There Will Be No Martial Law Declared on April 20

The truth is bad enough

Based on a drawing by Peter Kuper

I got a message from a nephew in Chicago on Monday, asking me if I knew anything about the “April 20” stuff everybody was talking about. He’d seen some social media posts from left-type acquaintances… A little later I saw some Facebook chatter saying an executive order was coming on April 20 ordering martial law throughout the United States.

Boy, this was big news! I’m sooo glad I heard about it on Facebook, because it’s such a reliable source, right? LOLOLOLOLOLOL…..

Let me tell you a couple things I do know about April 20th.

• It’s the date of birth for Adolf Hitler; lots of fascists think this is cool. Fuck them.

• It’s the date of birth of Napoleon III, the last official monarch of France

• Star Trek actor and activist George Takei was born on April 20

• The Columbine High School massacre happened in 1999. 15 people including the shooters died, another 24 were injured. It was not staged by the government.

• It’s national stoners day. Hee, hee.

• National Cheddar Fries Day is observed.

It is NOT the date that martial law will be declared by Donald Trump. Think about it. Why would that information appear on the internet? Does the government care if you get your life in order?

I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, but I can tell you for sure if Trump’s gonna declare martial law he ain’t going to announce it in advance. Hell, he couldn’t even make up his mind about tariffs until 3 hours before the press conference where they were announced.

There IS an executive order, issued on the first day of the Trump administration, that discusses the insurrection act. It gives the Homeland Security Secretary and the Secretary of Defense 90 days to come up with a report saying whether or not the Southern Border is so lawless that military intervention is necessary.

Here is the verbiage:

• Within 90 days of the date of this proclamation, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall submit a joint report to the President about the conditions at the southern border of the United States and any recommendations regarding additional actions that may be necessary to obtain complete operational control of the southern border, including whether to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.

Every paragraph in this Executive Order concerning exercising presidential powers includes the words “southern border.”

Now, I realize that La Migra has some authority up to 100 miles inside the US from the Southern Border, and it’s entirely possible there will be some over-reach, but this is not the same as the Fear Mongering associated with the “What to do if the insurrection act is invoked” article being shared. (Which I’m not sharing, BTW)

While governments at all levels in the US are terrible with conditions for incarceration, they all at least try to deter escapes. I don’t see congress getting in the way of building more facilities or even rounding people up, but you’ve got to at least imagine jails before you give the order to arrest a lot of people.

If somebody you know posted this misinformation on Facebook, ask them to please take it down. Its premise (the date) is false and the intention of the original author was to gain click and feel self important.

For that matter, if you still believe the man’s coming to get ya the least you can do is to throw a little sand at the gears or governance. Or picket a Tesla dealership. Do something…

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There is some real bad news about government immigration sweeps.

The Supreme Court ruling affirming the ability of the administration to use the Alien Enemies Act in deporting Venezuelan immigrants is a sad and scary thing.

We’re not at war with Venezuela, nor have any gangs been sent to wage war on the United States. But the Justices’ majority decided that the AEA applied in this situation. The ICE determinations about who is or isn’t an enemy combatant have been more wrong than right. Three quarters of those sent to El Salvador had no record of either arrests or convictions.

They did, however, declare that detainees arrested under those circumstances have a right to a habeas rights hearing in the district where they were apprehended. Each detainee must ask for a hearing as an individual, something that leaves the door wide open for a lot of weaseling on the part of government authorities.

From the Sotomayor dissent: "The implication of the Government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied…

“The Supreme Court also left entirely unresolved whether Trump is using the Alien Enemies Act properly,” according to Politico reporter Kyle Cheney. “This ruling is, in effect, very narrow and guaranteed to force new challenges to the specific invocation of his war powers — does Tren de Aragua really count as a ‘foreign government?’ Can a gang really be considered an invading force for purposes of the AEA? Those are still live issues. They’ll just be decided in Texas rather than Washington, and likely be SCOTUS-bound once again.”

It should be noted, though, that while it took six months for the Supreme Court to issue an opinion on presidential immunity (a decision preventing any Trump trials from taking place), it took just a few days to come to this ruling.

So there you have it.

I think Trump/assorted minions will eventually feel emboldened to the point where they might declare me personally to be acting on behalf of the Venezuelan enemy; only the lack of infrastructure for carrying out massive roundups (at this time) would stand in their way.

