In an April 15, 2025, social media posting, Vice President JD Vance issued a fatwa about what Due Process is due to non-citizens in the United States. He wrote: To say the administration must observe “due process” is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors. To put it in concrete terms, imposing the death penalty on an…

As President Trump sharpies his way through stacks of executive orders, lots of summaries and distillations have appeared. The last thing needed is one more from me. Rather, I would like to comment on practical aspects of the elimination of birthright citizenship. The move requires a re-interpretation of the Constitution’s  14th Amendment, Section 1, which states: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the…

Like most of you, I have been reading the post morta about how Kamala Harris lost to a convicted felon, pedophile, lying, corrupt, treasonous, undisciplined, racist incompetent like Donald Trump. The simplest explanation is that he won because eggs were too expensive. (It is ironic that people look to this no-nothing to solve a public health emergency – bird flu decimating chicken stocks and possibly, soon, us – when he dropped the ball resulting in 180,000 excess deaths  the last…

A recent case in the Ninth Circuit, Perez-Camacho v. Garland,  reminded me of a blog post which I thought of recent vintage, but thanks to the Covid time warp, was actually six years ago. The case involved a former U.S. Marine who was able to return to the United States after having been deported approximately fifteen years earlier after a conviction and two year prison sentence for animal cruelty. The blog from 2017 discussed the tension in the law between…