Trump’s glue-eating necrophile house-elf says the administration is “actively looking” at the suspension of the writ of Habeas Corpus. Americans should “actively look at” overthrowing these tyrants.
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Donald Trump and his entourage flood the zone with cascading outrages precisely because it overwhelms us — we’re helpless passengers on a hijacked ship of state. They’re trying to discombobulate us to the point we fall passive, or become so enraged that we’re utterly ineffectual. They seem to take turns and last week was Stephen Miller’s turn.
I understand very well that in dispatching this repulsive ghoul to announce the administration is “actively looking” at suspending habeas corpus, the idea is to reduce me and people like me to sputtering, wordless muscular spasms, hyperventilation, eye rolling, frothing at the mouth, tachycardia, and ultimately, clonus — leaving them free to bathe in swimming pools full of the cash they’re raking in from their massive crypto scams. I’ve vowed over and over that I won’t keep falling for it, yet I keep falling for it, salivating madly as Mad King Pavlov shakes the bell in my general direction.
I doubt they’ll really try to suspend habeas corpus — formally, anyway. They’ll just keep ignoring the Constitution and the courts while insisting they’re obeying both. I reckon they sent the necrophile elf out to make this announcement just to yank our chains, or to see how we react. It’s meant to gauge our level of desensitization. It’s meant to be yet another distraction from how much they’re destroying and stealing. And it’s meant to intimidate the judiciary.
Even suggesting this is an outrage. It’s part of a now-familiar ritual in which the administration says or does something obscene — something that would once have caused articles of impeachment to be drafted by nightfall — and no one really reacts, which is even more demoralizing than the outrage itself.
It’s a measure of how profoundly desensitized we’ve become that we heard this and, basically, shrugged. How long will it take before we’re so numb that we shrug when they announce that henceforth they’ll be summarily hanging “radical rogue judges” from a crane? “We’re looking at cranes. Maybe throwing them out of helicopters — that’s an option we’re actively looking at. The president is clear — and what he says is, of course, the supreme law of the land — that the radical rogue judges need to go.”
It’s supremely depressing to realize, from watching the news commentary, how many Americans don’t even know what the writ of habeas corpus is.
The Five Knights’ Case
In 1626, King Charles I found himself politically isolated and financially constrained. Parliament refused to grant him the funds he urgently needed for his war with Spain. Instead, it demanded an investigation into the extravagance and incompetence of the army commander, the Duke of Buckingham — the King’s favorite.
Like his father, James I, Charles believed deeply in the divine right of kings. He was determined to rule without undue interference from Parliament. This conviction would in time lead to civil war and regicide. But for the moment, Charles announced a fiscal innovation: “forced loans” — a euphemism for extralegal taxation. Wealthy subjects would be compelled to lend money to the Crown; those who refused to pay would be imprisoned without trial and, if they continued to resist, sent before the Privy Council.
Many refused. Among them were Sir Thomas Darnell, Sir John Corbet, Sir Walter Erle, Sir Edmund Hampden, and Sir John Heveningham — all prominent gentry. They were arrested at the king’s orders and imprisoned without charge. They were not brought to trial. They were not told what law they were accused of breaking. They were simply detained by royal order.
From the damp and stench of the Tower, the five knights sought refuge in the ancient bulwark of the English subject: the writ of habeas corpus. Before the justices of the Court of King’s Bench, their advocates demanded what the law had long held sacred — that no man be imprisoned save by due cause shown. They presented an order from a common law court: The king must specify what law they were alleged to have broken.
When the case came before the Court of King’s Bench, their counsel argued that imprisonment without a stated cause was unlawful under the Magna Carta, specifically invoking Clause 39. The king himself must bow before the rule of law.
(The original was written in Latin.)
The knights maintained that arbitrary imprisonment violated the ancient liberties of Englishmen.
Attorney General Sir Robert Heath argued for the Crown. The knights, he said, were being held per speciale mandatum domini regis — by special command of the King. The King reserved the right to imprison without cause under the royal prerogative, he maintained, especially in matters involving state security or emergency.
