Letter-writing time again.

Dear Senator _____ and Staff--

I write to ask you to stand up to the Executive Branch's defiance of the separation of powers and the rights of due process for all people.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia remains in custody in the brutal El Salvador prison that President Trump's ICE sent him to thanks to an "administrative error." Mr. Garcia has been neither tried nor convicted of breaking any law. He was here legally under a withholding of removal order issued by a judge in 2019. The Executive Branch could have challenged this order in court through well-established procedures. They chose not to. Now they claim--implausibly--that they are powerless to correct their errors and that Mr. Garcia is where he deserves to be.

Circuit judges and all nine Justices of the Supreme Court have disagreed. In response, the Executive Branch issued threats about impeaching judges and defunding federal courts. Every day, White House spokespeople spread misleading, unproven, or simply false stories about Mr. Garcia and his case. The Vice President has ridiculed those who dare criticize the Administration's actions, suggesting that due process is too cumbersome an obstacle to surmount in immigration matters. Most chillingly, President Trump himself has affirmed that he is looking for ways to send "homegrown" criminals--U.S. citizens--to foreign prisons.

The Executive Branch's stance is surreal and frightening. Today the Fourth Circuit forcefully turned back yet another attempt by the White House to dodge its responsibilities. In his decision, U.S. Circuit Judge J. Harvey Wilkerson summarizes the situation well: "The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done." Judge Wilkerson continues, "This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear."

As an American "far removed from courthouses," I agree completely with Judge Wilkerson. I am shocked at the speed and ferocity of the administration's blitzkrieg attack on Constitutional norms. More than that, I'm scared. A government that can disappear anyone it wants to simply by declaring them "really bad people" is the stuff of nightmare regimes we used to fight against.

Due process for everyone protects everyone. Suspending due process for "really bad people" threatens everyone. Declaring due process too inconvenient or too time-consuming threatens everyone. Due process for all is elemental to any democratic republic worthy of the name.

At this moment, April 2025, we apparently need the other two branches of our government to reinforce that lesson to the Executive Branch and its supporters. Circuit Judges like Wilkerson are doing their part. I ask you, my Senator, to help Congress do theirs. Stand up for the democratic good of due process. Reclaim the Legislative Branch's power to check the Executive. Publicly refute suggestions that the Executive branch can ignore due process. Rebut notion that the Judiciary or Congress is bullying the Executive by expecting it to abide by Constitutional norms. Affirm--loudly and often--that you stand for our system of checks and balances, not government by royal whim.

In his conclusion, Judge Wilkerson writes, "We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe
our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American
ethos. This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the
best that is within us while there is still time."

I am asking you to summon the best that is within you--the best that is within America--to stand up for basic democratic rights.

Thank you.

Back to Dwelling on The Awfulness

 I skipped some writing days, ignoring the inner voice last night that said I really needed to write something. But here I am now, writing, so.

I suppose I should compose another letter to my GOP senators. The SAVE act, which threatens to add enormous hurdles to voting in this country, has narrowly passed the House. The Senate is likely to pass it. It's depressing. 

The stock market rallied yesterday in reaction to Trump's "pause" on tariffs (which really wasn't a complete pause, just a reduction of all of them to 10%--still an unimaginable high). Today's stock market erased those gains as people realized, variously, (1) the US/China trade war is still very much on; (2) Trump appears to decide day-to-day or moment-to-moment about tariff policy; (3) the US is unreliable as a trade partner since it seems happy to elect Trump and allow him his whimsy; and (4) there is no plan.

That was Isaac Saul's takeaway from Trump's backing down on tariffs:

I wanted to understand the Trump administration’s grand plan, and it turns out they didn’t have one. When they said they were rolling out global tariffs to negotiate new trade deals but also said the tariff rates weren’t a negotiation tactic, that wasn’t 4D chess. It was a lack of a plan. When they said the plan was to end up with zero tariffs and total free trade and also said they wanted to raise tax revenue, that wasn’t 4D chess. It was a lack of a plan. When they warned about the need to be “tough” and “take our medicine” and promised that under no circumstances would they back down, and then backed down, that wasn’t 4D chess. It was a lack of a plan.

There is no plan, no master strategy, no "art of the deal" genius. There's only Trump's ego, according to Jamelle Bouie:

The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams and hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his own benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win, and someone has to lose. And Trump, as we all know, is a winner.

Other countries must pay us tariffs (as Bouie notes, Trump "genuinely seems to think of tariffs as fees that foreign countries pay to the United States") because that proves we're dominating them. Anything else is us being dominated, which is inconceivable. That his take on tariffs--and international trade--is so ludicrously, maladaptively wrong is, well, just our problem to deal with. I cannot blame the rest of the world for giving up on us.

