Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and Trump nominated in an oil industry executive as his pick for Energy secretary.
We have such a great show for you today.
The Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson joins us to discuss Trump's absolutely insane cabinet.
Then we will talk.
To the Brennan Centers Catherine Ebright about Trump's plans to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of seventeen ninety eight.
But first the news Somali, you want to talk the resistance. I think I am resistant to ever wanting to talk about. Tell me make your case for me.
Okay, So before we started recording, I was giving you a hard time because I want to talk about the resistance and you said resistance is cringe.
I do.
I said, it's a bad brand that we shouldn't continue using, is what I said.
And I want to make the case for earnestness right now. Look, there is a thing that you and I both sometimes do of wanting to be the cool kids. But we are in a moment here and we're not there yet, and we all have to sort of state ourselves. But we're going to be in a moment where there's going to be a lot of stuff that the government is.
Going to do, or Donald Trump is going to do to our government.
That we are going to have to be a bull war against and resist. And I think that one of the least helpful things we can do is to dismiss things, even like the idea of resistance. So there were a lot of pieces this week written by some very smart people about sort of what does it mean to be resistant and should we even use that word? And I
just want to make a case here for earnestness. Part of the ethos of trump Ism is this idea that nothing matters, this kind of nihilistic we were talking about it earlier, this black pilling, the idea that these things are ironic, that nothing matters, that we shouldn't care what happens to other people.
I wouldn't characterize that as black pilled, because that's not what black pilots is.
Okay, explain to us what black pilled is.
That's when your ideology is so poisoned by so many things on the Internet that no one could ever make a clear distinction between whether you're left right, libertarian or whatever. It's just so all over the place that it cannot be mapped.
So great, but the idea is that I think it's important for Democrats to be the opposite of black pilt, to be four things. It's easy to reject everything. It's hard to believe in things, especially right now. And I believe in democracy.
I believe. I know you're rolling your eyes, but I'm not.
I believe in all this. I'm with you right now.
I think we're in a moment right now where a lot of us are really in despair. And I want to talk about this article because in it is a bunch of really good news. And for those of you who didn't read this Rebecca Tracter article in your magazine. She talks about how on Thursday, after Trump was re elected, Indivisible, which is a really good organization, and the Working Families Party, did a call and they drew more than one hundred
and thirty seven thousand people. That call went on for hours. Okay, a woman who was part of it said she didn't get to speak until ten PM, and people stayed on and the attendance grew. People are not only seeking community, but ways to engage okay, And then I want to talk about Amanda Littman, a frequent guest on this podcast. She runs an organization called Run for Something, which is an organization that supports young, progressive first time candidates running
for state and local office. As you know, as we talk about on this podcast all the time, stay and local office are really the keys to enacting policy, to protecting people.
Okay.
So she says that in the first Trump inauguration day, she said she hoped that our organization would carry on doing consequential work even without resistance two point zero, which I did not expect to see. Seven days later, seven thousand people had signed up with Run for Something, seven times the number it had drawn the week it launched on Trump's first inauguration day. Seven times okay, and that
was just after Trump was re elected. So I just want to point out, like, this is a very dark moment for a lot of us, but there are a lot of green shoots right. People understand what another Trump administration means, and we see women at the grassroots and men trying to push back, and so I just want to make the case for earnestness. I'm not even a fan of earnestness. But I think at this moment we have to care.
Okay, did you die? Are you there?
I'm fined. I just don't.
I just don't want to call it the resistance, That's all I'm saying.
We could call it the case for caring. Okay.
I think this is just the same way that the word liberal became a bit of poisoning and we used progressive instead of other things. I just think it's not the best brand anyway.
Speaking of brands.
Yes, So with Trump's lead into the manisphere, he went to the manliest of sports UFC. You know, where men hug each other for a long periods of time. Is what I noticed whenever I see it on the TV. What'd you see here, Molly?
Yeah, So Trump went to the UFC fight. UFC has been part of trump Ism. And I want to talk about this idea that politics is downstream of culture. This is an idea that we kind of got from Andrew Breitbart, and it comes from sort of Obama era, where you had a politician who was a meshed with the culture.