Chief Justice Nicholas Hyde — an undistinguished jurist, rather like a spiritual forefather of SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts — delivered an equivocal ruling. The court declined to accept that the king had a general right to imprison without cause, but also declined to release the knights.
In this case, the court reasoned, the return on the writ said the knights were held “by the special command of the King.” Under the common law, he was not required to be more specific, so the court could not inquire further. The deeper constitutional question was left unaddressed. The knights stayed in prison.
The moment had the air of something ancient cracking.
Imagine the scene. Westminster, early spring, late afternoon. Rain splatters against leaded windows; candles sputter in iron sconces. Papers rustle. The hall smells faintly of damp wool, old ink, wood smoke. There is a low din of discontented murmuring, voices anxious and subdued. A few members stand near the hearth. Others lean on benches, wrapped in cloaks. The Five Knights’ case has cast a pall.
A messenger enters, breathless, with a transcript of the judgment. The Five shall remain in the Tower. His Majesty invokes the prerogative — “for reasons of state.”
The mutters of protest in the chambers swiftly become a roar of outrage and betrayal.
It is not just that the five knights are in prison. It is the threat to the rule of law itself. A king who could imprison without charge could, in principle, imprison anyone. No nobleman’s property was safe and no commoner’s liberty was secure. The ancient protections enshrined in Magna Carta would melt in the heat of such exercises of royal prerogative.
The elder statesman and former Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke — half-orator, half-prophet, a kind of legal Jeremiah — rises in the Commons, stooped with age but aflame with passion. “Magna Carta,” he declaims, “is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign.” Not even the king himself is above the law.
Lex facit regem. The law makes the king. And it may unmake him should he forget it. They speak of necessity. But tyranny is ever draped in the cloak of necessity. Kings may fall, ministers may flee — but the law endures. It is not the creature of kings, but their master.
The soul of the English constitution was at stake. “The writ of habeas corpus,” Coke thundered, “is the most high and most honorable remedy in our laws … the great bulwark of our liberties.”
His speech electrified Parliament. Invoking centuries of common-law precedent, he denounced the king’s use of imprisonment without cause: “What a slippery place do we stand upon, if once we leave the rock of the law!”
Even hardened members of the Court who had long supported the king could not escape the weight of Coke’s arguments. Sir Thomas Wentworth, a man known for his royalist inclinations, clenched his fists uneasily. The backbenchers shifted in their seats, emboldened.
Coke’s speech became the rallying cry for those in Parliament appalled by the erosion of their rights and the weakening of constitutional checks on royal power. It consolidated the parliamentary position that the king’s actions were illegal and tyrannical, intensifying the political and constitutional conflict, making it clear that Parliament would not passively accept royal overreach.
In response, Parliament drafted and forced through the 1628 Petition of Right. It declared, in no uncertain terms:
- No taxation without parliamentary consent.
- No imprisonment without cause shown.
- No quartering of soldiers in private homes.
- No martial law in peacetime.
If this sounds familiar, it should. (If it doesn’t, well, that’s our problem, right there.) The Petition was an extraordinary attempt to bind the king to the rule of law. It explicitly cited the abuses revealed in the case of the Five Knights.
The Petition of Right marked the first of a series of legislative changes and court cases that ultimately led to the 1679 Habeas Corpus Act. Passed after the Restoration of Charles II, the act reinforced the legal protections against arbitrary detention. It became a key element of English common law and all subsequent constitutional developments in both Britain and its colonies. It enshrined a modern constitutional understanding of habeas corpus as a guarantee of fundamental liberty. It captured Parliament’s growing suspicion of raison d’état, a concept increasingly associated with continental absolutism.
The act explicitly mandated timely judicial review, guaranteeing prisoners a legal means to challenge unjust imprisonment. It established heavy penalties for officials who violated the habeas corpus standards. If before this habeas corpus had been a procedural tool, now it was, explicitly, a safeguard of liberty. Habeas corpus enshrined judicial oversight as the essential check against arbitrary power.