It is disappointing that so many Republican voters seem ardently to believe exactly what Trump, Fox, and rightwing radio/web tell them: that these tariffs are a tax cut for Americans, that they'll bring back good times (i.e., times good for stable bluecollar jobs and secure retirements for white, straight, cis, conservative Christian, patriarchal people).

It's especially disappointing that so many politicians and justices who could check Trump seem completely unwilling to do so. The House just passed a measure preventing its members from challenging Trump's expansive tariff prerogatives. House and Senate majorities seem committed to passing Trump's budget, which adds to the debt via tax cuts for billionaires while repealing the ACA. There is no replacement, of course. That's been the M.O. for most Trump II "reforms"--get rid of vital services. Replace with nothing, or at best "concepts of a plan."

Sigh. 

I'm just not sure what comes next. 

This Week's Letter

 It's so difficult to do something rather than curl up into a protective ball. It's time to write my two Republican Senators. But what about? 

The insane tariffs Trump has threatened to impose on the world Wednesday? The gutting of vital federal services? The ongoing war against people and organizations he deems as insufficiently subservient to him? The disappearances of migrants, including some here legally, with no due process?

Let's take that last one, I guess.

Dear Senator and Staff--

It seems every letter I've written to you over the last few months consists of me begging you, begging Congress, to check President Trump's flouting of the rule of law. 

I'm writing another such letter now. Over the weekend, CBS News reported on the Venezuelan deportees summarily picked up and deported to a notoriously violent El Salvador prison with no due process. Contra the White House's assertions, their reporting found only 22% of the men had any kind of criminal record in the US. The more evidence that comes out about the government's process of identifying gang members, the shakier their case becomes. They seem to have made life-changing determinations about guilt or innocence based in many cases on evidence as flimsy as tattoos and hearsay. 

Maybe the government is correct. Maybe these are violent gang members simply posing as hairdressers, fathers, and artists. Maybe CBS and other investigators are mistaken. But how would we know? The government has declined to offer evidence in court, claiming wartime powers from an obscure eighteenth-century act. 

If these men are guilty of crimes, arrest them, try them, and let the system we have in place convict and sentence them. But carting them off to a dictator's brutal prison with no chance for them to see or challenge the evidence against them? That's barbaric.

I hear other stories of people like Rumeysa Ozturk, people legally here on student visas or even green cards, being "disappeared" right off the street. These people aren't even being charged with a crime. They just did or said something the government didn't like. I used to think such occurrences existed only as story beats in tales of dictatorships. I'm stunned that such stories are happening here in the US. I had thought that was impossible. 

I am not at all comforted by Secretary Rubio's insistence that such acts are legal. The government's punishing people for nothing more than exercising freedom of speech is wrong regardless of whether it's technically allowed.

I'm begging you to stand up for due process and civil rights protections for all. In our system, everyone, even those people that anger or scare us, have rights. They get to see their charges and challenge evidence against them. Once it becomes OK for the government to unilaterally decide someone is guilty and inflict punishment simply because they said so, we're all in danger.

Due process protects everyone. Lack of due process endangers everyone.

But I need you--Congress--to assert that more forcefully. Right now, the White House and their spokespeople are suggesting that rights and due process are only for some, not for all. That's anathema to our system. It betrays our pledge to liberty and justice for all. 

There's so much more I want from Congress: rein in DOGE's haphazard gutting of federal services, stop President Trump's market-melting tariffs, stand up to continued Russian aggression in Ukraine, tell the administration that we're not going to start World War III over Greenland or Canada. But I try to limit these letters to one ask at a time.

So please: stand up for due process for everyone. I know it's not easy or popular to do so. But it's right to do so.

Thanks.

AI Blues

 Grading, slowly making my way through a digital pile of script analysis papers. 

One newish twist is AI. It seems, more and more, I find a paper whose paragraphs are beautifully crafted but whose prose is superficial. My mode of script analysis focuses exclusively on structure. GPT and its ilk tend to prefer lofty reflections on theme and character, making (and repeating) basic links between those or that scene and this or that theme. 

Most students just don't recognize that a writer has a voice, that we can tell when they shift from their own (often error-riddled but honest) voice into the cottony vagaries of AI.

Encountering one of these depletes me. Usually I catch on about halfway through, as nonspecifics pile up. By that point I've spent time and energy crafting some encouraging intervention ("can you be more specific? Give me a 'for instance' from the text?"). 

And then I cut and paste something into gptzero or another detector, and BAM--likely AI generated. Such detectors are themselves error prone. I wouldn't use them as a first-line test. But they can sometimes tell me if and how someone has run into trouble.

I have to remind myself, as I always do when encountering academic dishonesty, that it's not personal. Dishonesty happens, as Truth Default Theory avers, when the truth becomes inconvenient. Students cheat out of desperation, not out of some desire to hurt teachers. I'm sure some may feel a certain contempt for the class or for me, but the same could be said of those who don't cheat.

