“The Trump administration is now flirting with lawless defiance of court orders.” — New York Times
This administration repeatedly ignores court rulings, so, sure, it looks like we are breaking many laws. But even though it seems very, very obvious to everyone that we’re breaking laws left and right, any stable genius can see we’re merely edging ever closer to breaking many laws. Like a teenager sitting next to their crush in a dark movie theater, slowly creeping nearer and nearer to graze their date’s hand.
This isn’t a constitutional crisis. We’re just making eye contact with a constitutional crisis from across the bar, then looking away and giggling.
When we continue to withhold foreign aid and climate change funds, even though the courts have ordered us to release the funding because the freezes were arbitrary and capricious, that’s not breaking the law. It’s smiling, leaning in, and gently massaging the arm of breaking the law.
We’ve swiped right on ignoring judicial rulings, but we’re still waiting to see whether it’s a match.
Continuing to block the Associated Press from attending White House events, even though the courts have ordered us to let them in, that’s not breaking the law. It’s asking for breaking the law’s number the moment breaking the law shows any sort of kindness or attention, even though breaking the law was clearly just trying to be polite.
We’re not flouting the entire system of checks and balances put in place to ensure the executive doesn’t wield authoritarian power. We’re just wondering whether the entire system of checks and balances comes here often.
When the courts tell us to turn around planes shipping Venezuelans to a Salvadoran prison, since the charges against most of them have not been proven, and we’re like, “Nah”—that’s not breaking the law. It’s seeing breaking the law in the hotel elevator and slipping them our room key, and when breaking the law says “What the fuck?” we tell ourselves we heard “Let’s fuck!”
And when the Supreme Court issues a unanimous ruling that our mistaken deportation of a man was illegal and that we must work to return him, and we don’t even bother to put it on our to-do list, that’s not breaking the law. It’s more like hinting you’d like to see breaking the law naked, then saying you’re just joking when breaking the law looks appalled, then incessantly sending dick pics anyway, until breaking the law punches you in the face.
As in any playful relationship, the administration and the law have joked around about who would hypothetically be our “free passes.” We called it in advance: Laws we don’t like are on our hall pass. It doesn’t count when you break those.
The law shouldn’t even feel special. We flirt all the time. We’re not, for example, married to fascism. We just bought a ring, put a deposit down on a venue, sent out save-the-dates, asked the ghost of Hitler for permission, and told fascism we’d like to spend the rest of the nation’s life with it.
That’s not committing to fascism. It’s winking at fascism.