Habeas corpus quickly became the emblem of Enlightenment ideals. John Locke recognized habeas corpus, in Two Treatises of Government, as the essential barrier against arbitrary rule and state tyranny. The idea became central to liberal political theory.
Coke’s arguments about the limitations of royal power and the supremacy of the law shaped the debates leading to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the establishment of constitutional monarchy, and the evolution of parliamentary sovereignty. They inspired future generations of jurists, politicians, and philosophers, including those involved in drafting the English Bill of Rights — and they inspired the Founding Fathers, of course.
This is our inheritance — a glorious tradition in political thought dating from 1215.
When asked, nativists are apt to say that they object to immigration from countries that don’t share our culture and our traditions.
In Poland in 2017, Trump delivered a speech, written by Stephen Miller. “The fundamental question of our time,” he said, “is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?”
Which values did he mean?
The Moment
The transition from a constitutional republic to a tyranny rarely happens in a single instant. But when historians look back — if in the future there are historians, and if they find a brief experiment in self-governance on the Planet Earth worth studying — they will probably date the formal demise of the experiment to the moment when Trump made it clear that he had no intention of facilitating the erroneously deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return, as ordered by a unanimous ruling of the Supreme Court handed down on April 10.
The Supreme Court told him to produce the body. He did not. That was when the United States ceased to be governed by the Constitution it adopted in 1789.
I don’t mean to say we were a perfectly functional constitutional republic on April 14 and overnight became something else. The Constitution has been failing for some time.
But when Trump made it clear, in the course of his April 15th Oval Office meeting with Salvadoran strongman Nayib Bukele, that he would not be bound by the unanimous judgment of the Supreme Court, we became something else in the way liquid becomes gas.
Before that, if you very much wished to, you could squint and cock your head a bit and somehow convince yourself that what you were seeing still fit: Yes, this was still the country you knew.
The exercise might call to mind a middle-aged tubby squeezing himself into the jeans he wore in high school: clearly uncomfortable, and one was sad and embarrassed for the squeezer. But with his vast rump cantilevered into his jeans, he could reassure himself that, basically, he was still the same man.
Not after that. The jig is up.
The Alarm of Tyranny
It’s not just that the Trump administration has made it clear that it intends to defy the Supreme Court. It’s the nature of the ruling they propose to defy.
This is not a complicated matter. This is not a controversial ruling. It concerns a fundamental outrage, one that not only contravenes the Constitution but the cornerstone of common-law jurisprudence since the time of the Magna Carta.
Everything rests upon habeas corpus. The principle spans centuries of judicial refinement, parliamentary enactments, and philosophical endorsement. This is the principle Coke advanced in the Case of the Five Knights. No one may be lawfully detained by royal prerogative alone. There must be judicial review.
In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone famously described habeas corpus as the “keystone” of liberty.
Of great importance to the public is the preservation of this personal liberty; for if once it were left in the power of any the highest magistrate to imprison arbitrarily whomever he or his officers thought proper, (as in France it is daily practised by the crown,) there would soon be an end of all other rights and immunities.
Some have thought that unjust attacks, even upon life or property, at the arbitrary will of the magistrate, are less dangerous to the commonwealth than such as are made upon the personal liberty of the subject.
To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole kingdom; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government. (My emphasis.)
Alexander Hamilton cited this passage in Federalist 84. Without the writ of habeas corpus, all other rights collapse. This principle is the beating heart of Anglo-American constitutional thought. In declaring that the Trump administration has no use for it, Stephen Miller has announced that whatever the United States was, it is no longer.
Plainly, we bereaved the hapless Kilmar Abrego Garcia of his liberty, without accusation or trial, by secretly hurrying him to jail — where his sufferings, the Trump administration hopes, are unknown or forgotten.
Garcia is, in a sense, fortunate: His case became known to the media, so he is not entirely forgotten. But I don’t think you’d lose the bet if you wagered we’ve secretly buried many more men and women in a Salvadoran hole with no semblance of due process. These are circumstances that should convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the realm.
