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L. L. #6, April 24 [1]

['The Geogre', 'View Profile', 'Greg Dworkin', 'Chloris Creator', 'Eric Yonce']

Date: 2026-04-24  

Preface: Laudable links is a group of curated links with discussion and analysis added, along with a few jokes. Comments appreciated, along with others who wish to make their own and in their own way.

Let’s go back to the Department of Justice’s stellar legal talent with a story of a judge slapping the snot out of them. When is argument by analogy not argument by analogy? When it’s a psychological profile of MAGA misrule. Not discussed but pointed at with enormous vigor: Joe Patrice disassembles the Fifth.

Why such scantiness? I’m sleepy. It happens, and one cannot argue with biology and win.

We’re from ICE, and We Can Deport Anyone We Want

There are asylum claimants and members of classes who enjoy protected status. These persons cannot be deported, legally. That doesn’t stop ICE, using Kavanaugh standards (skin tone, Spanish accent, being in a day-labor area) or a database from some spurious vote overturning group, from grabbing people, jetting them states away from their homes, and, if possible, getting them to another country before an attorney can file a habeas corpus petition. (And then they can argue that it’s simply impossible to find or return the persons.)

Now you might think there is a law on what to do when DHS has grabbed someone without legal right, but that’s not true. There is a law saying that DHS can’t do it, but the law on what DHS has to do in return is part of case law — precedent established by successive courts looking at similar cases and making similar rulings. (That’s what most American and British law is, by the way.)

Colin Kalmbacher tells us, at Law and Crime about how U.S. District Judge Kyle Dudek, nominated by Donald just last year, “tears into ICE for detaining man who cannot even be deported due to special visa.”

[|Quote|] Typically, the reason is straightforward: the government detains a noncitizen to ensure he is available for removal. But that justification rests on a critical premise—that the government actually can remove him. Here, it cannot.”[|End Quote|]

The “him” is Alejandro Osvaldo Ghysels Reales, who has been under an expulsion order since 2010, but he seems to have been giving information to law enforcement about. . . something or some group.

[|Quote|]In 2024, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) determined his U-visa petition was “bona fide,” Dudek notes. A judge in a similar habeas case recently described the U-visa as “a type of temporary visa available to certain undocumented persons within the United States who cooperate with law enforcement.” [|End Quote|]

Now, here is where the judge shows the quality of mercy, which is put through a strainer, and the quality of legal work at DHS, which is non-existent.

[|Quote|]“Despite this clear directive, [ICE agents] recently revoked Reales’ order of supervision and placed him in a detention cell,” the order continues. “He responded with this habeas petition, arguing that because his deferred action status prevents removal, his detention serves no legitimate purpose and therefore violates the Fifth Amendment. The Government’s response? Crickets.”

. . . “[The government] also insists that ICE has broad discretion to revoke an order of supervision whenever it deems appropriate,” the court explains. “But the Government’s 12-page opposition manages to completely ignore the elephant in the room: Reales’ U-visa and his active deferred action status.”[|End Quote|]

Well, plus ca change, as it were. Good to know that DHS is utterly hostile to the law, to courts, and not just to “marxist leninist leftist TDS” judges. It has one law. The law of force, for those who live by the sword have really sweet gated communities.

A nativity scene with EVERYTHING in it

All the Best Martinets

An argument by analogy is a fallacy when you say, “Because two objects, persons, or situations share two or more qualities, they must share other (unrelated) qualities.” [“All the hoodlums hang out at the bowling alley. Now Janey is at the bowling alley three nights a week. I’ll bet she’s on drugs.” Janey might have gotten a job there. She might be bowling.]

In “Hegseth, Xi, Stalin,” Harold Meyerson, at The American Prospect, points out a well known psychological trait an habit of martinets and autocrats, which is the paranoid firing of staff. It’s notable that Donald, in spite of the impression he gives of instability, has held onto plainly incompetent and even disloyal officials out of pride or belligerence, but not most of those officials. They (Bobby Junior being the most notable example) do nothing but replace people.

Mr. Meyerson’s occasion is the firing of Sect. Navy John Phelan, who was not exactly an Admiral Rickover:

[|Quote|]Phelan was a perfectly typical Trump appointee: a Florida-based investor whom President Trump had hailed as “one of the most successful businessmen in the country.” Phelan even was aligned with Trump’s nostalgic desire to have the Navy build more battleships—power symbols of Trump’s youth—even though naval officials and scholars universally believe that they’ve been obsolete since 1942. But even all this was not enough [|End Quote|]

Wobbles Hegseth has been led into firing people in the past by a series of online friends who know which bit of insecurity to heighten. But Mr. Meyerson is right to think this is better understood in a Downfall or purge (or cultural revolution) context. Phelan is not alone, in spite of being compelling in his lack of qualifications:

[|Quote|] context is the purge of top commanders that we’ve seen under Trump and Hegseth: the firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Navy’s chief of staff, and the commandant of the Coast Guard, who violated Trump and Hegseth’s norms of propriety by being, respectively, Black, female, and female. Those discharges preceded the firing of the Air Force chief of staff and, earlier this month, Army Chief of Staff Randy George, even as our war on Iran was raging.