You had that to some degree with Harris, but you had.
This also with Trump, and I think because it didn't happen in traditional media venues. A lot of us missed it because it happened on podcasts and streaming and YouTube and Twitch. But Trump has this relationship with these sports and also with the kind of health and Wellness space influencers which really did help him get elected.
And helped him win some women.
One of the ways in which Trump had this relationship with health and Wellness space people is that he got endorsed by RFK Junior. RFK Junior delivered him some voters, many of whom want to be able to drink raw milk and not get vaccinated anyway.
Sort Of following up on this in.
The Everything Trump Touches Dies genre, so photo of Trump and his people on his plane eating McDonald's RFK Junior drinking a coke, eating a quarter pounder on Trump Force one discuss.
A lot of people are saying saying that this is Trump testing if OURK will bed the dee. I personally just think this is just stupidity as usual.
I mean, it is interesting though that this is something where we know, like Ourk's brand is based on like not doing things like this, so you know, eating organic food and eat and raw milk and et cetera, et cetera.
And this is a pretty star contrast.
Doesn't get more organic than when you pick up roadkill on the side of the road.
That's all that's right, and numerous roadkill stories.
So I am without words though it does seem it does seem kind of hypocritical.
So mommie, this Mannion Musk, that's the first buddy who's coming around with Trump everywhere he goes his Tesla cars. Interesting story here where you see.
It's sort of interesting, right, Tesla vehicles. This is according to a recent icy cars study that analyzed data from the US Fatality Analysis Reporting System, which is called FARS in case you were wondering, study conducted aunt Tesla's from the twenty eighteen to twenty twenty two vehicles focused on crashes between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty two that resulted in occupant fatalities. Tesla vehicles have a fatal crash rating of five point six billion miles driven. According to study,
they are the most fatal car. It is Tesla's then, kias than buicks.
And I'm not very surprised.
It's almost like this guy who rails against regulation isn't very careful moves fast and breaks things as cars that break.
I mean, it does not seem so surprising to me.
But no, you know, as somebody whose wife every time she sees me get near a tesla or we get ed, what she says, Oh, great, we're driving.
It a bomb?
Why did she say that? Because the batteries explode. You've experienced this yourself with an electric car battery.
Yes, it did, but you didn't. We didn't die. We were okay, yes, but it did explode.
But they they do explode. It is bad.
I mean, the good news is you don't die, but the bad news is it is a little scary. And also then you're stuck on the stuff by the side of the road.
Yeah. Not so.
Speaking of Elon, he's trying to save what Nick's treasury. Bit, what do you think about this?
So right now in Marlago, there's a lot of jockeying between the first body that's Elon Musk or as Trump calls him, Leon and the quote unquote more normal appointment. So Trump had to give RFK Health and Human Services because the Kennedys are actually trying to assassinate us. I stall that from the internet. Somebody made that joke, a
brilliant joke. But so the question is will it be this Scott Asson, who is sort of a more normal pick, or will it be Howard Nick, who recently went on television and said that Trump would not pick RFK Junior, and then maybe vaccines weren't so great again. You know, we are so down the rabbit hole here, it's hard to.
Imagine that any of this ends. Wow.
Speaking of which, doctor joh former Biden administrator in the COVID nineteen and the dean of Brown University School of Public Health. He talked about the RFK appointment and he said RFK Junior has signaled that he doesn't intend to follow the approach. Instead of relying on rigorous analysis and evidence, he seems poised to prioritize his own views in decision making. Now all of us know that MAGA is all about doing your own research on Facebook. Nothing wrong with that,
except if you cause another pandemic. Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Product and the host of the Enemy Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Rick Wilson, Hey, Mollie John Fast how are you on this fine day?
Oh? Yeah, it's a great day, you know, I'm enjoying the last gasps of the Roman Empire.
How about you, Well, I mean it was the Roman Republic, but yeah, close enough. Yes, I mean you're you really are looking at the dying civilization right now.
