The naked truth is that we can talk all day long about laws and principles, but we just came out of a period where the previous President and his administration deliberately let literally millions of people in illegally, many of whom had violent criminal records, and they did not give a flying fuck about the law. These district judges, who wield so much authority now, did not rule that the Biden admin had no power to ignore our immigration laws. The Democratic Party was not screaming bloody murder about it, and 95% of the media either ignored it completely, denied that it was happening and gaslit those who said it was, or outright supported it.

So guess what? They don’t get to talk about laws and principles now. I couldn’t do anything about it at the time, but what we do have it in our power to do now is shut them out of the conversation.

Is this in keeping with the rules? I don’t know, do we have rules? They didn’t seem to think so.

Is this in keeping with principles? I don’t know, tell me again what the principles were 4 months ago.

The Constitution, laws, and the legal system only exist in so far as we agree that they exist. Their side very deliberately and very egregiously spent years wiping their ass with those rules. The way to make this stop is not to suddenly allow them to implement injunctions, keep these people here for another four years, then either drop the deportation entirely or say that it is cruel at this point to send them home. If the law is a weapon to be wielded by one side, and handcuffs to be placed on the other, then there isn’t law. There is just power. Perhaps a reminder of that is in order.

If this seems unprincipled, I suggest people consider whether this better preserves respect for the law in the long run, or if letting one side ignore the law when it’s inconvenient, but invoke it when it is convenient better preserves the law in the long run.

There is still far too much treating this as disagreement over policy. Not even close. We have, and had during the Biden administration, very clear laws passed by Congress on this topic. They just decided that laws didn’t count. If you want laws to matter in the long run, the remedy is to drop the hammer on what they did immediately.