“And There Was No One Left to Speak Out For Me”
I had planned on including a piece in today’s Jackspotpourri about German Pastor Martin Niemoller and the famous poem he wrote after World War Two. Instead, here’s a column written by Barbara McQuade from the Palm Beach Post’s Opinion page of April 18. The author says it far better than I can.
But first, here is what Pastor Niemoller wrote:
“First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist,
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.”
This poem has been reproduced in many settings, one of which is engraved on a monument in the Holocaust Memorial Garden of the synagogue to which I belonged back on Long Island. Read on!
President Trump’s lawlessness creates a danger for every American
Barbara McQuade - Op-ed contributor (Palm Beach Post)
“First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.'
So begins a poem written by Martin Niemöller, a German pastor who initially supported the Nazi party, and later spent eight years in concentration camps.
His words resonate today as President Donald Trump pushes the limits of his authority to deport immigrants. He seems to be counting on the fact that undocumented immigrants from Latin American countries lack public support, and so no one will speak out for them.
But the case creates a danger for every American.
The rule of law - When I served as U.S. attorney, I helped enforce immigration laws, but we were committed to doing so lawfully. Honoring the rule of law includes obeying orders of the judiciary, one of the three co-equal branches of government that checks the others. Allowing the executive branch to flout court orders undermines the legal processes that protect all of us.
And if we permit lawlessness in deportations, what comes next?
Take the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man the Trump administration admits was deported in error along with more than 200 others to a prison in El Salvador.
After his family filed a lawsuit seeking his return, the government has taken the position that it is powerless to bring him back.
This is the same government whose Secretary of Homeland Security was seen touring that same prison in late March while wearing a $50,000 watch.
And the same government that hosted El Salvador’s president at the White House on Monday.
The United States has agreed to pay $6 million to house prisoners in his country. During Monday’s Oval Office meeting, Trump mused aloud about even sending American citizens who were 'homegrown criminals' to the El Salvador prison.
‘Any of us’ - On April 6, a federal district court judge in Maryland ordered the administration to 'facilitate and effectuate' the return of Abrego Garcia, and an appellate court later agreed, noting that the government 'can – and does – return wrongfully removed migrants as a matter of course.'
Under the administration’s logic, the court wrote, 'the government could send any of us to a Salvadoran prison without due process, claim that the misstep was a result of ‘administrative error,’ and thereby wash its hands of any responsibility for what happens next.'
On Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld that decision in part, ruling that the government must 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.
The court remanded the case to the district court to clarify the meaning of 'effectuate.' That night, the district judge amended her order to remove the word altogether, clearing the way for the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.
Or so she thought.
Changing stories - Rather than bring him back, the government took the position — astonishingly — that to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia’s return, it need do nothing more than permit him to enter the country if he should manage to find his way to the border.
Last Saturday, the government also represented that Abrego Garcia is no longer able to remain in the country, anyway, because he is a member of the MS-13 gang, which the Trump administration recently designated as a foreign terrorist organization, a claim Abrego Garcia denies and has had no opportunity to contest in court.
In a hearing on Tuesday, the government again changed its story and claimed that Abrego Garcia was properly deported after all.
In response, the exasperated district court judge accused the administration of 'gamesmanship' and issued an order permitting the plaintiff to take depositions and request documents to find out who is authorizing his continued confinement.
On Wednesday, a different district court judge said he has probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt of court for willfully violating his order.
Everyone has rights - Abrego Garcia, 29, may not be a sympathetic figure. He entered the country illegally from El Salvador in 2011 when he was 16. Eight years later, he was arrested by immigration officials while looking for work in a Home Depot parking lot, and was ordered deported.
The government blocked his removal, finding he would face persecution if he returned to El Salvador, where his family’s business was extorted by a violent gang.
When he was pulled over and arrested on March 12, he was married to a U.S. citizen with three children. He has no criminal record. His name appears in court records in a civil domestic matter that was dropped, and stands apart from the issue at hand: everyone’s right to due process, regardless of their alleged misconduct.
But like anyone in the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, Abrego Garcia is entitled to constitutional protections, including due process, which means notice and an opportunity to be heard before our liberty can be taken from us.
By spiriting him out of the country without either, he was denied that right. And if he can be denied that right, then so can any of us.
'And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Barbara McQuade is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and the former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. She also appears frequently on MSNBC.
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Historian Heather Cox Richardson goes over the same territory, and much more, in her posting dated April 20. Visit it by CLICKING HERE or copying and pasting https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ on your browser line.