But we don't want people to be depressed here, because that is what because we want I know, I get.
We don't want people to despair because I think that Donald Trump is about to have a tent so big that includes both anti Semites and Zionists, both anti vaxxers and people who believe in modern medicine, Russian trolls and America firsters every which way discuss h.
Yeah, I think that's largely where we're about to go. We are going to have a very very very fed up period of time in this country where the promises Trump is made to his base to be awful to the world will be fulfilled. But it will also be so chaotic and so fucked up, and they will have such There are already internal maga civil wars breaking out, which I love, and boy Elon seems to be at the center of most of them.
Which civil wars are you talking about?
The civil war in this case is the moment that they're having with Treasury Secretary, where Howard Lutnik was supposed to be the guy, and then Elon wade in and wanted somebody else to be the guy. The thing about this moment we're in to remember is while they are evil and while they are powerful, they are also fucking stupid. They really are. These are not smart guys. These are
not a class thinkers. And that's one of our only big advantages in this fight right now is that they really are a bunch of fucking morons.
Well, what I would say is that it seems like there is a feeling in which Trump and his people are not like they have made promises. I just don't know how you keep promises to people who want to end government programs but still want to have So.
Let's talk about government efficiency for a minute.
So one of the things that Elon and Vivic and Silicon Valley, one of the reasons that Silicon Valley joined MAGA, besides tax cuts, is that they're very excited to cut the federal government. But I think that one of the places that Vivik wants to start is not a place that Republicans love to cut discuss.
He wants to cut the DoD and he wants to also cut the VA. Let me tell you something, Republican congressmen are a spineless, gutless, nutless, ballless set of human beings. But the minute you ask them to cut VA benefits for people in their districts, I assure you that's one of the red lines that they will actually say, vivek Donald, elon, go fuck yourself, because it is political poison. Same thing
with cutting social security political poison. One of the realities of government contract is that when you decide you're going to build a new fighter plane, Okay, let's take the F thirty five for existance, the current hot fighter number. That plane may be assembled at a factory in Dallas Fort Worth, but every part of it is built somewhere in this country and in all fifty states and all the territories. Everybody gets a bite, everybody gets a piece of the pie, everybody gets a cut. So let's say
they go, okay, we're going to cut this program. Well, that program is being built in some senator's home state and some congressman's home district. And the idea that that's just going to go that these guys are going to go, oh yeah, well, of course, in obedience to Trump, we're going to fuck ourselves politically for all time. That's not going to work out for you, goodloe boys.
I mean, that's what we're sort of looking down the barrel of very much so.
And the idea that you're going to end up with less government spending is always commendable. Everybody wants to do that. Okay, everybody wants less government spending. Blah blah blah. Reality is, though these tax dollars are allocated to the various states, the spending in those states benefits, benefits individual people, and it also benefits the members of Congress and the senators who pass that legislation and get those things spent in their states. And not all of it is you know, fraud,
waste and abuse. An awful lot of it is providing services that Americans have paid taxes for, e g. Just just just a little as a little for instance, veterans benefits. Wh's another place at Vivek Ramaswami has already promised he's going to cut Oh okay, you know that is about like saying I want to pass the National Herpes Distribution Plan. It is not a popular idea. It will never be a popular idea. No one's ever going to say that is the greatest idea since prepared, mustered Vivek, you should
go ahead and do that. Let's get let's get on with cutting VA benefits madness.
One of the things that it feels like Vivak and Musk don't totally understand is that a lot of our national debt is actually interest payments.
Yes. Yes, and here's a dirty little secret. Republicans are really fucking good at spending money. Okay, let's not pretend that all this money was just spent by Democrats doing national mime and puppetry programs. These things were spent on a lot of programs that went to Republican districts, and a lot of these guys have made their political careers off of having a very lavish federal spending program in their states or their districts. This is not going to stop. Nobody's going to stop doing.
This, including in red states.
Right, even more so in red states. Red states have a net and you know benefit they pay less in taxes than the blue states do. This is not rocket science, it's just a fact.
