We know how this will go.
ICE will wave an administrative warrant they issued themselves and declare themselves to be compliant.
Judge will point out that administrative warrants are not issued by Article III courts and cannot be used to trigger Article III powers.
ICE will say "exactly" and declare that since they are not working under Article III authority, they can simply do what they do as a function completely divorced from Article III and entirely under powers delegated by congress to the executive, plus all the stuff they added.
Judge will remind that Loper-Bright means that they do not need to defer to ICE's previously almost blanket authority to make stuff up and let it be law.
ICE will then simply remove those complaining from American jurisdiction and claim that nobody has standing is available, ta dah!
That is literally how they construct their authority, btw. They are law enforcement but not Law Enforcement. They are police in the most generic and metaphorical way possible. They exist because the founders did not anticipate that a hundred years after the Constitution gets ratified, congress would make up what would become of all this out of a theory that "if it's not covered by the constitution, it's fine" theory. Never mind that the power in question is actually not enumerated or even implied, it literally isn't and really should not be. The Constitution addresses naturalization, it does not contemplate that congress can simply attach a step in front of it and claim power over that step and then delegate all the powers under the sun to an agency that doesn't answer to Article III courts while pretending as if they do when it's convenient. It helps that when entire populations are excluded by law for a century those voices simply aren't at the table until the power ossifies and becomes part of stare decisis.
So they will drag it out until it's rendered moot by themselves. What else is new? They are happy not being real cops, since you know what really gets in the way of their work? Gideon v. Wainwright, if it applied. But that's entirely an Article III matter. They're not part of Article III, they don't even know what it says. They can follow anyone's orders they want. Stephen Miller doesn't have enumerated powers, his position is literally made up out of thin air, never mind authority. But if the agency chooses to treat him as their boss, who gets to stop them? Who has standing that they can't get rid of?
TL;DR: ICE is what the Chewbacca defense looks like in practice. Good luck.
The thing about Notice and Commentary is that they don't have to actually do anything except pay lip service to genuine concerns raised anyway. Also, looking at comment-stuffing patterns, it actually have for the past 10+ years inadvertently created a situation where the mass of copypasta support amplified the genuine questions since the APA does require said lip service to be paid, and it's hard to pay lip service to copypasta.
It's unlikely that most of the stuffing is done by corporate America, because there's a ton of anti-corporate but pro-state comments that ends up getting sent in for, say, the DEA (especially on matters that also involve the FDA), or DHS, or the even more in the weeds aspects ranging from the FAA to Treasury subagencies. They are far more about reinforcing what the agency wants to do already. I can't prove that because I can't even get a response to FOIA requests I've sent in and only ICE has been as mum on FOIA requests (although ICE actively trolls public interest firms so I guess they take it one step further, your tax dollars at work). The net neutrality instance (and other instances of comment-stuffing that was revealed when the government sees an advantage for doing so) are known because the gatekeepers wanted those particular cases to be noted, but it is widespread as hell and also, since there's no requirement to use one's real legal name - especially when interest groups can comment as a group if they so wish - not to mention that there are a bevy of people with my name in the country, the need to use actual identities from some db leak is extraneous and frankly, more indicative of the operatives not knowing how the system works more than anything else. That would hardly be surprising since the first Trump admin didn't seem to have a single lawyer who had the president's ear and understood the mechanisms of admin law. It's also curious why such stuffing efforts don't occur on a greater scale on the state level since most states have a similar system. Boyd Gaming tried to ask for a handout and continue the Nevada ban on iGaming over the pandemic and failed because 5 Nevadans, none of whom knew each other, objected in writing to the Gaming Commission. Boyd even made the ludicrous claim that Nevada didn't have the datacenter capacity to run a geofenced in-state gaming system and with a fairly significant chunk of taxpayer change at stake a company that size would not make completely idiotic claims that can be refuted by Googling. In fact, Google literally was building and finishing their Henderson DC during the whole process and so it's literally the top of results when searched. Boyd is publicly traded and operate close to 30 properties, they can afford lawyers who can make better arguments than five randos. And it would take a very small sockpuppet operation to create the appearance of support, and instead they were out about $200 million both from not receiving an additional state bailout and the acquisition of an iGaming company.