I know that I’m overstating my subversive potential, but the point is that anybody the government decides they don’t like could get treated this way.

The government, regardless of how they grab people off the street, doesn’t have any place to put them. At present, ICE facilities are roughly six thousand people over capacity.

That’s why there is a front page story in today’s Union-Tribune about the Department of Homeland Security seeking a request for proposals from contractors for new detention facilities and services.

• Facilities under the contract will not have to meet the standards for services and detainee care that ICE has typically set for large detention providers. Instead, they can operate under the less rigorous standards the agency uses for contracts with local jails and prisons. These facilities typically do not include comprehensive medical care, such as access to mental health services, nor do they offer access to information about immigrants’ legal rights.

• Homan had previously said that he was seeking to lower detention standards, and that he would do away with some of the government oversight and inspections intended to ensure compliance.

• Even under existing standards, government inspections for years have found evidence of negligence at private detention facilities, including lack of access to medical care and unsanitary conditions, and problems that may have led to deaths of detainees.

Does anybody want to bet that ‘lower detention standards’ will sooner than later amount to what reasonable people would call cruel and unusual treatment?

Poll: AOC leads Schumer in head-to-head New York primary matchup by double digits by Holly Otterbein at Politico

• The survey by the liberal firm Data for Progress, first shared with POLITICO, found that 55 percent of Democratic likely voters said they supported or leaned toward supporting Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, while 36 percent backed or leaned toward backing Sen. Schumer. Nine percent were undecided.

• The poll is the latest sign that Schumer’s standing among the Democratic base has taken a hit since he voted to advance a GOP funding bill last month that avoided a government shutdown. The fact that Data for Progress conducted and released the poll also underscores that liberal organizations are continuing to look for ways to prod Schumer to take a tougher stance against President Donald Trump.

• “This poll really does show that Democrats are united in just wanting to stand up, wanting to fight, wanting to see someone taking a stand for them,” said Danielle Deiseroth, executive director of Data for Progress.

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Attack of the Quack-Industrial Complex by Paul Krugman

• I use the term “quack-industrial complex” advisedly. Medical snake oil plays a surprisingly large role in right-wing extremism. Right-wing influencers gain audiences by peddling hatred. But they monetize that hatred largely by selling fake remedies and nutritional supplements. So it’s not surprising, if you think about it, that a right-wing extremist administration has put quacks and snake-oil salesmen in charge of the nation’s health care.

• Did I mention that Dr. Oz has been appointed to run Medicare and Medicaid?

• In the long run the demolition of U.S. medical science may be even more damaging than tariffs. Our health won’t be the only thing that suffers; the biopharmaceutical sector is a huge industry that will atrophy without publicly supported research.

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The Last Abundance Agenda by David Dayen at The American Prospect

• I had a lot of problems with the Abundance book. I thought it was sloppy to recycle a two-year-old Klein column about alleged impediments to federal semiconductor manufacturing grants without mentioning that all the money was taken and the plants are operating. I thought it was maddening to use California’s high-speed rail program as a signature example of Democratic dysfunction when it was a Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who made the decisions while in charge of the state’s high-speed rail authority at the key moment in 2008 to decrease state capacity and outsource to consultants. I thought it was deceptive to celebrate Bell Labs as a spur for invention without mentioning that it sat on most of those inventions, until a Justice Department consent decree forced the AT&T monopoly to license them out, an action that created Silicon Valley. And I thought it was reductive to blame Democrats for complicating the broadband build-out when it was the product of Republican senators and the telecom industry wanting to bog down the process.

• But let’s focus on where we agree. Abundance comes out of a frustration that Democrats promise to make the lives of their constituents better and then fail to deliver. Klein has said precisely this in media appearances. This was the point of my 2021 warning making the case for deliverism, on the grounds that failing to deliver will toxify the Democratic brand. The brand is now indeed toxic, and it’s reasonable to ask why things can’t get done.

• The Klein-Thompson view is that Democrats clogged the building channel with unnecessary or just burdensome rules. My view is that powerful forces profit off choke points and want them to remain. Joe Weisenthal had a particularly insightful explanation of this dynamic, noting that “any impulse to abundantly build out less profitable lines of business undoubtedly strikes at the heart of how American capitalism works.” Even in housing this is true, as homebuilder cartels have been building less and making more money by hoarding land.