So explain to us what's gonna sort of what's going to happen.
Now, they're going to say. Elon's going to say, we have to cut the XYZ program in the Department of Energy, Okay, whatever it is, but he's going to find out that that program is in statute, it is in federal law where Congress has said this program is established under House resolution or House Bill blah blah blah, signed by the Senate, signed by the President. And you don't just get to randomly cut those things. That's not how any of this works.
Right, So how does it work?
Explain they're going to have If you want to get rid of some of these programs, you have to have votes on the floor of the House to get rid of them. You have to have votes in the Senate to get rid of them.
And the House has right now, I think it's like a three seat majority, right, correct, Republicans.
It's not all the California votes are encountered yet, but it looks like it's going to be a very small majority.
Yeah, this will not be a sweeping Republican hoarde. The Senate and the House both are going to end up feeling very tight, very constrained.
The Senate is a little better for Republicans, right, Yeah.
But again, it's not the It will not be easy going. Now. This is going to be like a walkover where they have just so much ladder to play fuck around that they're going to be able to come out and pass anything they want or cut anything they want. I've been
around the block on these things. I was around when we did something back in the nineties called the Base Closure and Realignment Commission, which was what and whether they were at the time the most liberal anti war, anti military blah blah cliche whatever, or the hardest core Republican, they all wanted us to do base closures after the end of the Cold War. And guess what, none of them wanted the base closures to be in their districts Ah, weird, weird how that works.
But also Vivig and Elon don't it's not part of the government. They're not being appointed to the cabinet, right.
No, this thing is a quasi governmental office. It has no statutory authority whatsoever. You know. I know it has no statutory authority because it never existed until today, right, That's how I know.
So they're going to make recommendations and then the government is going to just not be able to implement them.
They're gonna make recommendations and it doesn't matter what they say because it's not in the budget. We don't pass budgets anymore in this country. We stopped doing budgets years ago for a lot of bad reasons. We should do budgets, Honestly, we should pass budgets. That'd be a good, responsible, grown
up American thing to do, but we don't. And because of that, we're going to end up with these people thinking, oh, well, we can do whatever we choose, we can cut these things and they'll just go away because Trump doesn't want them there and Elon doesn't like them. Nope, not how it works. And again you're going to find out some maga member of Congress is going to say he's going to get on the phone to Elon. I go, well, listen, buddy,
I'll tell you one thing. I'm on the NASA Procurement Committee, and I'm going to tell you some your fucking rockets aren't going anywhere unless you stop this bullshit.
Right. That is the sort of interesting thing about the situation is like Elon has more money than anyone else in the entire world, so he can fund primary challenges. But these people have control over the space stuff he wants to do.
Right.
Yeah, these people have also been around the entire history of Washington. They know what they're doing. This is not an easy skate for Elon. This is not some magical wave of magic wand and the world does what Elon wants. It just doesn't work that way.
So what do you think happens now? I mean, like, just sort of talk us through what's going to happen.
In a few days. They're going to start more in earnest saying, oh, how do we do this? What do we do? They won't get a good answer. They'll get lawyers who tell them, oh, well the president will pass this because or the president will push people and they'll do it because the president, when you are taking money from people in their districts, you are going to get fucked. This is just I mean, this is one oh one Washington, d C. And people who don't understand this, they don't
understand it for a reason because they're they're magas. They come from a world where they've never had a dear with an actual issue with government. They've just ignored it or pretend that it didn't exist, and they're going to.
Get fucked I think it's interesting.
This is meant to be the Trump term where he gets serious and finally dismantles the physit over men.
Is it though?
But a lot of these appointments don't seem like Marco Rubio is pretty is it sort of normal?
Appointment? RFK Junior is not enormous?
Not so much. Yeah, Look, all these guys other than Marco and maybe a least stophonic okay, are not serious people. And even at Lease isn't a terribly serious person. But these are not serious people. These are not people who could get a job at a waffle house, as I like to say. They're not smart, they don't have their shit together. They are not normal people. They're going to end up, you know, fucking this up. They can't help it. These are broken people. They don't know what they're doing.