But of course on the federal level for the most part rulemaking is not arising out of lobbying directly but instead most of it arises out of agencies fulfilling the procedural requirements of the APA. Those commenting should do so to force the agency to engage with genuine concerns and since they don't have to consider the persuasiveness of the comments, their answers can be surprisingly revealing. Getting the DEA to admit that their enforcement and scheduling actions are done without considering patient well being because they only care about potential for abuse (not even actual abuse, so much of scheduling is based on moral panic and an attempt to create problems to justify its raison d'etre) didn't take an API key since under both the Obama and the first Trump admins I couldn't even get an api key somehow. I have one now - during the Biden admin - but it's also way easier nowadays to stuff the comments without using the API. Residential/mobile proxies are cheaper than ever, and if someone can't figure out how to automate a browser or 100 to navigate the site, they should hire the sneaker bot kids. But this really means that if the tactic actually worked, then someone like me can pay next to nothing and stuff regulations.gov, no api required. Selenium has been around long enough that it's incredibly simple to pose as a real browser once you do a run-through, or the likes of OctoBrowser, ixBrowser, Linken Sphere if you want to go halfsies on the automation. But since agencies are effectively shielded from direct political pressure anyway and can simply wave away legitimate concerns as they have always done. Many routinely ignore black letter reporting requirements and have effectively gone rogue (the DEA makes a profit and keeps it to augment its budget, and that profit comes from profits made when laundering cartel money, for over 20 years. They've stopped reporting to congress regularly in 2012 and remains the case when the IG was still able to audit), so why should they be afraid of the unwashed masses trying to ring the alarm on the recklessness of agency action? The most dangerous regulations are the ones that directly affect the liberty and property interests of the average person. Immediate harm surely outweighs potential future harm, and if you really give a damn you should already have a template ready for submission. The agencies seems to take such minute indicators of effort more seriously for some reason, although not seriously enough to change their plans most of the time.
No dude, PACER is literally the docketing system for district courts. Admin stuff is on regulations.gov. And yes, most private citizens don't know anything about admin law, but the lawyers who work in their niche are all ridiculously dedicated specialists who believe in holding the administrative state to account regardless of administration and have turned down far more lucrative and less stressful work to do what is frequently invisible, entirely not understood by most people we went to law school with (half of my admin law class dropped out, and it's a pre-req for all the juicy stuff like immigration law and the niche classes about the admin parts of the DMCA, which was taught over the summer, had 4 students, and was taught by the head of the IP division of the state bar who offered all 4 of us a position. I was the only one to turn it down since the DMCA is relatively tame compared to the clusterfuck that is immigration law and I was gunning for a position that paid me less, had me working insane hours, use 3 languages routinely, encounter daily the only part of the US code that singled out my ethnicity by name and marked us for removal - kept even though all provisions had been moved out in the 1940s - and in the end, somehow managed to help facilitate 17,000 DACA recipients in getting a green card because DHS didn't know their own regulations as well as the attorneys. I actually don't even know how counsular processing works for someone to legally get their spouse an immigrant visa to the US but I can tell you the exact wording that, when the law still mattered, can fit through the semantic trap ICE long kept to define "criminal" in an absolutely insane way that they managed to finangle into allowing the removal of legal immigrants who were ticketed for turnstile jumping in NYC, because paying the ticket, which is not a criminal offense but a violation under NY law, can be interpreted as agreeing to the allegation that falls under "theft of services", which thanks to the word "theft" in the name, is categorically considered a crime involving moral turpitude by ICE. Except the theft doesn't happen until the person gets onto the train, so only in NY would you contest the ticket and make it into a trespassing offense, which ICE won't flag since trespassing is not a moral matter. Moral turpitude is ported from the 1880s when it was a veiled reference for interracial sex, btw, although it did jack squat to prevent that from happening anyway. ICE is also the only governmental body that has the power to punish someone for not having sex - nonconsumation is considered a sign that a marriage was contracted for fraudulent purposes, and to add insult, lying to a federal official is a felony that is categorically removable as well, essentially giving ICE the authority to, under the penalty of first detention or imprisonment and then removal from the country, order two people to fuck. This isn't a hypothetical, they constantly conduct invasive interviews of couples they deem potential frauds and somehow they seem to all be interracial or at least not involving a white couple. Trump's first wife got status in Canada through a lavender marriage, but heteronormativity is only compulsory for the racially inpure, or something. Most people don't know, but some of us have RSS feeds just to force agencies to admit to things in writing. But none of this is on PACER, since agency decisions until last year's Loper Bright were given so much deference that admin law straight up doesn't end up in district court very often, and PACER is really just the district court docketing system, one that looks like Geocities not for retro reasons but because it's as official as web design was back in the day. Each court actually runs its own PACER instance so it's actually a federated system. Filing actually uses a system that looks exactly like PACER but you can and most practitioners do use a separate account for just in case you accidentally comingled personal funds with litigation expense. Nothing is secret because it doesn't need to be when you can't be held responsible for intentional bad acts or negligence or anything else that causes harm. Can't sue ICE, but if they issue a detainer on a US citizen they then remove - not unusual, just public these days - if you manage to get back into the states you can sue the municipality into bankruptcy.