Mostly there's just a mass of students who aren't (or who feel) unprepared to do the kind of reading and writing we do in class. I'm continually trying to revise my teaching to reach such students, to clarify what it is they need to make this task seem doable. 

And AI makes it harder. It feels like work to them--they look it up, they teach it about this play they may have read part of, and they have it spit out what they think I want to hear. I think some of them convince themselves it's like what they might have written. But then, how would they know? That's one of the awful things about LLMs (large language models); they prevent students from learning their own voice. They never know what they "sound" like without the filter of AI-ification. 

And it's exhausting to go through the rigmarole of reporting them to student advocacy and accountability. Each time, I'm like is it worth it? Am I doing this out of pique, or am I doing it to teach the student something? At this point, it's more a matter of consistency. I did it for this one student; I have to do it for everyone similarly positioned. And sometimes it really is a good wake-up call. My institution at this moment is pretty good about making these teachable moments. 

But. It's still rough. 

"I use GPT for lots of things," say some friends outside of academia.

I don't.

What's There to Say?

 Man. I don't have much to say. Across-the-board tariffs for all (except for Russia and a few other exempted states). Math apparently based on fundamental misunderstandings of economy. Fantasy predictions of liberation and prosperity. Global stock futures tanking. Retaliatory tariffs incoming. 

This on top of massive and stupid cuts to vital services (HSS, most recently). This on top of abandoning or even mocking the idea of due process for all and of democratic checks and balances. Just lots of open revenge and power-grabs.

Can't even write in complete sentences rn. 

And the worst thing is that I'm afraid none of this will be enough, that popular apathy, boredom, distraction, and/or ignorance that will make it seem like those sounding the alarm about all this are the unreasonable ones. Or I'm worried that the consequences, though bad, won't be severe or sustained enough to alter the opinion of low-information citizens about either (1) passionately supporting Trump, or (2) disengaging from everything.

I don't know. 

Even the comedy of Trump assigning "reciprocal tariffs" on unoccupied Antarctic islands falls flat in the face of the magnitude of damage he's done to the country and the world. 

God help us.

Booker's Filibuster

 Kudos to Senator Corey Booker (D-NJ), who broke the record (set by Strom Thurmond) for longest speech given on the Senate floor. He filibustered against Trump for over 25 hours (25 hours, 4 minutes). He spoke the entire time save for questions from the floor and time given over to fellow speakers. He remained standing throughout.

As Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski noted, "Whether you agree with him or not, the past 24+ hours was what most people think a filibuster actually looks like." She congratulated him. 

Social media that I looked at (Bluesky) seemed mainly supportive of Booker. Some detractors pointed out that he wasn't filibustering any one piece of legislation, that this made his performance more of a stunt than anything. Others disagreed, noting that Democrats have needed a coherent and inspiring leader since Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reversed course and (with nine other Democratic votes) helped Republicans to avoid a government shutdown. 

I still don't know what to think about that decision. I was against it, in no small part due to arguments from Isaac Saul. Saul himself, however, withdrew his opposition to the continuing budget resolution. Friends and family who work for government agencies were likewise opposed to shutting down the government, fearing that would embolden DOGE's already drastic government cuts. 

Those same friends, however, just got "the letter" today--a "better take it while it's offered" deal to retire early. Some are taking the deal. Some--those who haven't worked long enough or aren't old enough (there's a calculation that balances those factors)--can't afford to retire now. Thus they wait for a roll of the dice to see if they still have a job.

Mind you, the FAA will, I expect, still be relied upon to do all the tasks they currently do--prevent widespread death and chaos in air travel--at severe labor shortages.

Tomorrow, April 2, Trump is supposed to be announcing his "liberation day" tariffs on everyone everywhere. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board calls the "tariffs are really tax cuts" an Orwellian exercise. One gets the sense that Trump and his Commerce Secretary Howard "I Don't Know Anyone That Isn't Pissed Off At Him" Lutnick really do believe what, well, no one with any economic training agrees with. The Politico article I linked to suggests that Trump world is poised to blame Lutnick when things go south. "Bad advice." I hope that dodge fails. Trump owns "tariffs are good." And even if he didn't, isn't he supposed to be so good at hiring the best people?

I don't know. I'm back to hoping for bad things. Really, I'm not sure what good path Trump perceives by raising taxes on all imports. Nothing I've heard on that score seems realistic or coherent. 

There's so much I'm losing track of what next to write about to my Republican Senators. I'm guessing it'll be about ICE overreach and the horror of doing away with due process for all. But it could be about how Trump's initiatives seem to do the opposite of what they aim to do. He's going to fix the economy by ruining it? He's going to create peace by going to war? He's going to improve government efficiency by gutting vital programs--including and especially those that make or save us money--randomly? He's going to fix immigration by creating no-human-rights-apply states of exception? 

No wonder Senator Booker needed 25 hours.