A lot of these candidates don't seem like they'll be able to get through a Senate comproment.
I suspect what we're going to end up with, as everybody else is sort of, you know, clearly predicting, is we're going to end up with a bunch of recess appointments.
Now, can you just talk us through recess appointments, because isn't that sort of up to the Senate majority leader.
No, it's also up to the president. He can recess Congress.
But doesn't he sort of need the leader to be bought in.
Do you think that John Thune won't say yes or three bags full when he says we're going to do this. I mean, I don't see any world in which Thune becomes sort of a superhero and says, this is the line, sir, and you will not cross it.
So what happens? In said, So he recesses the Senate. He appoints all these people without hearings, yep.
And they are in office for two hundred and eighteen days I think it is, or fifteen whatever. It's some non trivial but long enough to fuck things up. Not long enough to get too comfortable, but long enough to fuck things up.
We explain this to me. A recess appointment can only last for a certain amount of time.
Only last for two hundred and eighteen or two hundred and nineteen days, it's some weird number.
And then they have to go into hearings or now.
No, then they're done. You cannot be recess appointed twice. Doesn't work. That way.
Wasn't this Matthew hot Tub crime machine?
And this is what he had to do with him? Yeah, exactly what happened with hot Tub.
He was acting.
He was acting. A recess appointment is an acting appointment.
Oh okay, so they'll put them in for acting. But then do you think anyone will have regular appointments or now?
Oh, there'll be some regular appointments that get passed. I mean a few here and there, not as many as they would like.
So they'll be confirmation hearings. But just for the people who could pass.
Like dog Killer, Christie right, the Senate will confirm dog Killer. They'll just do that pro forma. But if you're Christy Nome, you get a regular appointment. But you really don't matter Matt Gates. Look, I'm a skeptic about the strength and moral character of Republican elected officials, as you might well know. Even with these guys, it's a real tough to sell giving Matt Gates an appointment putting a secondator, a sexual predator inside the Department of Justice.
So do you think Matt Gates gets appointed as a recess or No?
Yeah, that's the only way they're going to get him.
In right, And you think that's going to happen.
Yeah, oh yeah. I mean, look, Matt is loyal to Trump. None of these senators want to None of these senators want to take this vote. Okay, they're petrified to this vote. And so I think you end up in a world where a lot of them are like, just say, mister President, we can't pull this off. You got you got to give us a break on this one. You got to let this one go. Let us do this in a recess.
So they want him to do Resa's appointment so they don't have to worry about it.
Absolutely for the tough votes, one hundred percent. Look, none of these guys want to cast a vote for RFK when they know that that means in the year or two that kids are going to start dying of fucking mumps. I mean, none of them want to make that choice. None of them want to make that call.
And you think RFK ends up as a recess appointment too, Yeah?
Absolutely?
And then what happens destroy the agencies they're tasked to lead.
Yeah, that's their actual job is to destroy the agencies they've been they've been hired to run.
Well, that's pretty chilling. Any good news here. Give us a little bit of good news.
They're all stupid. I mean that actually is a piece of good news. I really want you to internalize that these people are stupid, and stupid people make easy mistakes all the time. Stupid people make a lot of mistakes, and I think we can be hopeful that as we go forward the kind of mistakes that they will make which are predictable, both in terms of corruption, in terms of not understanding the law, in terms of exposing the
White House to political and logistical and criminal problems. There's a lot of good news here.
Frankly interesting. Rick Wilson, thank.
You a pleasure. As always, Mollie, talk to you soon.
Katherine you Bright is a counsel at the Brennan Centers Liberty and National Security Program. Welcome to Fast Politics, Catherine.
Thanks for having me explain to us what you do.
I'm a counsel on the Brandon Center's Liberty and National Security team, and I've been doing a concerted, focused research project into the Alien Enemies Act of seventeen ninety eight.
Great did you see this coming? And when did you get interested in this act?
