Common Conviction

In reaction to the tidal wave of Trump Administration actions, many Americans are subordinating rule of law, constitutionality, and impartial justice to their political agendas, both in “resistance” to and support for the many measures.  

Of course the anti-Trump actors point to clear issues in the detention and deportation of immigrants as exhibit A.   They also challenge, validly, the President’s authority actually to effect some of his Executive Orders, for instance to abolish the Department of Education.  

Disrespect for established rules is never nice, and disregard even for procedural laws can be seen as breaking eggs to make an omelet of sweeping government change.  But many measures still violate the law.  Vested interests, such as people have in the jobs they’d held, or labs in the grants that funded them, also still have a right to due process treatment.  

Some moves could cut to the core of our founding principles.  Transgressions against the separation of powers, or violation of persons’ constitutional rights, particularly for personal political retribution, as President Trump has alluded at times, raise fundamental concerns.  Constitutional measures, of due process and checks and balances among the branches of government, are not merely rules to be navigated; they are living implementations of our founding Truths, of unalienable personal rights and government tasked to secure those rights. 

It is therefore imperative that government actors shape their actions, before acting, for full compliance in good faith, and explicitly not in the spirit of asking forgiveness after the fact rather than permission before.  But it is also crucial, in opposing such political measures, to distinguish between actions’ political content; rules and regulations of proper authority and jurisdiction; and, crucially, transgressions against fundamental justice.

The political content of trying to abolish the Department of education is one thing, fully open to debate and subject to electoral mandates.  The authority actually to abolish the Department is another question, subject to jurisdictional rules of law and Constitution.  Those too can be justly contested in political and legal forums. Violations of basic rights and of checks and balances, such as unvetted detentions of documented immigrants and visitors, or of impeachment of judges for impeding administration actions, or government attacks on lawyers for legally investigating the President in the past, are another matter entirely.

It is crucial that opponents of the administration’s actions distinguish among these types of issue.  Conflating basic constitutional principles with politicized objectives is as deleterious as initiating actions that threaten those principles.  If you defend a detainee for the sake of his rights, that is one thing; if you oppose the detention because she advocated for Palestinians against Israel, you are as culpable as the administration for subordinating principles of justice to politicized interest.  Anyone who subordinates basic principles to partisan wants degrades the principles themselves.  Our contestation has reduced law from legitimate authority to auxiliary for interests and ideology, from ethical bulwark to battle trophy.  

All advocacy along these lines needs to be ignored, or rejected.  Our duopolistic political poles always try to pin each other for undermining democracy, with “democracy” interpreted to mean “my side wins.”  It’s time to look past their disregard for principle.  Carried on for too long, a discourse of politics over principle reduces civic order to nothing but the outcome of partisan struggle.  When civic order is only a stake in the fight, then any means of fighting become fair.  Civic order then no longer walls off civil society from the Hobbesian war of all against all, and might-as-right then takes over, even within our own identity and community.

Anyone charging, then, that the Trump Administration is attacking democracy, or imposing authoritarianism, must acknowledge whether they would say the same if some other person were being detained, or some other rule challenged.  Anyone supporting administration actions must accept that impartial justice and due process are fundamental requirements.  Disregard is beyond the scope of acceptable behavior; it is to be avoided, not attempted in anticipation of a test in the courts.  And all should note that few real tests have yet occurred, as of Spring 2025.  Final court adjudications have occurred on few if any of the contested matters.    

From the standpoint of this blog, the most important matter today is to promote, preserve, and restore American comity.  Comity, we note, is not “unity.”  The latter requires all to agree on substantive matters as well as ethical principles.  That requires some political not only to “win” civic contests, but to eradicate opponents.  Comity requires only that all advocates and contestants acknowledge each other’s rights and deliberate as compatriots, which we all are.

It would be ideal if some set of figures from multiple “sides,” political, cultural, and of vested interests, could all pledge together to support, defend, and defer to our founding principles and constitutional rules first, and leave politics and policy for contestation to be contested on that common platform.  Even if the various parties are lying, and obfuscate their subsequent disregard for the creedal ethos, such a pledge would create a standard that the rest of us can point to, and refer to as we choose candidates to vote for,