Noemskull

On the MAGA Carta

About the current administration there are a lot of truisms that, while still true, have nonetheless gotten kind of shopworn. That truth is literally meaningless to MAGA, we know. That the cruelty is the point, we know. That they’re doing everything they can think of, with the assiduousness of a penniless drifter trying car doors at midnight, to kill democracy and won’t stop until it’s accomplished, we know, etc.

Not that the self-evidence of these propositions relieves us of our responsibility to try and get our less attentive countrymen to understand them. But when wise guys like you and me rehearse these themes among ourselves, we may get a little bored. How many citations of On Tyranny can even the most earnest liberal wine mom or beer dad endure before it all starts to sound like the world’s biggest In This House lawn sign? (Not that you should take those down! Like I said, there are low-info voters watching.)

This has to be a caution for anyone who writes a lot about politics. I’m not talking about Prestige Press types, of course! They just grab hold of the latest handle (e.g. Joe Biden Is Still Old, Now With Cancer), to which they are guided like a geezer to a grab-bar by the rightwing noise machine, and churn for all they’re worth. (How [Still] Old Is He? So Old That Questions Remain! Now let’s bring out Dean Phillips!)

No, I mean guys like me, who really care and have the deflated bank accounts to prove it. To a great extent I do play the classics, albeit refreshed by the latest object lessons thereof, e.g. the War on Democracy as evinced by the recent, otherwise senseless revocation of the Energy Star program. (Also I have jokes!)

Today as well I have examples Ripped From Today’s Headlines. But I think there may be a glimmer of added interest in at least one of the atrocities.

You probably saw there were a number of hearings in the Senate this week, at which administration officials said a bunch of crazy shit. This is not really anything new. Just the other day Kash Patel showed up at an Appropriations meeting where he was supposed to present a budget for the FBI and straight up said he didn’t have one and offered neither reasons nor remorse for it. This tracks with the come-and-get-me-coppers shamelessness of the Trump crew in general. No surprises there.

But there was something piquant in the latest highlight reel. First we had IRS Commissioner nominee Billy Long refusing to say that the law forbids Trump to use IRS to investigate his enemies, to the point where Liz Warren read the literal law to him and he had to pretend not to understand it:

(BTW, no shock, the Wall Street Journal headlined this struggle session “Trump’s IRS Pick Defends His Record Promoting Tax Breaks” and, after a brief description of Warren’s questioning, added, “Long said later that he would make sure that the IRS wouldn’t and should not be politicized on his watch,” which I guess was easier for Long to assert when the mean lady was no longer trying to make him stipulate to a particular form of politicization that he certainly intends to commit.)

We also had Secretary of State Marco Rubio claiming, on the record and to Chris Van Hollen’s face, that Abrego Garcia, the wrongfulness of whose detention in a foreign gulag is by now as well-documented as any tide table, is a “gang member” and a “human trafficker” and that Van Hollen had a “margarita” with him, which is at least three different lies.

All of this is amusing/horrifying, but in more or less the expected manner. There’s not much new about Rubio’s disregard for truth or Long’s comically craven refusal to admit the law is the law. (It’s very close to the “2020 was rigged” pledge all elected Republicans had to make last year if they wanted to hop aboard Tubby’s gravy train.)

But there’s something in Kristi Noem’s weird Bizarro-world reading of habeas corpus that struck me as special:

Since her installation, much has been made of Noem’s almost-too-perfect incarnation of MAGA values. She wrote about killing her dog, not for regrettable-but-had-to-be-done Old Yeller mercy-killing reasons, but because the dog had become an annoyance — clearly choosing to project, in furtherance of her career, the sort of heedless cruelty she knew Trump would appreciate.

Noem has also plumped her face with fillers to better conform with the rightwing idea of feminine beauty, and has gone, dressed in police outfits but with her long hair coiffed and streaming, on absurdly cruel photo ops, most notoriously at the Salvadorian hellhole where her Department has sent at least 50 migrants whose only offense was being in the way when she needed to show-deport some Latinos.

This Ilsa She-Wolf of the ICE ICE act seems to be all Noem has. She has never said or written anything of which I’m aware that shows any understanding of or interest in democracy or government. She just knows what the boss likes.

So it’s possible that she didn’t understand the not only anti-democratic but also anti-civilizational statement she made to the committee. Which may be why she was chosen to advance it.

It reminds me of what happened with birthright citizenship. which we all thought was settled because the damn Constitutional Amendment is so clear. In an anywhere-near-normal world Tubby’s executive order against it would be no more meaningful than if he scrawled “Trump is world pickleball champ” on a bathroom wall. Like Noem’s statement, it was too stupid to take seriously.

Yet his Gruppenführer Steven Miller made a policy of ranting about it, and in response a whole little coterie of bullshit legal scholars emerged to make up an argument for this nonsense and, supported by Tubby and his enablers, hoist it unto the Supreme Court, at least with regard to the scope of the injunctions standing against implementation of the theory; if they can’t fully succeed (and that can’t be ruled out) they may at least partly succeed on the injunctions, and then come back later to take a bigger whack at the foundations they’ve weakened.

The habeas thing goes even further. It strikes at the roots of common law and consent of the governed. Which I’m sure Trump would love to get rid of — it’d prove he’s tougher than King John, that loser. But they wouldn’t let him try talking about it to the press — think of the pronunciation issues — and an EO reinterpreting habeas corpus might even get some of his lickspittles to protest.

It may be that, as shameless a factotum as she is, Noem didn’t realize what she was saying. I don’t mean that she wouldn’t commit any indignity for her own success; I’m sure she would. I mean, based on her inept reference to Lincoln in the Civil War — which suggests another, deeper level of misunderstanding, but let that pass — she may have just been pushing a more familiar mass-immigration-invasion argument, and misspoken. That’s what the “Noem flunks test” angle some news outlets have taken suggests.

But I do think that, if she hasn’t internalized this inversion of habeas, she has heard it around the shop, so to speak — perhaps from Miller. Maybe Miller gave Noem the words she repeated in committee as part of a coordinated strategy. Because there’s no need to argue for this outrageous idea now — what’s needed is merely to assert it until, like the birthright citizenship absurdity, it attracts a bunch of fascist lawyers who will gladly gin up a line of sophistry to squeeze it through sympathetic courts. Then, who knows? They may win a bigger prize than even we cynics imagined was available to them.