Divorce law is actually a lot more straightforward since it's not federal, and well, if it's a no-fault then really the only thing stopping divorce by app is a cooperating federally recognized Indian tribe willing to be a bit flexible with how they determine membership. When there's something to fight over, it really just becomes insanely frivolous. I once had to wait 4 hours watching a couple fight over a set of season tickets for my law school's team - they had no-contact orders out so they had to split it game by game, plus potential playoffs and NCAA tournament tickets since the school is pretty good and makes deep runs regularly. I had a very obvious and not even really contested suppression motion waiting but since they would not stop arguing, made more insane because it was my 3L year and I didn't need to pay to go to any game and can reliably be on the front row because the school's system of holding spots had a loophole that the law students took advantage of (you need to put a tent out but it's never stated that you need to stay in the tent, so we'd pitch a tent as early as possible, have someone sit in it to throw off the underclassmen, put a mannequin we found in a trash bin in for the rest of the time and when doors open 16 of us go in front and center. Meanwhile, this couple just had to go on and on over a pair of seats that apparently cost a ton of money and aren't very good because neither went to the school and alumni had priority. Frivolous, yes, but complex? Only if you make it.
(If you need something, I regularly fulfill requests on courtlistener.com, since features like full text search and webhooks are nice to have generally. For PACER that is, since regulations.gov has a perfectly functional search system.)
Civil asset forfeiture should not be thought of in "legal" and "illegal". There's a rebuttable presumption to overcome in terms of the owner being innocent, but that doesn't make the act itself illegal. And you can't really do more since civil forfeiture when the innocent owner prevails is portrayed as a mistake and not a deliberate act of wrongdoing. It's unimaginable that civil forfeiture itself would go away because it both predates the founding and is effectively going to be a part of admiralty law. But never underestimate the power of ostracization and shame. For the state, any failure in this realm is deeply shameful and subject to internal ostracization, and it makes for a huge difference sometimes. If you ever talk to a prosecutor who lost a pro se case, you'll know.
If the police says it's not illegal they can make it for all intents and purposes not illegal. Prosecutors have discretion and they exercise it to protect the cops first and foremost.
So, to your question, they might get a vacation (paid) and a medal.
Trump: We have open borders
Also Trump: We need to give border patrol more money
Except why the hell would there be a border patrol in the first place if the border was open? We didn't have one when we actually had open borders, for the first hundred years of the nation's existence.
The rationale behind the Lanham Act and the relevant provisions on advertising is more about fraud than pure speech. That's why there is a "pure puffery" defense if raised in court, and only competitors have a cause of action, not consumers. You can make all sorts of false assertions in advertising, but faking scientifically refutable data to sell a product is problematic gives rise to a civil cause of action not as a speech restriction, but as an act of fraud for the purpose of financial gain.
If you're gullible enough to believe in the utter nonsense from the whole MAGAsphere then you're probably gullible enough to get swindled by one of many scams that are far better thought out than what Trump's trying to sell, and if you stuck with Trump for what would be a period of time that is longer than the standard statute of limitations, well, it's at least a great way to get some short term gain. It's not sustainable, but for first movers you can scam quite a bit of money running ads on their platform.
The MAGA ideology is sufficiently similar to the official line of the Chinese Communist Party that there's not only a widely believed conspiracy theory that Trump is an agent by the Chinese intelligence service... on Weibo and other Chinese platforms, but it has been allowed to propagate because he has been so incompetent broadly speaking at hiding said affinity that censoring the theory would be taken as confirmation and in turn, serve as a tacit critique of Xi's own competence in meritocratically select officials in charge of intelligence and national security. Not censoring, in turn, does not automatically mean approval but the possibility that either it's not important enough to censor, or that it's considered to be so obviously false that common sense alone would be sufficient, or the inverse. In any case, censorship generally leads to one conclusion, while leaving it uncensored is the equivalent of a no-comment and lots of crazy stuff gets posted with a similar treatment.
