The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.
United States Constitution — Article I, Section 9, Clause 2
Of all of the ridiculous and illegal suggestions that have come from the White House during these first 100 days in office, this brainchild of Stephen Miller and Project 2025 to have the President suspend the right of habeas corpus is not only flatly unconstitutional, it is literally the only thing keeping the Executive Branch from locking up more people indefinitely without charge than they’ve already done!
It is hard to imagine any competent court, Article III or otherwise, ever allowing the Great Writ to be suspended by the executive branch.
The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia is but one example showing the glaring need for habeas corpus which was effectively defied when he was shipped off to a Salvadoran gulag of strict regime without notice or anything approaching a hearing and the ability to challenge his detention and removal in what the Trump administration laughingly described as an “administrative error”.
Months later, he’s still rotting in that prison that a court order from a United States judge had forbidden him to be sent to with no end in sight given the absurd arguments the Department of Justice has been advancing in this case.
Habeas corpus is a hard-won right that is the effective difference between living in a democratic society and being subjected to an authoritarian dictatorship.
There was a reason why King John was forced to acquiesce to the right of habeas corpus when he signed Magna Carta on that meadow in Runnymeade in 1215 and why it’s one of the more persistent tenets of that document that underpin the American legal system today.
Can you imagine a world in which someone may be imprisoned by the state, held incommunicado indefinitely in detention, and goodness knows what else may happen to them whilst they’re in custody without that fundamental right to require the government to show that they have reasonable cause supported by evidence to deprive the person of their liberty if not their life?
There’s certainly plenty of contemporary examples…North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia (both the modern version and the Soviet Union that Vladimir Putin seems hell-bent on recreating along with reconsituting the worse abuses of the KGB he once ran) come immediately to mind.
I don’t think there’s a person in this country who really wants to live in a dystopian police state.
That’s why you should care about habeas corpus and be very concerned when people casually talk of suspending it…especially a President that has no authority in the Constitution or the law to actually do so unilaterally.
There is a reason it has only been suspended four times in our history and all four times were during an actual war or rebellion and was ultimately done with the blessing of Congress.
President Lincoln actually tried to suspend habeas corpus unilaterally during the Civil War and was almost immediately smacked down by the courts which have ruled consistently ever since that the power to suspend habeas is very narrowly construed and is exclusively a power of the Congress.
Yes, *THAT* President Lincoln that is so revered for seeing us through the Civil War and credited with freeing the slaves and the President you always hear the Republicans fawning over if they’re not idolising Reagan.
If a President truly were allowed to suspend habeas corpus, do you really think the abuses would stop there?
What need would they have for the pesky courts and judges that try to check the executive and keep it from acting illegally and unconstitutional? What would stop them from locking up the half of Congress they could do without and replacing them with their own paid political stooges to do the executive’s bidding.
Have a dissenting thought against current governmental policy and the temerity to say it or write about it? Nicked off to the chokey without so much as a by your leave and likely threats to anyone else who knows of it to just as quickly forget about it and not ask questions the government would preferred not being asked.
Our democracy would be all but dead and we’d be at the mercy of a tyrant cloaking themselves in the flag and the presidency.
I can’t imagine that you want this and I sure as hell don’t and that’s why you need to care about who is threatening this bedrock right of a free citizenry in a democratic society even if it’s a right you’ve never heard of or really understand.
And whilst you’re at it…don’t vote in people who are perfectly comfortable in tossing the Constitution into the bin!
This whole kerfuffle reminded me of a Star Trek episode from the original series in the 1960’s called “The Omega Glory” in which the crew finds a sister starship whose crew has been decimated by a deadly disease they contracted whilst visiting the planet below.
The boarding party investigating the USS Exeter’s fate beams down to the planet in time and finds themselves amongst a friendly Asian-looking people called the “Kohms” who are fighting the “Yangs” who are brute savage whites intent on wiping them out. It turns out that the two groups fought a bacteriological war where the surviving natives had evolved to live far longer on the order of 400-1,000 years or more and that the crazed captain of the Exeter thinks that some sort of immortality serum could be derived and violates the Prime Directive on non-interference to try to discover the secret to the natives’ longevity.
The reason why I mention this is that the crew eventually figures out that the “Kohms” were “Communists” and “Yangs” were the “Yankees” on a parallel Earth (yeah…it was the 1960’s!) and Captain Kirk ends up making the best defence of the Constitution I’ve ever seen or read when he explains to Cloud William (the leader of the Yangs) just what his “holy words” truly mean:
CLOUD: When you would not say the holy words, of the Ee’d Plebnista, I doubted you.
KIRK: I did not recognise those words, you said them so badly, Without meaning.
ELDER: No! No! Only the eyes of a chief may see the Ee’d Plebnista.
KIRK: This was not written for chiefs. (general consternation) Hear me! Hear this! Among my people, we carry many such words as this from many lands, many worlds. Many are equally good and are as well respected, but wherever we have gone, no words have said this thing of importance in quite this way. Look at these three words written larger than the rest, with a special pride never written before or since. Tall words proudly saying We the People. That which you call Ee’d Plebnista was not written for the chiefs or the kings or the warriors or the rich and powerful, but for all the people! Down the centuries, you have slurred the meaning of the words, ‘We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution.’ These words and the words that follow were not written only for the Yangs, but for the Kohms as well!
CLOUD: The Kohms?
KIRK: They must apply to everyone or they mean nothing! Do you understand?
CLOUD: I do not fully understand, one named Kirk. But the holy words will be obeyed. I swear it.
That is why the Constitution, even with its flaws that have been amended over centuries as our society evolved beyond the monarchy that was customary at the time and brutal and barbaric institutions such as slavery, has made the case for the rights of the individual to a government by the people, of the people, and for the people in a way that had never been seen before and likely will never be equaled.
We should all cherish that document and be willing to fight and die if need be to defend it against all enemies, whether they be foreign or the domestic sort that seem quite comfortable with the idea of tossing it onto the scrap heap of history.
We can never allow that to happen and one should not need to swear an oath as many of us have done through the years to be ready to come to the Constitution’s defence when needed.
So the President (or more likely his henchmen ruling from the shadows) wants to suspend habeas corpus?
Then he should be the first one to find out firsthand just how bad an idea it is before he inflicts it on even one American citizen.
With all of his efforts to escape accountability and justice for his crimes, I think the Earth will stop orbiting round the Sun before that will ever happen.