Who Knew the Bill of Rights Was Just a Pick-and-Choose Menu?

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Who Knew the Bill of Rights Was Just a Pick-and-Choose Menu?

We Know Diehard MAGE Evangelicals See the Bible That Way

"Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.” 

Set forth in a Trump Executive Order, January 20th.

Even as the ultimate MAGA rule-makers have been Donald Trump and his appointees, it’s clear that making new choices seems a reaction to an officially immutable Bible and an unamendable Constitution. In a hotly divided nation, there is no way to amass the necessary state and federal votes necessary to amend that founding document. The last amendment to pass (the 27th in 1992), a relatively innocuous requirement that before Congress could give itself a raise there must be an intervening election, took 203 years from being introduced to passage. But even with a fully compliant MAGA majority in both houses of Congress, except for budget reconciliation bills which only require a simple majority to pass, the cloture rules in the Senate mandate a 60 (out of 100) votes just to move a bill to a full floor vote. Solution: executive orders from a bully dictator!

Given that Trump’s followers (his base) are generally not issue oriented – preferring to vote for a charismatic leader confirming their conspiracy theories – even with the recent Jeffrey Epstein “client list” controversy, they still seem bound to him “no matter what.” Without this MAGA base which permeates into virtually every nook and political cranny at the red state level, Trump’s ability to “primary” (fund their GOP opponents) has eliminated opposing Congressional Republicans into lockstep alignment with Trump’s mandates. Trump has also found a backdoor to amending the Constitution: getting his ideological 6-3 Supreme Court majority to de facto amend the Constitution through “tortured logic” rulings, some detailed on point (like his immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts), others based on an opinionless “shadow” docket rulings (for example, effectively ending nationwide trial court injunctions on constitutional issues).

Based on Trump’s now perfected bully tactics, Trump has managed to move Article I congressional constitutional powers – to establish tariffs and taxes, to wage war and utilize the military to enforce his domestic pollical agenda – to himself. Of particular relevance is Trump’s approach to the Bill of Rights (the first ten constitutional amendments), claiming “invasion” (by foreign gangs), rebellion and emergency economic necessities, to issue Executive Orders that, on their face, are obviously unconstitutional. His followers, favoring the “efficiency” of one-person rule, have cheered Trump’s ignoring those rights to effect the kind of society MAGA voters want.

Most of these violative executive orders have imposed penalties (loss of citizenship, immediate deportation, denial of continued legitimate residency, detention, cutting congressionally-approved funds for state institutions and universities) primarily in connection with his immigration policies, his stand that diversity, equality and inclusion are un-American, his convenient use of “antisemitism” to decimate opponents and bring the nation’s top research universities to heel. Bill of Rights? Inconvenient and ignored.

Yet almost as quickly as Trump issued his protection of free speech noted in the above quote, he began stripping foreign students of their visas, even declaring them to be enemies of the state for expressing opinions he disagreed with. Arrests, detention and deportation, often without notice of the change in status or any semblance of due process, followed. In defiance of the 10th Amendment (states rights) and legislation like the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act (banning the use of military, absent invasion or rebellion) for domestic purposes, Trump federalized troops from the California National Guard and assigned active-duty Marines to support ICE policing services in support of roundups and any offsetting protests. His senior appointees pledged to use the military, wherever state or local governments (or protestors) challenged Trump’s immigration mandates. Free speech died. A police state was born.

Notwithstanding the 1st Amendment’s further ban against the establishment of a state religion or given the right of individuals to assemble and to present grievances to the government, Trump used the military to contain local governments, and high-ranking MAGA officials (like House Speaker Mike Johnson) rejected the notion that Congress could not vote for a state religion. Other officials, from Vice President JD Vance embracing Nazi-like mandates or DOD Secretary, Pete Hegseth very obviously attended a religious service openly supportive of white Christian nationalism, flaunting the Constitution as an irrelevant piece of paper.

Trump sneered at the multiple facets of “probable cause” and “due process” (which applies to all persons within the US under the 14th Amendment) at set forth in the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments and the ban against “cruel and unusual punishment” articulated in the 8th Amendment. Masked and unidentified officers, holding themselves out as ICE agents, swept mostly innocent undocumented workers (and more than a few US citizens) into detention centers like the new “Alligator Alcatraz” with hundreds being shipped to overseas prisons (see above) without a trial or any criminal conviction.

Even American citizens lacking that “perfect” white or pink skin carried their passports with them, knowing that an ICE agent could confiscate that document and claim it was never produced. Meat processing plants, stoop-labor farms, construction sites, restaurants and hotels, car washes, childcare workers were stripped of workers, failing to focus on the “convicted criminals” DHS promised to deport first. About 70% of those undocumented arrestees had no criminal convictions, most paid taxes on their earnings and the majority of those workers were willing to take low-paying jobs that US citizens would not take at any price.

Even with this track record of clearly defying the US Constitution, most Americans simply assumed their lives would continue without material change. There were and are unaware of the material provisions of Trump’s disgusting giveaway to the rich at the expense of lower income Americans in his “Big Beautiful Bill.” As the Democrats founder in search of a path to resist, they face a huge wall of national complacency no matter what the Trump autocracy imposes. Remember that in the last election, approximately 90 million eligible voters… DID NOT VOTE!

I’m Peter Dekom, and the fear I see in Los Angeles streets, from citizens and non-citizens alike, is a disease that could easily spread to all of the United States… unless voters begin to care!