May 9, 2025
Trump Admin ACTIVELY Seeking To Suspend Habeas Corpus
White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller said the Trump administration is actively considering suspending habeas corpus.
- 7 minutes
President Trump has talked about
potentially suspending habeas corpus
to take care
of the illegal immigration problem.
When could we see that happen,
do you think?
Well, the Constitution is clear.
And that, of course,
is the supreme law of the land, that
the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus
can be suspended in a time of invasion.
[00:00:19]
So it's an option we're
actively looking at.
Yeah. So there it is.
I mean, look, they're doing it already,
by the way.
I love that he says.
We're going to look into it.
They have not been respecting
habeas corpus this entire time,
in the same way that they haven't been
respecting the decisions of judges,
[00:00:35]
the Supreme Court, any of that.
When you take people who have been court
ordered to not be able to be deported
to a particular country,
and then you send them there,
you do not get to pretend that you
gave them due process thereby, like
there's no habeas corpus, but whatever.
He's at least admitting
that they're going to do it more broadly,
[00:00:50]
that they're looking into it.
And he understands that as a Republican,
you're supposed to pretend
to care about the Constitution,
and obviously they don't.
But he'd love the fig leaf still.
So he says they're,
the Constitution is very clear.
In case of an invasion,
you can suspend habeas corpus.
[00:01:08]
So we'll jump into
what the Constitution actually says.
First of all, it, as I'm sure you know,
comes initially from codification
of the Magna Carta and said,
no man shall be arrested or imprisoned
except by the lawful judgment of his peers
and by the law of the land.
[00:01:23]
But our version of it in the Constitution
says, the privilege of the writ
of habeas corpus shall not be suspended,
unless, when, in cases of rebellion or
invasion the public safety may require it.
And I'm just realizing now, is that
why Donald Trump capitalizes random words?
[00:01:40]
Because the Constitution does it?
Does he think it makes
it seem constitutional?
But in any event, the only word
that really matters there for the purposes
of Steven Miller is it says invasion.
So he, like the small brained person
that he is, says, oh, well,
[00:01:55]
I just claim this is an invasion.
I can do whatever I want.
And that's what they're doing right now.
They're implying that because some people
have been victims of crime,
and there are some people whose paperwork
is not in order, we've been invaded.
[00:02:11]
I think I can hear the gunfire and
the shells landing off in the distance.
You know, I don't need to tell people
watching everywhere I've been watching
this in every corner of America.
You look out your window
and there's tanks rolling down the street.
Right? You've been invaded.
Do you feel invaded?
I know Stephen Miller is terrified
of brown people every day of his life,
[00:02:29]
so he probably does actually feel
like we've been invaded.
The rest of us
are just kind of living our lives.
But to put in perspective,
how ridiculous his invocation of invasion
in this case is, let's take a look
at prior times when habeas corpus has
been suspended in the United States.
It's happened four times
since the Constitution was ratified.
[00:02:47]
So throughout the entire country
during the Civil War.
That was a rough time, admittedly
in 11 South Carolina counties overrun
by the Ku Klux Klan during reconstruction.
I don't think Stephen Miller
wants to talk about that one.
In two provinces of the Philippines,
during a 1905 insurrection, and in Hawaii
[00:03:05]
after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
So the thing about each of those four
invasions is that they're all invasions,
like there was a military threat.
And we can debate and historians have
whether it was necessary or how it
[00:03:20]
might have been abused in those cases.
And certainly it has been.
But at least there was a war going on.
Them talking about people's cats
and dogs being eaten
does not a war make in my mind.
What do you think.
The concocted invasion thing is so absurd?
[00:03:40]
It's offensive, but it's really the hook
on which they're hanging
all of these blatantly illegal moves that
they're making so they have no choice.
And it reminds me of the when he
talked about the caravan
and Trump won Trump season one
when he was sending the military
[00:03:55]
at Christmastime to the Mexican border.
Remember, he said, because those caravan
people are coming, there's an invasion.
I think he called him the wasn't it
the caravan or something like that.
And so this is the lie that is floated,
because otherwise you have
to play by the rules and clearly they're
going to play outside the lines.
[00:04:11]
So this is again, it's the only thing
that can concoct to perhaps allow them
to at least pursue this
until I think the courts,
all of the courts push back hard on them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, this is this is utterly pathetic.
[00:04:27]
Even if you accept that they're not doing
this on purpose because they
utterly despise the Constitution,
the constitutional rights that you have,
they fundamentally down to their
bone marrow, hate it and want to kill it,
which is definitely true
of Stephen Miller and Donald Trump,
many of the people around him.
But let's say that you don't believe that.
[00:04:43]
And they actually are this petrified
about the invasion.
I want you to just think briefly
of all of the things we've gotten
through as a country without needing
to suspend habeas corpus.
I mean, we got through world wars,
the Cold War,
[00:04:58]
international terrorism, terror cells.
We got through all of that.
But there's some Guatemalans
that dudes from El Salvador.
Oh, well, you don't have
any rights anymore.
I mean, that is like if you accept their
cover story, that is deeply pathetic.
And so I kind of buy it.
[00:05:16]
That might actually be
why Stephen Miller is doing it.
But on the other hand, it could just be
that the fascists are gonna fascist.
And I just want to say, like,
you know, there was there was the debate
during the election about is it fair
to call them that or whatever?
And people can debate
definitions of fascism.
There are different constructs
for how you label or whatever.
[00:05:33]
But like, I don't know, I don't I
don't feel like I was being hyperbolic.
I feel less like that every day,
more that they are the movement
we said they were, that these people are
the goons that we said they were.
I just I feel vindicated.
Well, it's small comfort, by the way.
[00:05:50]
No. Right, right, right.
But they see the Constitution
as an impediment to their agenda.
And so that's why they're grabbing
these things like, that,
that really reflect the authoritarian rise
that, this, that this crew has.
Right.
They want to do this, and it's fascistic.
[00:06:06]
It's authoritarian,
however you want to call it.
It's a flex.
And they don't want anything
to get in the way of that flex.
They want to get rid of these people.
And if we need to grab this excuse
about an invasion, well, then that's
the way we'll get around this thing,
which is an obstacle to our agenda.
[00:06:22]
- And that thing is the Constitution.
- Yeah, yeah.
And I don't want to do, like, the knee
jerk thing of automatically slippery slope
in this or whatever.
What they're doing right now
is by far bad enough.
That's why we talk about it so much
on this show, on the network.
But, like the idea that Stephen Miller
will be satisfied to just end due process
[00:06:41]
for migrants or whatever,
for undocumented migrants.
Like, come on, who thinks that?
You don't think they'll expand that
to other migrants?
I mean, they are literally already taking
permanent residence and shipping them out.
Why am I talking hypothetically
about things that exist in the past tense
or for a student, protesters?
I mean, oh,
they've said such terrible things.
[00:06:58]
Their signs are very, very scary to me.
And there are so many of them.
What are we going to have a trial for?
Every one of them for?
For people who commit a variety
of different types of thought.
Crime. Like, just think carefully.
You want to protest
against police brutality
or genocide or that sort of thing.
[00:07:13]
Do you think they're going to be
suddenly cool with that again?
They're going to, like, rediscover
their love for the First Amendment.
Like when they strip away rights,
they get very comfortable.
Historically, regimes get very comfortable
with you not having those rights anymore.
So as bad as things are right now and they
are, and they're bad enough for everyone
[00:07:30]
to be as freaked out as they should be,
if not more, or as they are, if not more.
It can still get a lot darker, I think.
Every time you ring the bell below,
an angel gets its wings.
Totally not true, but it does
keep you updated on our live shows.
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