The Justice Department Just Debuted a New Defense of Trump. It’s Terrifying.
26th March 2025
Slate, a Voice of the Crust.
On Monday, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice made two arguments in two different courts that, taken together, amount to a legal claim of near-dictatorial power by Trump. First, it informed a federal appeals court that the president has authority to declare any noncitizens to be “alien enemies” and to deport them to foreign prison, where they will be forced to perform hard labor indefinitely—without notice, a hearing, or any meaningful opportunity to prove their innocence. Second, it refused to provide U.S. District Judge James Boasberg with details of these mass deportation operations, even in a closed courtroom, even under seal, insisting that Boasberg’s authority must yield to the “mandate of the electorate.” In other words, Trump’s electoral victory grants him an absolute right to conduct these deportations, rendering them unreviewable by the judiciary.
Well, no. What renders them ‘unreviewable by the judiciary’ is the President’s plenary power, under the Constitution, to conduct American foreign policy. This is basic Separation of Powers stuff, and has nothing to do with any ‘mandate of the electorate’. This whole ‘mandate of the electorate’ business refers to the fundamental value of democracy, which sock-puppets for the Democrat party purport to value higher than any other value. Either we live in a democratic system in which people get to determine policy by electing certain people to do that stuff for them, or we do not.
What terrifies Slate and other constituents of the Narrative Media is the prospect that democracy doesn’t mean that they win all the time. And that prospect upsets their entire world-view.