So? Donald Trump, on the campaign trail had been promising to use the Alien Enemies Act of seventeen ninety eight for over a year, and then we saw this law also pop up in the GOP twenty twenty four presidential platform, And so this is not something new by way of a promise for what the incoming president would like to do. The mass deportation promise has been a focal point of
the campaign for again over a year. I really got interested in this particular authority because of the way that I felt it had been covered when Trump first started promising to use it, and there was I think a lot of reflective skepticism about whether it would be possible for him to invoke this law and whether it would be a slam dunk in the courts to strike down that kind of use. And this is a wartime authority.
I work on constitutional war powers, and I thought that the argument was not as clear cut and that the situation could be a little bit hairrier than some of the reporting reflected.
So the Alien Enemies Act of seventeen ninety eight was enacted during wartime, right, and the last time it was actually enacted was during World War Two.
Yeah, So the law was enacted as the name suggests in seventeen ninety eight during something called the quasi War with France, which was an entirely naval conflict. It never escalated into a ground war, it never became a declared war, and the Alien Enemies Act was passed alongside three other laws, quite notorious. You probably learned about them in grade school, be Alien and Sedition X, and they're very controversial, sort
of negative precedent in American history. This swaw was not actually used in the quasi war because it never escalated into a more intense ground invasion or declared war. It has only been used three times, the first time in the War of eighteen twelve, then in World War One, and then in World War Two. And it is in authority for summary detentions and deportations in wartime and its history.
I think most notably and notoriously in World War Two was the internment of thirty one thousand immigrants non citizens of Japanese, German, and Italian descent.
Yes, and I actually have known people whose mothers and grandmothers were swept up in this.
Tell us how it ended.
Yeah, So this is one of the things that gave me pause about the assumption that the courts would definitely strike down a peacetime use of this wartime authority. How did the use of the Alien Enemies Act end in World War Two? Well, it actually ended in nineteen fifty one, even though World War Two, as we would all assume and we were all taught, ended in nineteen forty five.
But the courts for years and years allowed Harry S. Truman to continue relying on this authority to detain people and to deport people, because the court said, while the Congress and the President say that the war is ongoing, and so even if there's no hostilities, even if we've actually already finished demobilizing US forces after the war, we can't second guess the president on that.
How was it stopped in the end?
Yeah, Eventually, in nineteen fifty one, Congress passes a resolution that says the war is over. The President signs it, and at that point the courts acknowledged, Okay, the power of the Alien Enemies Act has terminated because the political branches, the Congress and the President have now acknowledged that we're not at war.
Okay.
Yeah, the courts exercised really no independent judgment to determine whether we were or were not at war. And so one of my concerns is that this law in our history has been used outside of what we would generally understand it be wartime where there were no ongoing hostilities. And so can we be certain that the courts will serve as a check on a peacetime use or abuse of this law.
First of all, I don't understand if it's a wartime act, if you're not at war, how would that work.
Yeah, so the law can be invoked in times of declared war. We know what that means, Congress gets to declare war, but also in times of quote invasion or predatory incursion, and those aren't defined terms in the law.
Oh wow.
What we've seen in the past several years is some anti immigrant groups and politicians claiming that migration constitutes a quot unquote invasion, or that cartel activity narcotics trafficking constitutes
the quote unquote invasion. And so even if you look at the history, and it's very clear that an invasion was understood by the Fifth Congress back in seventeen ninety eight, as well as by presidents and congresses since then, to refer to acts of war and invasion is an act of war there's this sort of obfuscation or gainsmanship where these anti immigrant politicians and groups are trying to replace that legal meaning of the word invasion with their rhetorical meaning.
Right, talk me through what would happen.
Right. We know Donald Trump is planning this, we know he's planning deportation. We know he wants to use this act. Explain to me why.
He needs to use this act.
I mean, we've seen a lot of deportation of people who are not in this country illegal for years and years and years. If you could explain to us why this is necessary to begin with.
