In 1789, James Madison stood before the First Congress and proposed a set of amendments to the young Constitution—ten of them, to be exact, a shield against tyranny, a promise that the government would not crush the people beneath its boot.
They called it the Bill of Rights. It was meant to be sacred.
Two hundred and thirty-five years later, in the smog-choked streets of Los Angeles, the echoes of that promise sound hollow.
President Donald Trump, a man who once swore an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” that same Constitution, has ordered 2,000 members of the California National Guard into the city, deploying them against protests that erupted after federal agents swept through neighborhoods, dragging away men and women who had lived here for years.
Governor Gavin Newsom objected. The Constitution, in theory, requires the governor’s consent for such a deployment. But Trump does not seem overly concerned with consent these days.
Nor does he seem certain whether the Constitution still binds him at all.
In January, hand on a Bible, he swore to uphold it. In May, sitting in the gilded halls of Mar-a-Lago, he shrugged when asked if he was obligated to follow it.
“I don’t know,” he told Kristen Welker of Meet the Press, when pressed on whether due process—a right enshrined in the Fifth Amendment, a right that does not distinguish between citizen and noncitizen—applied to the millions he now wants to deport.
“I’m not a lawyer,” he said, as if the Constitution were some obscure legal code rather than the bedrock of the republic.
His own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, had no such hesitation. “Yes, of course,” Rubio said when asked if every person in the United States is entitled to due process. But Trump, the man who took the oath, the man who holds the power, is less sure.
Now, the National Guard moves into Los Angeles, boots on pavement, rifles slung. The protests grow louder. The raids continue.
And somewhere, Madison’s words—Congress shall make no law… nor deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law—hang in the air like smoke, waiting to see if they still mean anything at all.
The courts have been clear.
The Supreme Court, stacked with Trump’s appointees, has ruled three times that even immigrants facing deportation must be granted basic due process.
Not full trials, as Trump claimed—just the chance to stand before a judge, to plead their case.
This president does not like to be slowed down by civil rights and justice.
“I was elected to get them the hell out of here,” he said, as if the law were a nuisance, as if the Constitution were a suggestion, or as if his razor thin victory was a mandate.
A nation is only as strong as its laws. A law is only as strong as the men who choose to enforce it.
America is weaker than ever before because weak people are weakening our laws.