Except those tend to be flashes in a pan, and this has been around for 7 years. This is augmented with, understandably, the lack of broad understanding of the role of religion and the Catholic intergralists which Trump has essentially allowed to propagate freely a vision that is effectively identical to "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" except replace "CCP" with "the church" as the CCP is effectively a religion onto itself.
I've tried to suggest that it's not a conspiracy but stupidity and was roundly rejected as apparently it's harder to believe that the American president is actually stupid instead of merely incompetent. And for some reason stupidity and incompetency can't co-exist because incompetency is viewed, wrongly but persistently, as a broad trait like stupidity and not individualized to specific categories (the Ben Carson situation, except nobody in China knows who he is). But yeah, Trump has managed to do something unique at least, which is to trigger a conspiracy theory about him being in the CCP's pockets in China that the CCP views as favorable enough not to simply censor. This isn't Q-Anon (that kind of moral panic just doesn't play in the country) but has a similar sort of influence.
Congrats MAGA, your idiot chief is parroting the CCP so hard that people in China thinks that you're a bad communist and not an American nativist. Except they even have the border secured without the wall (since that was tried for 1800 years and did nothing to stop invasions and there's a lot of bewilderment as to why a solution that arguably have failed consistently from 200 BC into the 1800s would work now). Authoritarians know authoritarians and if they think that you're a failure at pushing authoritarianism, they might actually be right about that.
Goes for everything one puts out onto the world, doesn't it, including these comments (7:30am meta alert!) I've tried to put into the public domain as much code I've written as possible for the reason that I know that it's entirely likely that I don't even know the different ways my code can be used and the best way it could be used, transformed, and adapted in ways I can never imagine on my own.
I hope that authors or anyone who creates original works for public dissemination would realize that they are not writing dogma, and they are not creating religious texts but rather, works that by their nature cannot be treated as some holy text but rather, foundations upon which others will build upon or refute or transform or mash-up or sample as they see fit. No man is an island whether in their knowledge, the context of their writing, and the manner and view they espouse which then goes into the works they write. In that sense and in a way that certainly most writers would understand to some degree, I think T.S. Eliot was prescient (as others have noted in the 100 years hence) when he wrote, in regards to the notion of tradition, that
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
The realization that the future transformation of how a work is interpreted will also have an inherent impact on how the original work is read and understood is recognized by Eliot who was keenly aware of the fact that even his works would and be read in ways that he did not intend and had little power to stop it. His copious but frequently cheeky and sometimes tongue-in-cheek ur-trolling in his footnotes are indicators of his ambivalent attitudes towards dogmatic interpretations. He then proceeds to talk about how it's less about each individual who works with this aggregated knowledge and experience but the quality of the aggregated knowledge itself that matters far more.
Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author.
I think this indirectly outlined the ethos upon which hip-hop and open source software development was built and cannot exist without the basic notion that it's less about you but the work itself. I don't think Eliot himself could possibly see how his essay on literary criticism would be read as such, but it demonstrates the point, I think. The critiques of this essay seems to lean heavily on the notion that the writer must be depersonalized in his passing of said tradition when writing, but it ignores that the writer's depersonalization is inherently a sort of self-depersonalization, and may be better read as one cannot and should not intentionally make what can only be the accumulated experience and knowledge into a canonical, definitive culmination of the inspirations that leads to an immutable work.
(Also, with great irony I feel compelled to point out that 'Eurocentricity' critique of the essay was written very much with a distinct 'white man's burden' tone, as if those of us who did not learn English as a first language and were educated, partially or fully, in traditions that had no direct contact with the western canon, need someone to white knight for us when in truth, I've viewed that the over-reliance on the western white-knight mentality undergirds the dogma upon which the CCP and its historiography is constructed. I'm no longer in academia and when I left this was not fleshed out fully yet but by this point it should be clear that even the need to distinguish "socialism" with "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is both an endorsement of the transformative nature of idea and thought as aggregation and a rejection that western white-knighting is necessary and the most essentialist notion is also something inherently foreign in the context. It's not something that I can even say in China, but the mountains are tall and the emperor is Winnie the Pooh.
