When Kristen Welker, host of the NBC News show Meet the Press, asked convicted felon, sexual abuser and President Trump in a TV interview whether as President he needs to uphold the U.S. Constitution, Trump answered,
“I don’t know.”
On January 20, 2025, Trump took the Presidential oath of office, saying: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees due process to all “persons” in the United States. Its does not say these rights only pertain to U.S. citizens.
“Due process” means the governments must follow certain procedures before depriving people of their life, liberty or interest in property. Due process procedures include things like being afforded a court hearing, holding grand juries and the opportunity for people to be informed of the charges against them and present evidence against the charges.
Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureau has so far kidnapped hundreds of people off the streets of the U.S., including people legally present in the U.S., for “offenses” as small as co-authoring an op-ed Trump doesn’t like, or having the wrong tattoos, hustling them off to detention centers and sending them to a prison in El Salvador without offering them any due process, in violation of the U.S. Constitution. When a Court ordered the federal government to bring the people back and give them the required due process court hearings over their rendition to the foreign prison, Trump refused to comply.
On April 16, Trump said he hopes to deport U.S. citizens to offshore prisons as well.
House Democrats on the Judiciary Committee introduced an amendment to a budget bill currently under consideration that would have required the federal government to abide by the U.S. Constitution and provide all persons due process before removing anyone from the U.S. and sending them to foreign prisons.
House Republicans voted down the amendment.
A president who says he “doesn’t know” if all persons present in the country must get due process under the Constitution indicates how exceedingly unqualified and incompetent Trump is to be president.
Since he was inaugurated, Trump has been on an unconstitutional rampage, violating the Constitution many ways, from trying to eliminate birthright citizenship — another guarantee in the Constitution — to writing executive orders to withhold Congressionally-appropriated funds to multiple federal agencies and U.S. institutions like universities, in attempts to destroy those agencies and institutions he targets.
Unfortunately pointing out that Trump is not upholding his oath doesn’t matter to his disciples. What they want from him is a big ” fuck you ” to anyone they disagree with. He gives them all they can handle.
We learned that from you.
🙂
I agree. He is really not bound to tell the truth. So saying ‘I don’t know,I need to consult lawyers’ about upholding his oath is as good an answer as any. He is throwing red meat to his base, and not only in the USA but in the rest of the OECD. In the process, he is facilitating the elections of weak liberal governments. Carney, Merz, Macron. They can’t get a functional coalition government together. Maybe Starmer, but he seems wishy washy. Romania nullified the election results. Claudia Sheinbaum might be the only clear head in the mix by placating Trump. Seems she learned something watching Zelensky. Maybe we do need a woman to lead.
Sometimes I think he just says this stuff to get you people going. It wouldn’t be terribly surprising to find out some day that Trump had a secret contract with MSNBC that he provide them with the outrage content they’ve been living off of for the last ten years.
And really what does it mean to “uphold” the constitution?…to obey it?
There were at least two times that Biden blatantly disregarded what the Supreme Court determined was constitutional and not a peep was heard from the left.
Astounding!…not.
What were those times? Or is this like the three million illegal immigrants that Obama deported without due process that you can’t seem to find any actual information about?
From Snopes:
According to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data from fiscal years 2009 to 2016, more than 3 million individuals were formally removed from the country during the Obama administration. Annually, between 58% and 84% of these removals were so-called “summary removals” carried out through legal procedures such as “expedited removal” and “reinstatement of removal,” which do not involve a hearing before an immigration judge. On average, about 74% of removals during this period fell into these categories.
Right off the cuff…Biden disregarded the Supreme Court and continued his student loan forgiveness program and similarly continued his ban on property owners being able to collect back rents from and/or evict renters.
Now…don’t bother me! I’m very busy.
So not without due process. They followed the rules and procedures. In other words, not at all what you claimed. Thank you for proving yourself wrong.
Are you aware that the majority of undocumented immigrants did not in fact cross the border illegally? Probably not, since you keep banging this same tired drum. Consider that it is quite possible for someone to enter the country legally, with a visa or other valid document, let it expire and they are now an undocumented immigrant without having crossed a border in the dead of night. That is how most of our undocumented immigrants got here. Stop listening to the right wing pundits who are trying (and apparently succeeding) at scaring the gullible.
