The Constitution does not belong to a faction

Reason reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been conducting operations that, in the view of that publication's writers, are straining or outright shredding the protections the Bill of Rights was written to guarantee. I take no position on the particular mechanics of modern immigration policy — that is terrain far removed from my own direct experience — but the constitutional shape of the question is one I recognize entirely.

The Bill of Rights was not appended to the Constitution as a favor to any faction. It was appended because the framers understood, from hard experience, that government power expands when no one is watching, and that the executive branch is the instrument most tempted to expand it. The protections against unlawful detention, against proceeding against a person without due process, against the subordination of courts to administrative convenience — these were written precisely for moments when the government believed its cause was urgent enough to set them aside.

The urgency of a cause has never, in my observation, been a sound reason to abandon the law. Indeed, it is in moments of urgency that the law matters most. Any government can respect the rights of citizens it finds convenient. The test of republican government is whether it respects the rights of citizens it finds inconvenient. That test is not an abstraction; it is the daily work of the institutions we constructed.

What strikes me most about this report — and I mark this as inference, not recollection, since I cannot have lived through these events — is the political framing. Reason's writers note, and the headline makes plain, that defending constitutional limits ought not to be a conservative or progressive cause. That observation would have seemed to my contemporaries almost too obvious to state. The law does not bend to party. The moment it does, it ceases to be law and becomes merely the will of whoever holds the office.

I counsel this: citizens of every disposition should ask themselves whether they would be comfortable if the opposing party held these same powers with this same disregard for process. If the answer is no, then the discomfort belongs now, regardless of who governs. Precedent, once set, does not stay where it was placed. The Republic's character is built not in the extraordinary moments of crisis but in the ordinary, undramatic insistence that the rules apply — to every person, under every administration, without exception.