She also points out that cracks and weaknesses in the President’s programs are beginning to appear even among the MAGA folks.
There is hope, just as there was in 1775 when the colonists started the process to permanently rid themselves of a ‘king.’
That seems to be an unending task. Attributed to Thomas Jefferson and others, indeed ‘Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty.’
JL
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It Started a Quarter of a Millenium Ago
This week marked the 250th anniversary of the start of the Revolutionary War with the battle of local Minutemen against British regular troops at Lexington and Concord.
From school days, you probably recall Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s commemorative poem’s lines: ‘Listen my children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, T’was the eighteenth of April in ’75, there’s hardly a man who is now alive, etc. etc.’
Paul Revere and other riders were racing to advise the Minutemen of the route the British were taking from Boston to Lexington where they intended to arrest the 'rebel' leaders, after being given a signal from lanterns in the steeple of Boston’s Old North Church: ‘One if by land, and two if by sea … ‘ In commemorating that 1775 event, and relating it to 2025, the Old North Church was lit up again this week, but not with lanterns. This message was briefly projected on it.
JL
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International Trade and Tariffs
Paul Krugman recently wrote that international trade is not about what we can sell. The real issue is about what we need to buy.
We (and others) buy some things we need from other nations because we cannot produce them ourselves less expensively or less efficiently than they can. But there are other things that other nations buy from us because we can produce them less expensively or less efficiently than they can. The delicate balance between the two positions, a nation’s ‘balance of trade,’ starts with what a nation needs to buy, which is more important than what they have to sell, which might be nonexistent or something nobody might need to buy from them.
This ‘balance’ is what Trump’s tariffs are attacking by making ‘buying’ more expensive and difficult, in the questionable hope that doing so will result in our developing the ability to ourselves produce what we buy from others more efficiently, doing away with the need to buy it from others, whom the President claims have been ‘ripping us off.’ In any event, imposing tariffs on what we buy from other nations is not a friendly act toward those nations.
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No nations today are totally self-sufficient. That is a dream. The day of the totally self-sufficient caveman ended when a hunter exchanged the extra meat from an animal he had killed for some fruit or vegetables from a neighbor who swapped some of the produce he had picked for stuff to fill his needs. Thus, the hunter didn’t have to learn to pick fruit and the fruit picker didn’t have to learn to hunt to get the stuff each needed. Both were happy buying from each other until the greedier of the two decided to go to war against the other, taking over its hunting grounds or vegetable patch, or inventing tariffs which at least initially, didn’t involve armed forces.
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MSNBC’s Jen Psaki correctly quoted California’s Attorney General the other day, who pointed out that tariffs are the business of Congress, unless a President declares a national emergency. He has filed suit arguing that Trump is abusing the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to bypass Congress and impose tariffs unilaterally. As he put it, you can’t invent "bogus national emergencies" to grab power. Correct!
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While Paul Krugman’s postings on the economy are sometimes a bit difficult to fully grasp (at least for me), his April 21 posting (Trump’s Cultural Revolution - The first thing we do is we kill intellectual inquiry) is more to the point. Check it out by copying and pasting
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trumps-cultural-revolution on your browser line, or by CLICKING HERE.
JL
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My Keyboard Remains Active. So Should Yours!
Here’s a copy of a letter I sent off to the Palm Beach Post after the recent fatal shooting at Florida State University. If they print it, I will let you know.
‘There has to be some reason why shootings like those at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, and now at Florida State University continue to occur in Florida, while the State Legislature attempts to weaken the State's laws aimed at gun violence. I think it arises from a misinterpretation of the Second Amendment that even the Supreme Court has accepted, an interpretation that ignores that Amendment's first thirteen words, but allows its final fourteen words to stand alone, never the intention of those who wrote the Constitution; the right to bear arms was intended to arm State militias in the event of either Federal action against individual States or slave rebellions. How much innocent blood has to be shed before this misinterpretation, authored by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, is corrected?’
I’ll save you the trouble of looking up the Second Amendment’s language. Here it is. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
I feel the Amendment relates to protecting that right for the very specific purpose of enabling State militias to be able to recruit already armed people and was not intended to reinforce other existing reasons for people to continue to keep and bear arms. The Bill of Rights, the first ten Amendments to the Constitution, each referred to something the government could not do, not to something it was being empowered to do! Read it and make up your mind.
JL
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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
Your comments on this ‘blog’ would be appreciated. My Email address is jacklippman18@gmail.com.
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JL
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