So, one of the things that I think Trump's team finds so attractive about the Alien Enemies Act is it's summary deportation process. And what that means is there's no hearing. In fact, not only is there no hearing, this law can be used against anyone who is not a US citizen who is from a proclaimed enemy nation. And so that could mean an asylum seeker, it could mean a
VIASL holder, It could even mean a permanent resident. And so this not only has none of those procedural protections that you have in conventional immigration law, it also if you accidentally scoop up someone who has legal status like it's not going to matter. You can still hold that person in immigration or not immigration processing rather under this wartime authority, and then you can still summarily deport them
under this authority. The other thing that this law does is it provides detention authority, as we saw in internment in World War Two and internment in World War One. And so it's unclear what kind of authority Stephen Miller and Tom Holman would be relying on for the immigration processing camps that they're talking about holding migrants as they're trying to figure out repatriation. Right, if these aren't people who are subject to an immigration removal order from an
immigration judge, how are we holding them? And they're not people who are criminally convicted or even criminally charged. Necessarily, if the courts refuse to strike down an abuse of invocation of this law, this law then could become the legal basis for detaining people at those immigration processing camps.
Wow explained to us how it would be different than what we have right now.
I think the rapidity with which the detentions and deportations could be affected would be the substantially different would be much faster, and the scale on which the detentions and deportations could happen would also be conceivably much larger.
Now.
One thing that in the deportation context is a persistent challenge across administrations is the under resourcing of the immigration system. And so there's a tremendous backlog. We don't have enough immigration judges. The immigration judges are overburdened. There are many hearings that need to take place, particularly when people make
asylum claims. One of the things again with the extreme summary processes of the Alien Enemies Act, but the Trump administration is hoping this law will allow them to do is bypass asylum hearings altogether. What we saw in World War Two was that this law was used even against German Jews simply because they were of German ancestry.
Wow, as a GEO, that's pretty rough, especially considering what was happening during World War Two to German Jews. So why was that? Is the law just open to that or was that a conscious choice.
The law applies to anyone once there's a presidential proclamation that there's an enemy nation with which we're at war. Applies to anyone who is a native, a citizen, denizen, or subject of that foreign enemy. If you happened to be Jewish and born in Germany, the fact that maybe you had been denationalized or stripped of your citizenship by Germany and that you had then fled to the United States as a refugee didn't change the fact that you
were born in Germany. You were still a native, right and so you still fell under this law, and you still fell under the proclamation and the potential to be interned that this law gave to the Roosevelt administration and
later to the Truman administration. And it was actually a conscious choice as well by the Department of Justice, at least for part of the war, not to exclude Jewish refugees out of fear for the potential that German Jews would use their refugee status as a quote protective cloak for Malian activities, as if someone who had just suffered that kind of persecution in the third right would go around and turn around and conduct espionage or sabotage to
undermine the US war effort. It's a draconian, unforgiving law that contains no exceptions for someone who's completely loyal to the United States to someone who in no way, shape or form could constitute a threat to the United States.
Yeah.
Is there any way to push back against this?
Yeah?
So, as I've said, it would be an abuse of the law to invoke it in peace time. And the que unquote migrant invasion that Trump and Miller are hoping to proclaim is in fact not anywhere close to the kind of invasion or act of war that the Alien Enemy Is Act is concerned with. And so one of the things one of the arguments that we would be making, and you know, helping detainees immigrants detained under this law to do, is bring havieous petitions to the courts saying
this law was inappropriately invoked. There actually is no legal authority to hold me in detention and queue me up for deportation. That's one of the arguments, and I think it's a pretty strong argument that this is a pretextual and abusive invocation of the law. We also would argue that the Alien Enemies Act violates contemporary understandings of equal protection or anti discrimination under the Constitution and the due process rates that immigrants have under the Constitution.
Yeah, but where would this go?
So you would argue that it would get kicked up to what circuit it would eventually go to the Supreme Court.
Right, that's right unless the circuit courts, district courts, and circuit courts soundingly strike down the abuse. I think if we have a case where the circuit courts are unanimous that this is a violation, this cannot be happening. Maybe the Trump administration doesn't appeal it up to the Supreme Court, but I think if this law is invoked, the chances are that this does end up with the justices.