I guess “due process” is in the eye of the beholder. From the ACLU.
The Obama administration has prioritized speed over fairness in the removal system, sacrificing individualized due process in the pursuit of record removal numbers.”
For the first time in a long time I agree with them…not that I’m against swift removal…I just think, given the circumstances and the fact that we are in no way equipped to handle this volume, individual due process is absurd.
You’re entitled to your opinion. Remind me, however. How many of those that Obama deported were sent to a foreign prison without being convicted or sentenced for a crime?
Thanks for your concern about my gulibility. It’s touching.
I’m not scared. I’m angry that our country has been compromised by very unscrupulous people whose intention is to
overload our generous welfare system. For instance, the next thing you people will be screaming about is cuts to Medicaid by those horrible Republicans while you stood by and encouraged people with no means of support to get on the gravy train. It’s really just a conflict of visions.
What I am most hopeful for is that Trump can collaborate with Sheinbaum to destroy the narco cartels. That’s a war worth having. The people of Mexico are living in hell.
I just re-read your comment and you seem to be saying that most undocumented migrants just overstayed their visas or something benign like that. So all those pictures of hordes of people lining the river banks and leaving their mountains of garbage on private property and and dying or being raped in the Darien Gap and living in squalor in Aurora were just staged by right wing pundits and FOX News to scare gullible people like me.
I would like to be generous here and declare that you and I have irreconcilable differences of opinion and there’s no use in continuing this conversation
I’m saying that the majority of the undocumented immigrants currently in the US are here because they overstayed their legal authority to be here, not because they snuck across the border. This is a fact, whether you agree or not. Surely you didn’t post some so inflammatory without checking first, right? Check everything, right?
So I have to prove everything I say and you just get to say stuff…right?
I think I’ve been clear that the illegals I am talking about are the ten million who entered while Biden was president.
I’m not talking about the rest from years ago who have overstayed their visas.
But you know that.
And I’m telling you you’ve been lied to. There weren’t ten million illegal crossings into this country under Biden. The right took the number of undocumented immigrants and assumed that they all must have crossed the border illegally. But you’ve never bothered to check because you want to believe it.
PS. I somehow buried the lede!
Letting ten million (plus) unvetted and illegal immigrants into our country either unconstitutional
or treason.
Badhat, you had Scott on the ropes! I was rooting for you! Scott takes little clips from memes. I thought they might have cobbled together 5-minute speeches from MSNBC, but they could not repost clearly. For example, if you add the fact that most undocumented enter from somewhere other than the Southern border to the denial of due process, to deportation of American citizens, to racial profiling and false imprisonment at the border then you have a full-fledged Constitutional crisis based on immigration alone.
It is not a Constitutional crisis but rather an economic, judicial, demographic, environmental, public safety and political crisis.
But Badhat, I don’t think modifying or failing to enforce current border policy is unconstitutional. There was some smoke about Foreign Agency with Ukraine, but I have looked into this closely and see no corruption with Zelensky during Biden presidency. As Vice President, he was too far removed and actually ignored. If you have real evidence, let me know. His son may have believed his name could influcnce, and maybe even Biden considered the possibility, but no crime occurred.
Regarding treason as applied to immigration. Hmm. I looked up the Cloward-Piven Strategy. You need a nexus connecting the president to the Foreign based human traffickers who would be asked to supply illegal immigrants toward this end. There could very well be a future Cloward-Piven outcome in overloaded systems and mass poverty requiring a Universal Basic Income. This will probably happen anyway as a result of automation, globalization, and fiat currency failure, and environmental collapse. But it does not mean it was planned. More likely, Biden was working on his dream of DEI and elimination of racism. The problems of the 1960’s were mostly different than that of today.
Look more to Venezuela, Equador, and Cuba on the Communist/Socialist side. Good times ahead for the Democratic Socialists.
I like your other thoughts! We have another Summer of Love coming.