Once upon a time in America, there was a tyrant. And Congress rejected him totally.
The tyrant, of course, was King George III, the target of the Declaration of Independence. We take it for granted now, but the Declaration was an enormous political innovation — in it, the country that became the United States of America laid claim to certain “unalienable” rights, rights that took precedence over any king or crown.
To protect those rights, our Founders declared that the People were allowed to “alter” or “abolish” the government — in this case, British rule over the American colonies.
The idea that ‘the People’ have ‘unalienable rights’ became so standard that it slipped into cliche
The point of the famous preamble to the Declaration — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — is that the government should exist to protect our rights, a radical proposition in an era when governments mostly existed on the basis that one guy was descended from another guy. Over time, the idea that “the People” have “unalienable rights” became so standard that it slipped into cliche, the stuff of car commercials. But this was not a throwaway line. These rights are repeated throughout the founding documents of the United States. Life and liberty aren’t just there for decoration — they are essential to the spec. They are the reason why the entire American system has been designed the way it has.
The Declaration pronounces these rights to be so important that it’s worth overthrowing a government over them. But one should not undertake revolution against a tyrannical government lightly, the Declaration says, going on to provide a massive litany of complaints as justification. In modern times, the full list was considered to be the boring part of this document, lacking the vim and vigor of “we hold these truths to be self-evident” and other such bars from the preamble. But this year, it’s become a… bracing read.
Listed among the reasons to boot the British monarch are:
From the beginning, this has all been profoundly un-American
From the beginning, this has all been profoundly un-American, and it wasn’t surprising when the Trump administration ran into some legal problems. A district court judge issued an injunction against the Department of Homeland Security, requiring it to add a fairly basic form of due process to its deportation machine. Detainees set to be deported must be told where they are going, so they can have the chance to explain that being sent to that specific country may result in their torture or death. “This small modicum of process is mandated by the Constitution of the United States,” the judge wrote.
“Small” is too fucking right; giving someone the opportunity to pipe up before being shipped off to a place that might kill them is not exactly a radical affirmation of human rights. But this is where we are as a country: the right-wing justices of the Supreme Court stayed the injunction. So the DHS can now go right back to shipping people off to CECOT — or somewhere even worse — without telling them where they are going or hearing out why they should not go.
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