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We know how this will go. ICE will wave an administrative warrant they issued themselves and declare themselves to be compliant. Judge will point out that administrative warrants are not issued by Article III courts and cannot be used to trigger Article III powers. ICE will say "exactly" and declare that since they are not working under Article III authority, they can simply do what they do as a function completely divorced from Article III and entirely under powers delegated by congress to the executive, plus all the stuff they added. Judge will remind that Loper-Bright means that they do not need to defer to ICE's previously almost blanket authority to make stuff up and let it be law. ICE will then simply remove those complaining from American jurisdiction and claim that nobody has standing is available, ta dah! That is literally how they construct their authority, btw. They are law enforcement but not Law Enforcement. They are police in the most generic and metaphorical way possible. They exist because the founders did not anticipate that a hundred years after the Constitution gets ratified, congress would make up what would become of all this out of a theory that "if it's not covered by the constitution, it's fine" theory. Never mind that the power in question is actually not enumerated or even implied, it literally isn't and really should not be. The Constitution addresses naturalization, it does not contemplate that congress can simply attach a step in front of it and claim power over that step and then delegate all the powers under the sun to an agency that doesn't answer to Article III courts while pretending as if they do when it's convenient. It helps that when entire populations are excluded by law for a century those voices simply aren't at the table until the power ossifies and becomes part of stare decisis. So they will drag it out until it's rendered moot by themselves. What else is new? They are happy not being real cops, since you know what really gets in the way of their work? Gideon v. Wainwright, if it applied. But that's entirely an Article III matter. They're not part of Article III, they don't even know what it says. They can follow anyone's orders they want. Stephen Miller doesn't have enumerated powers, his position is literally made up out of thin air, never mind authority. But if the agency chooses to treat him as their boss, who gets to stop them? Who has standing that they can't get rid of? TL;DR: ICE is what the Chewbacca defense looks like in practice. Good luck.
Donald Trump can barely write 138 characters of readable text at a time. This is President Stephen Miller at work.
The thing about Notice and Commentary is that they don't have to actually do anything except pay lip service to genuine concerns raised anyway. Also, looking at comment-stuffing patterns, it actually have for the past 10+ years inadvertently created a situation where the mass of copypasta support amplified the genuine questions since the APA does require said lip service to be paid, and it's hard to pay lip service to copypasta. It's unlikely that most of the stuffing is done by corporate America, because there's a ton of anti-corporate but pro-state comments that ends up getting sent in for, say, the DEA (especially on matters that also involve the FDA), or DHS, or the even more in the weeds aspects ranging from the FAA to Treasury subagencies. They are far more about reinforcing what the agency wants to do already. I can't prove that because I can't even get a response to FOIA requests I've sent in and only ICE has been as mum on FOIA requests (although ICE actively trolls public interest firms so I guess they take it one step further, your tax dollars at work). The net neutrality instance (and other instances of comment-stuffing that was revealed when the government sees an advantage for doing so) are known because the gatekeepers wanted those particular cases to be noted, but it is widespread as hell and also, since there's no requirement to use one's real legal name - especially when interest groups can comment as a group if they so wish - not to mention that there are a bevy of people with my name in the country, the need to use actual identities from some db leak is extraneous and frankly, more indicative of the operatives not knowing how the system works more than anything else. That would hardly be surprising since the first Trump admin didn't seem to have a single lawyer who had the president's ear and understood the mechanisms of admin law. It's also curious why such stuffing efforts don't occur on a greater scale on the state level since most states have a similar system. Boyd Gaming tried to ask for a handout and continue the Nevada ban on iGaming over the pandemic and failed because 5 Nevadans, none of whom knew each other, objected in writing to the Gaming Commission. Boyd even made the ludicrous claim that Nevada didn't have the datacenter capacity to run a geofenced in-state gaming system and with a fairly significant chunk of taxpayer change at stake a company that size would not make completely idiotic claims that can be refuted by Googling. In fact, Google literally was building and finishing their Henderson DC during the whole process and so it's literally the top of results when searched. Boyd is publicly traded and operate close to 30 properties, they can afford lawyers who can make better arguments than five randos. And it would take a very small sockpuppet operation to create the appearance of support, and