Do you have any reason to be hopeful here?
Yeah, I mean whenever you're litigating up to the Supreme Court. But the question is can you count to five?
Right?
And we have the three liberals who I'm sure would be aghast at an abusive invocation of this law. I think Frankly Neil Gorsich would also be really upset by this kind of pretextual, ahistorical use of an overbroad national security authority. And there are some cases where Gorsich has shown himself to be a little heterodox on the issue
of national security pretexts advanced by the President. And I should hope that either Kavanaugh or Roberts would also strike down this kind of abuse because of the tremendous damage that using this wartime authority for peacetime massed attention and deportation would due to the American ethos and also of course to the courts themselves.
Right, you don't have any hope for justice, Barrett.
I'm not sure about justice, Barrett. There is a case that she wrote the majority opinion for in the past term. It's called Munez, and it is an immigration case, and she actually, in that opinion favorably cited as immigration precedent the Alien Friends Act, which was a counterpart authority of the Alien and Sedition Acts. So the peacetime authority was
Alien Friends, the wartime authority was Alien Enemies. She cites that favorably as an immigration precedent, and then she also cites Chinese exclusion favorably as an immigration precedent, And those are both counter precedents in my view, and those are both arguments in my view, for why the Alien Enemies Act should be viewed and understood as unconstitutional and incompatible with our present day values, because it's just so rare
for these kinds of really overbroad immigration statutes that discriminate against a person based on their identity, not based on their conduct, to be enacted by the Congress. And also, when we have as a nation enacted those laws, we have apologized for it and we've understood that that was a mistake. And so to see that in Barrett's opinion in that case left me a little bit concerned.
Makes you think, yeah, that sounds right.
It's interesting because I'm used to bear it being one of the less insane conservatives on the Court. Though she tends to vote with them, she tends to not be happy about it. Though, for whatever that's worth, that's super interesting and relevant. The money to finance these camps, do those? I mean, wouldn't that come from Congress?
Yeah, So whenever you're talking about government action, you need to be thinking about the authorizations but also the appropriations, right, and so the Alien Enemy Us Act is an authorization, right, Like, what can we do assuming that Congress is giving us money to do it? The appropriations have to come from
somewhere else. And one thing, and I'll admit I'm not an expert on this, that people have talked about is the potential of reprogramming funds that have been allocated to other projects, and so can the Trump administration take those funds that are allocated to other projects and move them into mass deportation as an endeavor.
Right, that's good. I'm very depressed now. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you again for having me.
No moment, fuck Rick Wilson, what is your moment of fuckery?
My moment of fuckery is the promise by the Trump administration's louder mouths to prosecute the American generals who were executing a lawful presidential orders in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, that they are going to hold them in a court martial and try to prosecute them. I get that they have a lurid fantasy life and they believe that they want to punish their enemies. Trump is doing this not
because of Afghanistan or anything else. He's doing it for the very very simple and ugly reason that they believe that they need to scare the shit out of as many members of the military as they can in advance. They want to scare the shit out of those people so that they will obey Trump, so that they will not fight back against Trump, so that they will not in any way stand up and uphold their oath of office when the time comes.
Yeah, that's really scary.
My moment of fuckery is that all of this feels very familiar and that we're back here again, and that people are more exhausted and the Supreme Court has his back and it's just a very dark moment in American life. But I also want to add that there's a lot of hope here.
Right.
This is he won by a very small margin. There are a lot of people who don't agree with his cheos, right, and that in fact there are Democrats won a bunch of Senate seats, kept a bunch of Senate seats, and the down ballot, they worked on state legislatures and did the unglamorous hard work that they had been needing to do in twenty sixteen.
And in some ways that will provide a bullwork.
And there are a lot of good Democratic governors and they understand that they have to fight trump Ism tooth and nail. And that is not either fuckory, but in fact, like it's a moment of hope.
Who are you and what have you done with Fast?
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