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US judge asks if constitutional crisis looms in Tufts student's immigration case
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hayst4ck 1y agoGovernments exist to protect rights, not grant them. This was a core truth of our founding fathers beliefs and their entire justification for why it was OK for them to break British law and rebel against King George III. If you have rights only because a government grants them, then they are not rights, they are privileges. It is a core American belief, the core American belief, that a government that violates rights is illegitimate because governments are instituted among men to protect certain unalienable rights.
- jfengel 1y agoI think that's our ideal, but I suspect we believe it less than we think we do. Rights often conflict, and the government can't always protect both rights. So we have a giant pile of judicial precedent telling us which rights get prior claim. And you'll find that most people will insist that the right they care about dominates over the rights other people care about. In this case, people have a right not to be subject to crime, and many of them believe that this dominates over the due process rights of people who might commit crime. They will rarely put it quite that way, but those who voted this way don't seem to be issuing a lot of push-back. They consider their right to avoid theft and murder to be sacrosanct, and that non-citizens have few if any rights that take precedence.
- pmags 1y agoAnd here's the latest update to the extra-judicial sh*tshow that we're witnessing in real time: • "Columbia Activist Arrested by ICE at His Appointment for Citizenship" -- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/nyregion/columbia-student-palestinian-arrested-ice.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/nyregion/columbia-student... From the article: Mohsen Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident, has lived in the United States for 10 years and was arrested in Vermont. He has not been charged with a crime...