constitution sometimes called its protections “parchment barriers” – meaning the paper and words on it couldn’t do much unless people supported it.
Do you care? Suppose you’re picked up by a masked and unmarked ICE agent, no doubt by mistake, if we can assume it was a government agent and not a kidnapper who picked you up, what can you do? Due process was incorporated from the Magna Carta of 1354, to give you a way to show it was a mistake, there was no reason to pick you up, you’re innocent, and you can’t just be locked up because someone doesn’t like you or want a bribe for your freedom.
But Trump has been fighting a war against your ability to protect yourself against false arrest. He blocked due process by attacking and intimidating lawyers and law firms for the mere act of providing counsel and defending people Trump doesn’t like. God forbid any firm have the temerity to advise and defend his opponents. For Trump, they shouldn’t just lose; they weren’t entitled to due process in the first place.
When Shakespeare wrote "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers," he wasn’t attacking lawyers; just the opposite, he was suggesting that killing lawyers would protect the thugs. Trump is trying to “kill the lawyers” so he can turn ICE into thugs, and straitjacket judges.
The Constitution says you have a right to a lawyer for your defense, and an impartial judge. For Trump, no law need be violated for him to attack the survival of law firms that have the temerity to defend people against his charges. And no law firm can safely defend them.
This president views the protection of due process for you and me as an obstacle to his power and treats shredding the Constitution as an example of his power. Pick up someone without any form of due process or impartial procedure, send him abroad without legal authority, and when the “mistake” is discovered, do everything possible not to correct that error. That leaves none of us safe.
Other protections should also protect you against lawless behavior by a power-crazed president. This president has been treating everything in the Constitution as an invitation to shred the paper and ignore the rules: explicit limitations on the president’s power, delegations of power to other branches, congressional control of the budget and due process.
Do you care if he ignores his constitutional obligations, and lies when it suits him? His tariffs are proving my point. Trump has no idea what the consequences of his tariffs are or will be, and doesn’t seem to care as long as the rich and famous give him valuables. So he skirts all the rules and decrees tariffs. Without Congress and the courts to hold them back, all I can suggest is to induce him to protect you with gold plated jets and the like. Not something you can afford? What a shame.
My last book was intended as a warning that, if we didn’t deal with the economic disparity and division in this country, we’d likely lose our democratic system. My warning didn’t take. Trump used those problems to convince people to elect him. But fix things for poor and working people? You’d have to believe in fairy tales. He’s taken apart every agency and program that provided jobs, protected working people and provides them a safety net when Trump or the economy decides we don’t need them.
He’d be the first person I’d deport.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran. He enjoys the help of his editor, Jeanette Gottlieb
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