How Far We've Come

 

Thom Hartman at "Common Dreams" has an editorial about the truly dangerous territory that Trump is taking the USA into:

Opinion | Do You Understand How Dangerous This Moment Is — How Far We've Drifted? | Common Dreams

He insisted that justice must be blind to nationality or legal status; that due process, as encoded in the Constitution, must apply to persons, not just citizens. If the government could arbitrarily decide who deserved rights and who didn’t, then no rights were truly secure.

It was a radical argument for the time, but the Supreme Court agreed. Adams won. And in doing so, he helped define a cornerstone of American jurisprudence: that the rule of law exists to constrain the state, not to be selectively applied at the whim of those in power.

Fast forward to 2025, and that principle is now under direct assault.

The Trump administration, enabled by allies in Congress and the judiciary, has weaponized immigration law and executive authority in ways that Adams would have recognized and condemned. They are now detaining legal permanent residents, like Mahmoud Khalil, not for crimes, but for speech. They are targeting foreign students and legal residents — often young people of color — for deportation based on political views, often under the thinnest pretexts of “national security.”

...

Because once the government claims the right to strip anyone of due process, rights cease to be rights and become privileges, granted or revoked at the whim of those in power. That is not a constitutional democracy. That is the scaffolding of fascism.

And sure enough, what began with undocumented immigrants is now creeping toward legal residents, foreign students, and even American citizens. The Trump administration recently floated the idea — with a straight face — of deporting certain American citizens to El Salvador.

Let that sink in.

So far as it goes it is an accurate summary of the openly fascist, dictatorial Trump regime.  But Hartmann fails to mention the contributions of the Democrats to this nightmare.  Biden wrote the pre-cursor to the PATRIOT Act.  Hillary Clinton normalized bush II's moving government communications to private servers.  Obama chose not to prosecute the previous bush II regime's use of torture.  (Because Democrats had approved of it at the time.)  And he expanded the state's surveillance of the populace.  And he arrogated for himself a supposed legal right to murder US citizens overseas.  

There's more, but we don't need more evidence that the USA's slide into fascism has been a bipartisan effort.