STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT DUE PROCESS.

Outside the Beltway's Matt Bernius gets off what could be a Friday short take, but for Cold Spring Shops generally staying away from the niceties of the law.  "EVERYONE should get due process. Full stop. And that includes criminals or people who do things we don’t like."  That column opens with a qualification.  "While undocumented folks don’t get the same level of due process as citizens, they still are entitled to due process as spelled out by our laws."

Most of his column calls attention to a conflation of the moral with the legal.

I write all this because we, as Americans (and this might be true of Western nations writ large) tend to get moral systems mixed up with legal systems. And that’s super dangerous. As I’ve written in the past, the thing that often unites the Left and the Right is the desire to punish people who deserve to be punished. What divides left and right is who each thinks deserves to be punished. It’s those impulses we see play out here: Only citizens deserve due process, or only good people deserve due process. Both perspectives are a rot on our civil society and the rule of law.

That rot has been a long time in coming.  In 2012, I asked, "Will it really take a total loss of confidence in governance before business as usual ends?"

Dear reader, I fear that loss of confidence is upon us.  If you only rely on a principle when it is convenient, you have compromised your integrity.

Put another way, invoking due process only when it is convenient, which meant overriding it during the corona tyranny, compromises the integrity of many of the people currently invoking it.

That it's yet another invocation smelling of "soft on crime" doesn't help.

— Stephen Karlson (@StephenKarlson) April 20, 2025

Yes, I have noticed an overlap of people currently treating the deportation of illegal aliens without a hearing as a denial of due process, which, per Mr Bernius it is, with the arbitrary closing of businesses, open spaces, and schools for years without a hearing, which was For Your Own Good, and due process be masked up!  Never mind the deflection, or the caterwauling about hypocrisy: it is the very integrity of the Rule of Law that has been deconstructed, and the Trump presidency is simply another manifestation thereof.  Too late, perhaps, for Mr Bernius.

I beg my fellow travelers on the Left not to fall into the trap of arguing that Garcia is a good man or, in some way, that his poor treatment by the federal government somehow entitles him to due process. Or even throwing around words like “innocent” regarding this case.

I hope fellow travelers on the Right can also join in on this. We don’t need to agree on other criminal legal system things (though, from personal experience, there are many spaces for collaboration and agreement). We all need to be fierce advocates that EVERYONE residing in the United States deserves due process, regardless of what they may or may not have done.

Sometimes all you can do is crack wise.  "According to sources, several individuals who bypassed the legal process in migrating to the United States are demanding due process before being deported."

Well, yes, making Senator Van Hollen a figure of fun rather than noting he is a sad sack lacking integrity might be the less troubling course to follow.