instead they were out about $200 million both from not receiving an additional state bailout and the acquisition of an iGaming company. But of course on the federal level for the most part rulemaking is not arising out of lobbying directly but instead most of it arises out of agencies fulfilling the procedural requirements of the APA. Those commenting should do so to force the agency to engage with genuine concerns and since they don't have to consider the persuasiveness of the comments, their answers can be surprisingly revealing. Getting the DEA to admit that their enforcement and scheduling actions are done without considering patient well being because they only care about potential for abuse (not even actual abuse, so much of scheduling is based on moral panic and an attempt to create problems to justify its raison d'etre) didn't take an API key since under both the Obama and the first Trump admins I couldn't even get an api key somehow. I have one now - during the Biden admin - but it's also way easier nowadays to stuff the comments without using the API. Residential/mobile proxies are cheaper than ever, and if someone can't figure out how to automate a browser or 100 to navigate the site, they should hire the sneaker bot kids. But this really means that if the tactic actually worked, then someone like me can pay next to nothing and stuff regulations.gov, no api required. Selenium has been around long enough that it's incredibly simple to pose as a real browser once you do a run-through, or the likes of OctoBrowser, ixBrowser, Linken Sphere if you want to go halfsies on the automation. But since agencies are effectively shielded from direct political pressure anyway and can simply wave away legitimate concerns as they have always done. Many routinely ignore black letter reporting requirements and have effectively gone rogue (the DEA makes a profit and keeps it to augment its budget, and that profit comes from profits made when laundering cartel money, for over 20 years. They've stopped reporting to congress regularly in 2012 and remains the case when the IG was still able to audit), so why should they be afraid of the unwashed masses trying to ring the alarm on the recklessness of agency action? The most dangerous regulations are the ones that directly affect the liberty and property interests of the average person. Immediate harm surely outweighs potential future harm, and if you really give a damn you should already have a template ready for submission. The agencies seems to take such minute indicators of effort more seriously for some reason, although not seriously enough to change their plans most of the time.
No dude, PACER is literally the docketing system for district courts. Admin stuff is on regulations.gov. And yes, most private citizens don't know anything about admin law, but the lawyers who work in their niche are all ridiculously dedicated specialists who believe in holding the administrative state to account regardless of administration and have turned down far more lucrative and less stressful work to do what is frequently invisible, entirely not understood by most people we went to law school with (half of my admin law class dropped out, and it's a pre-req for all the juicy stuff like immigration law and the niche classes about the admin parts of the DMCA, which was taught over the summer, had 4 students, and was taught by the head of the IP division of the state bar who offered all 4 of us a position. I was the only one to turn it down since the DMCA is relatively tame compared to the clusterfuck that is immigration law and I was gunning for a position that paid me less, had me working insane hours, use 3 languages routinely, encounter daily the only part of the US code that singled out my ethnicity by name and marked us for removal - kept even though all provisions had been moved out in the 1940s - and in the end, somehow managed to help facilitate 17,000 DACA recipients in getting a green card because DHS didn't know their own regulations as well as the attorneys. I actually don't even know how counsular processing works for someone to legally get their spouse an immigrant visa to the US but I can tell you the exact wording that, when the law still mattered, can fit through the semantic trap ICE long kept to define "criminal" in an absolutely insane way that they managed to finangle into allowing the removal of legal immigrants who were ticketed for turnstile jumping in NYC, because paying the ticket, which is not a criminal offense but a violation under NY law, can be interpreted as agreeing to the allegation that falls under "theft of services", which thanks to the word "theft" in the name, is categorically considered a crime involving moral turpitude by ICE. Except the theft doesn't happen until the person gets onto the train, so only in NY would you contest the ticket and make it into a trespassing offense, which ICE won't flag since trespassing is not a moral matter. Moral turpitude is ported from the 1880s when it was a veiled reference for interracial sex, btw, although it did jack squat to prevent that from happening anyway. ICE is also the only governmental body that has the power to punish someone for not having sex - nonconsumation is considered a sign that a marriage was contracted for fraudulent purposes, and to add insult, lying to a federal official is a felony that is categorically removable as well, essentially giving ICE the authority to, under the penalty of first detention or imprisonment and then removal from the country, order two