. . . [the program] exemplifies the normal staffing criteria of the Trump administration. It assumes that any officials who are not both white and male are only in their jobs due to some dastardly DEI machinations, and, fundamentally, just don’t look the part.[|End Quote|]

These moves by other autocratic figures were episodes of national suicide. Personal prejudice, fear, and envy led to the hollowing out of professional leadership. It was then that leadership crises made the absences visible (most particularly in Germany, of course). Here, we are provoking our own acid tests.

[|Quote|]Hegseth is following the example of China’s President Xi, who has arrested, fired, or disappeared 29 of China’s 44 top generals and admirals since 2023. Even Xi’s paranoia pales alongside that of Stalin, who notoriously purged roughly 80 percent of his army’s generals and thousands of colonels and other officers in 1937 and 1938 [|End Quote|]

The author doesn’t get into the earliest firings, when Wobbles fired some of his own friends because another pal told him that they had talked smack about him online. I applaud Harold Meyerson for recasting Party Pete as Stalin, Xi, Idi Amin, and others, but I have to sadly point out what he misses — social media.

Just imagine what Stalin, or Egon Krenz‘s Stassi, would have done with X, Gettr, Daily Caller, and podcasts. That gets us close to what D.T. Hegseth is about.

My last of the night, and I wish I had the energy… Go! Read!

Joe Patrice is editor of Above the Law. When he writes a satirical dissection of a right wing legal monster, he leaves no part of the beast uncut. He actually engages with the legal theories and laughs at the horror being endorsed by the lackwits and vicious.

“Ten Commandments In Schools Law Upheld, As Fifth Circuit Declares ‘Thou Shalt Not Confuse Us With Facts’” is too big, too detailed, and too rich for me to treat. Read it and see if I’m exaggerating or fibbing. (I believe in being wrong, but, since I am not cohabitating, I try to keep my fibs to discourse with my dog. (“I’m going to the store. I’ll be right back.” “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He doesn’t believe me anymore.))

From this magnum derpus, I’ll concentrate on just the “facts don’t matter” section. Remember, I’m zeroing in on a small part of the article:

[|Quote|]In Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District, the en banc Fifth Circuit decided 9-8 that, when it talks about protecting the inviolable right of parents to direct the religious education of their own children from state-sponsored interference, it means the inviolable right of parents to teach their kids about Texas Jesus.

And quite literally “Texas Jesus,” because as noted by dissenters, the statute mandates a specific Protestant translation of the Ten Commandments with substantive deviations from even other Judeo-Christian traditions. [|End Quote|]

About that “mandates a Protestant translation” cited by dissent, it comes from the district court. You see, the district court did something silly: it employed the three pronged test proscribed by Lemon. Two of the questions are: 1. Does it establish what the framers would consider a religion? 2. Does it have a secular purpose, or is the purpose religious?

Patrice finds the author of the opinion, Duncan, really dread:

[|Quote|]Duncan’s analysis is that without Lemon‘s three-prong test (and, specifically, its emphasis on a law having a secular purpose), there are no meaningful limits at all on state promotion of religion as long as no student is forced into religious exercise or observance or catechized or taught the text.

One might wonder what the point of the law even is if the state is so confident that students will never even notice these displays. The Fifth Circuit responds: shut up, nerd.

As for infringing the free exercise rights of parents trying to raise their children, the majority handwaves that students don’t have to believe the display. I, for one, am looking forward to the response from the state of Texas when a teacher hangs a Cliff’s Notes version of Sharia law next to the Commandments and points out that no student is required to believe it [|End Quote|]

That’s right: the state MUST have the commandments posted in EVERY room so that students won’t believe them. That’s a hell of a 5th Circuit you got there.

I can’t emphasize enough that this is the solid gold plunger horse in the races for the day, and I’m not going to handicap it.

[Conclusion] Sorry for petering out there, but the mortal engine is like that sometimes. I may have more pep in my step in the morning.

Here. Have a very large iris from the front yard here. They survived Hurricane Helene, too.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/24/800026712/community/l-l-6-april-24/

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