In 2020, Trump delivered these remarks to a White House Conference on American History:
Our mission is to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character. We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world. …
In this great chamber, we preserve our glorious inheritance: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. On this very day in 1787, our Founding Fathers signed the Constitution at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It was the fulfillment of a thousand years of Western civilization. Our Constitution was the product of centuries of tradition, wisdom, and experience. No political document has done more to advance the human condition or propel the engine of progress.
Very true.
It was the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham who said, “The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.” Something similar may be said of Trump’s relationship to the Constitution. Trump went on to say something about the threat to Americans’ “values, their heritage, and their very way of life.”
Habeas corpus was central to American colonial resistance to British rule, especially in response to arbitrary imprisonment during the revolutionary era. It was explicitly enshrined in Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution, an expression of the Founders’ conviction that liberty required judicial protection from unlawful detention. It is a fundamental civil liberty. Without it, we’re not even pretending to be a free country.
Too many dipshits will get excited about anything some other dipshit tells them they should be excited about.
So important is the idea of due process in the US Constitution that there are two due process clauses, in both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. The words “No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” descend directly from Clause 39 of the Magna Carta:
No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.
A Public Display
In the lower court ruling unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court, a federal judge laid out the facts of the Garcia case:
In 2019, an immigration judge — acting under the authority delegated by the United States Attorney General and pursuant to powers vested by Congress — granted Plaintiff Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia (“Abrego Garcia”) withholding of removal, thereby protecting him from return to his native country, El Salvador. Such protection bars the United States from sending a noncitizen to a country where, more likely than not, he would face persecution that risks his “life or freedom.” … Six years later, without notice, legal justification, or due process, officers from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement … put him on a plane bound for the Terrorism Confinement Center (“CECOT”) in El Salvador. Neither the United States nor El Salvador have told anyone why he was returned to the very country to which he cannot return, or why he is detained at CECOT.
… As Defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere. Having confessed grievous error, the Defendants now argue that this Court lacks the power to hear this case, and they lack the power to order Abrego Garcia’s return. For the following reasons, their jurisdictional arguments fail as a matter of law. Further, to avoid clear irreparable harm, and because equity and justice compels it, the Court grants the narrowest, daresay only, relief warranted: to order that Defendants return Abrego Garcia to the United States.
… On March 12, 2025, while driving home from work with his young son in the car, Abrego Garcia was stopped by ICE agents. The officers had no warrant for his arrest and no lawful basis to take him into custody; they told him only that his “status had changed.” He was first transported to an ICE facility in Baltimore, Maryland. Next, ICE agents shuttled him to detention facilities in Louisiana and La Villa, Texas. He was allowed a handful of calls to his wife. He said that he was told he would see a judge soon. But that never happened.
… Three days later, on March 15, 2025, without any notice, legal process, or hearing, ICE forcibly transported Abrego Garcia to the Terrorism Confinement Center (“CECOT”) in El Salvador, a notorious supermax prison known for widespread human rights violations. On that day, two planes carried over 100 aliens to CECOT purportedly pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act, the legality of which is the subject of separate litigation. A third plane included “aliens with Title 8 removal orders;” many of them were in ICE custody awaiting asylum and other protective hearings in the United States.
Once the planes arrived in El Salvador, the male detainees were stripped and shackled. Their heads were shaved, and they were marched into CECOT to join nearly 40,000 other prisoners held in some of the most inhumane and squalid conditions known in any carceral system.
Since then, no one has heard from Abrego Garcia.
… Although the legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different—there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal. Nor does any evidence suggest that Abrego Garcia is being held in CECOT at the behest of Salvadoran authorities to answer for crimes in that country. Rather, his detention appears wholly lawless.
The Supreme Court said, simply, “You can’t do that. Fix this.”
Every American alive should understand that you can’t deprive a man of his liberty without due process.
That we did so is appalling. Everyone American should grasp that it is appalling. Anyone who says it is not appalling is either gravely misinformed — and many are, because the Trump administration has lied about the case repeatedly — or is himself lying.