people to fuck. This isn't a hypothetical, they constantly conduct invasive interviews of couples they deem potential frauds and somehow they seem to all be interracial or at least not involving a white couple. Trump's first wife got status in Canada through a lavender marriage, but heteronormativity is only compulsory for the racially inpure, or something. Most people don't know, but some of us have RSS feeds just to force agencies to admit to things in writing. But none of this is on PACER, since agency decisions until last year's Loper Bright were given so much deference that admin law straight up doesn't end up in district court very often, and PACER is really just the district court docketing system, one that looks like Geocities not for retro reasons but because it's as official as web design was back in the day. Each court actually runs its own PACER instance so it's actually a federated system. Filing actually uses a system that looks exactly like PACER but you can and most practitioners do use a separate account for just in case you accidentally comingled personal funds with litigation expense. Nothing is secret because it doesn't need to be when you can't be held responsible for intentional bad acts or negligence or anything else that causes harm. Can't sue ICE, but if they issue a detainer on a US citizen they then remove - not unusual, just public these days - if you manage to get back into the states you can sue the municipality into bankruptcy. Divorce law is actually a lot more straightforward since it's not federal, and well, if it's a no-fault then really the only thing stopping divorce by app is a cooperating federally recognized Indian tribe willing to be a bit flexible with how they determine membership. When there's something to fight over, it really just becomes insanely frivolous. I once had to wait 4 hours watching a couple fight over a set of season tickets for my law school's team - they had no-contact orders out so they had to split it game by game, plus potential playoffs and NCAA tournament tickets since the school is pretty good and makes deep runs regularly. I had a very obvious and not even really contested suppression motion waiting but since they would not stop arguing, made more insane because it was my 3L year and I didn't need to pay to go to any game and can reliably be on the front row because the school's system of holding spots had a loophole that the law students took advantage of (you need to put a tent out but it's never stated that you need to stay in the tent, so we'd pitch a tent as early as possible, have someone sit in it to throw off the underclassmen, put a mannequin we found in a trash bin in for the rest of the time and when doors open 16 of us go in front and center. Meanwhile, this couple just had to go on and on over a pair of seats that apparently cost a ton of money and aren't very good because neither went to the school and alumni had priority. Frivolous, yes, but complex? Only if you make it. (If you need something, I regularly fulfill requests on courtlistener.com, since features like full text search and webhooks are nice to have generally. For PACER that is, since regulations.gov has a perfectly functional search system.)
Civil asset forfeiture should not be thought of in "legal" and "illegal". There's a rebuttable presumption to overcome in terms of the owner being innocent, but that doesn't make the act itself illegal. And you can't really do more since civil forfeiture when the innocent owner prevails is portrayed as a mistake and not a deliberate act of wrongdoing. It's unimaginable that civil forfeiture itself would go away because it both predates the founding and is effectively going to be a part of admiralty law. But never underestimate the power of ostracization and shame. For the state, any failure in this realm is deeply shameful and subject to internal ostracization, and it makes for a huge difference sometimes. If you ever talk to a prosecutor who lost a pro se case, you'll know.
If the police says it's not illegal they can make it for all intents and purposes not illegal. Prosecutors have discretion and they exercise it to protect the cops first and foremost. So, to your question, they might get a vacation (paid) and a medal.
hold on
Trump: We have open borders Also Trump: We need to give border patrol more money Except why the hell would there be a border patrol in the first place if the border was open? We didn't have one when we actually had open borders, for the first hundred years of the nation's existence.
The rationale behind the Lanham Act and the relevant provisions on advertising is more about fraud than pure speech. That's why there is a "pure puffery" defense if raised in court, and only competitors have a cause of action, not consumers. You can make all sorts of false assertions in advertising, but faking scientifically refutable data to sell a product is problematic gives rise to a civil cause of action not as a speech restriction, but as an act of fraud for the purpose of financial gain.
If you're gullible enough to believe in the utter nonsense from the whole MAGAsphere then you're probably gullible enough to get swindled by one of many scams that are far better thought out than what Trump's trying to sell, and if you stuck with Trump for what would be a period of time that is longer than the standard statute of limitations, well, it's at least a great way to get some short term gain. It's not sustainable, but for first movers you can scam quite a bit of money running ads on their platform.
