No, Just No: Department Of Justice Goes For Broke

Sheriff Barr is gettin’ a mite bit envious of them Banana Republics down South o’ th’ Border.

They asked Congress to authorize indefinite pre-trial detention.

You can see Mother Jones’ coverage at Trump’s Justice Department Proposes Indefinite Detention in Emergencies—Like the Coronavirus Outbreak, and Wonkette’s more full-frontal description at Would You Let This Man Suspend Habeas Corpus?.

So go read those first if you think I might be exaggerating.

Go ahead; I’ll wait.

So, they really did that.

And that’s bad, yeah

There’s no way that I think Barr’s DoJ can be trusted with that power.

But it’s not really about them.

You’d think that no citizen in a democracy would even want the State to have that power, even if they were currently at the top of the government.

Presidential administrations come and go, but State powers tend to stick around to be used by the other Party later.

I really would like to think that we all understand that, and therefore we’d all agree that the State should never have this power.

Apparently not.

I mean, I think that I can (of course) be trusted to use any kind of State powers responsibly but there’s no way I trust any of the rest of you nutters with it. I figured everybody had some version of that thought as well.

I find it hard to believe that anyone living in the modern world would be so trusting, after the hundreds of years of evidence we have for how other people behave when they get that kind of power.

But nope.

People with power tend not to contemplate losing it.

Even in a democracy, even a democracy with a Presidential term limit which guarantees that they personally will be out of power in (at most) 5 years from now, people seem not to contemplate what will happen when the opposing Party eventually wins an election.

Which seems kinda shortsighted to me, although they do seem to have gotten away with everything (Iran-Contra, Gulf Wars 1 and 2, etc.) so far. America does seem loathe to prosecute an administration once its out.