It is supposed to be appalling. That’s the point of it.
The United States has no shortage of prisons, including prisons designed, using all of our American ingenuity, to ensure that even the most dangerous of criminals can’t escape. These prisons are extremely unpleasant and many are even quite dangerous. If the Trump administration is sending men to a foreign prison, it can only be because this prison offers the possibility of a punishment that would so flagrantly violate the Eighth Amendment as to profoundly shock the conscience. (The claim that they’re shipping prisoners to El Salvador for budgetary reasons is absurd on its face.)
The point of doing this is for you to see it and for you to grasp, very deeply, that this administration is lawless, cruel, and arbitrary — and that this could be your fate.
Our own State Department described the conditions of El Salvador’s prisons this way in a recent human rights report:
There were reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings, largely stemming from deaths of detainees while in prison, either from medical neglect or physical abuse. The human rights nongovernmental organization Socorro Jurídico Humanitario recorded the deaths of 79 detainees as of August 16 and determined that 33 of the deaths were violent.
… On July 14, a coalition of human rights organizations at an Interamerican Human Rights Commission public audience stated they collectively interviewed more than 100 released detainees, many of whom reported systemic abuse in the prison system, including beatings by guards and the use of electric shocks. The coalition alleged the treatment of prisoners constituted torture. On March 25, the newspaper El País reported a man released from Izalco prison said guards beat one of his cellmates to death with batons and the butts of their rifles. He also said guards activated electric stun guns against the prison’s wet floors to deliver electric shocks to all the prisoners in a cell.
… Prison conditions before the state of exception were harsh and life threatening due to gross overcrowding; inadequate sanitary conditions; insufficient food and water shortages; a lack of medical services in prison facilities; and physical attacks. The addition of 72,000 detainees under the state of exception exacerbated the problem. … Detainees released from the Izalco and La Esperanza prisons reported a lack of food and potable water and being limited to two tortillas, one spoonful of beans, and one glass of water per day. They also reported limited water for sanitation. Human rights organizations noted released prisoners reported severe heat and lack of ventilation in the cells and prolonged confinement, without the opportunity for movement or the use of sanitary facilities.
… One released prisoner reported to El País that his diabetic cellmate received insulin only two or three times during his period of incarceration and died suddenly in his sleep. … There were reports of life-threatening lack of medical care or sanitation for detained pregnant women and young children held with their mothers. … Cristosal published a statement from a released prisoner who reported many pregnant women miscarried due to a lack of medical care. Young babies often stayed with their mothers in prison and received limited medical care, despite widespread scabies and other communicable diseases.
The point of this exercise is to make a very public show of sending people to what is widely believed to be the hemisphere’s most terrifying prison, one from which, notoriously, the only escape is “in a coffin.”
This is because they want to scare the shit out of us — all of us.
Many members of the administration, presumably, looked at the video below before it was released. That it recalls scenes from liberated German concentration camps isn’t an accident.
The point is to terrorize — not hardened criminals, but you. It is an advertisement of the Trump administration’s lawlessness. (Not incidentally, if we accept the administration’s claim that it may snatch people off the street and send them to face life imprisonment in El Salvador because we have been invaded, that means the people they’re snatching are combatants, and this photoshoot is an explicit violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.)
Liquidation
Do you believe that anyone from America who goes into CECOT will ever come out?
I do not.
This is not incarceration; it is liquidation.
Incarceration is a penal act. It is controlled by laws. There are well-understood mechanisms governing the length of terms, applications for parole, processes for release.
Liquidation is a political act. It is arbitrary, opaque, and unappealable. There are no controlling laws or processes. There is only power. …
The old American order is dead. It ended on April 14, 2025, when a Latin American strongman sat in the Oval Office and discussed sending US citizens to foreign concentration camps with the American president while they jointly defied the Supreme Court.
Everyone who is not part of the authoritarian regime is a member of the dissident movement now. The sooner they realize it, the better.
Yes.
Adapted with the permission of the author. A version of this piece originally appeared at The Cosmopolitan Globalist.