The MAGA ideology is sufficiently similar to the official line of the Chinese Communist Party that there's not only a widely believed conspiracy theory that Trump is an agent by the Chinese intelligence service... on Weibo and other Chinese platforms, but it has been allowed to propagate because he has been so incompetent broadly speaking at hiding said affinity that censoring the theory would be taken as confirmation and in turn, serve as a tacit critique of Xi's own competence in meritocratically select officials in charge of intelligence and national security. Not censoring, in turn, does not automatically mean approval but the possibility that either it's not important enough to censor, or that it's considered to be so obviously false that common sense alone would be sufficient, or the inverse. In any case, censorship generally leads to one conclusion, while leaving it uncensored is the equivalent of a no-comment and lots of crazy stuff gets posted with a similar treatment. Except those tend to be flashes in a pan, and this has been around for 7 years. This is augmented with, understandably, the lack of broad understanding of the role of religion and the Catholic intergralists which Trump has essentially allowed to propagate freely a vision that is effectively identical to "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" except replace "CCP" with "the church" as the CCP is effectively a religion onto itself. I've tried to suggest that it's not a conspiracy but stupidity and was roundly rejected as apparently it's harder to believe that the American president is actually stupid instead of merely incompetent. And for some reason stupidity and incompetency can't co-exist because incompetency is viewed, wrongly but persistently, as a broad trait like stupidity and not individualized to specific categories (the Ben Carson situation, except nobody in China knows who he is). But yeah, Trump has managed to do something unique at least, which is to trigger a conspiracy theory about him being in the CCP's pockets in China that the CCP views as favorable enough not to simply censor. This isn't Q-Anon (that kind of moral panic just doesn't play in the country) but has a similar sort of influence. Congrats MAGA, your idiot chief is parroting the CCP so hard that people in China thinks that you're a bad communist and not an American nativist. Except they even have the border secured without the wall (since that was tried for 1800 years and did nothing to stop invasions and there's a lot of bewilderment as to why a solution that arguably have failed consistently from 200 BC into the 1800s would work now). Authoritarians know authoritarians and if they think that you're a failure at pushing authoritarianism, they might actually be right about that.
Goes for everything one puts out onto the world, doesn't it, including these comments (7:30am meta alert!) I've tried to put into the public domain as much code I've written as possible for the reason that I know that it's entirely likely that I don't even know the different ways my code can be used and the best way it could be used, transformed, and adapted in ways I can never imagine on my own. I hope that authors or anyone who creates original works for public dissemination would realize that they are not writing dogma, and they are not creating religious texts but rather, works that by their nature cannot be treated as some holy text but rather, foundations upon which others will build upon or refute or transform or mash-up or sample as they see fit. No man is an island whether in their knowledge, the context of their writing, and the manner and view they espouse which then goes into the works they write. In that sense and in a way that certainly most writers would understand to some degree, I think T.S. Eliot was prescient (as others have noted in the 100 years hence) when he wrote, in regards to the notion of tradition, that
The realization that the future transformation of how a work is interpreted will also have an inherent impact on how the original work is read and understood is recognized by Eliot who was keenly aware of the fact that even his works would and be read in ways that he did not intend and had little power to stop it. His copious but frequently cheeky and sometimes tongue-in-cheek ur-trolling in his footnotes are indicators of his ambivalent attitudes towards dogmatic interpretations. He then proceeds to talk about how it's less about each individual who works with this aggregated knowledge and experience but the quality of the aggregated knowledge itself that matters far more. I think this indirectly outlined the ethos upon which hip-hop and open source software development was built and cannot exist without the basic notion that it's less about you but the work itself. I don't think Eliot himself could possibly see how his essay on literary criticism would be read as such, but it demonstrates the point, I think. The critiques of this essay seems to lean heavily on the notion that the writer must be depersonalized in his passing of said tradition when writing, but it ignores that the writer's depersonalization is inherently a sort of self-depersonalization, and may be better read as one cannot and should not intentionally make what can only be the accumulated experience and knowledge into a canonical, definitive culmination of the inspirations that leads to an immutable work. (Also, with great irony I feel compelled to point out that 'Eurocentricity' critique of the essay was written very much with a distinct 'white man's burden' tone, as if those of us who did not learn English as a first language and were educated, partially or fully, in traditions that had no direct contact with the western canon, need someone to white knight for us when in truth, I've viewed that the over-reliance on the western white-knight mentality undergirds the dogma upon which the CCP and its historiography is constructed. I'm no longer in academia and when I left this was not fleshed out fully yet but by this point it should be clear that even the need to distinguish "socialism" with "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is both an endorsement of the transformative nature of idea and thought as aggregation and a rejection that western white-knighting is necessary and the most essentialist notion is also something inherently foreign in the context. It's not something that I can even say in China, but the mountains are tall and the emperor is Winnie the Pooh.