Judge Dread

“I am the law!” declared Judge Dredd, the cinematic supercop played by Sylvester Stallone in the eponymous 1995 film. Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan seems to have come to a similar conclusion, and she has been charged with a felony and a misdemeanor in the matter of Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, an illegal immigrant who was scheduled to appear before her on domestic battery charges and whom—according to the federal police agencies today under control of people who won their positions by insisting we should not trust federal police agencies—the judge tried to help evade arrest and presumable deportation. 

Let us assume, arguendo, that Judge Dugan does not have a special place in her heart for supposed domestic abusers. If she is, as it seems, engaged in the same proud tradition of civil disobedience as such heroes as Henry David Thoreau, then she should go to jail for it as happily as Thoreau did when he observed:

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable, ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her.

The question before the jury—the real jury, I mean: us—is not the character of Eduardo Flores-Ruiz but the character of the Trump administration and that of our doddering republic. 

Judge Dugan has behaved at least improperly, if not criminally, if the facts of the case are as described. (And go ahead and put on the caveat that since we are talking about habitual liars such as FBI director Kash Patel and other Trump sycophants here, who the hell knows?) Dugan supposedly sent the agents who had come to arrest Flores-Ruiz to a different part of the courthouse on an administrative chore and then interrupted the legal proceedings in front of her to spirit Flores-Ruiz out through the jury entrance and away from the feds. His evasion of arrest lasted only a couple of minutes, but, as my colleague Sarah Isgur has intelligently observed, one can be guilty of obstructing justice even if one is no good at it. 

The Trump administration is lawless—and particularly so in the matter of immigration, where it has ignored court rulings and trampled over due process, exiling U.S. citizen children and infamously sending a man off to a Salvadoran gulag in plain contravention of the law, with President Trump citing doctored photos of MS-13 gang tattoos on the deportee’s hands to vindicate himself. To push back against such lawlessness (and I will here assume that this is what Judge Dugan is up to) is good and necessary and patriotic. It also is far from anything that falls under the properly understood professional duties of a Milwaukee judge and it may be, at times, a crime. 

There is much to admire in the tradition of civil disobedience, from the nonviolent kind practiced by Mohandas K. Gandhi to the bloodier kind practiced by John Brown. Civil disobedience is the mildest form of revolution, but it may lead to the more traditional kind of revolution—the line is short and straight from the Boston Tea Party to Lexington and Concord. Gandhi meant to work a political revolution in the British Empire and establish an independent India; the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. meant to work a revolution within American government and social practice; John Brown meant to secure the freedom of American slaves as a matter of brute fact and then let the law accommodate itself to the new political settlement created not by votes or argument—which had failed in the great moral cause of the time—but by his Sharp’s rifle. Thoreau expected to be put into jail for breaking the law, and Gandhi, who read him, adopted the same position. The Rev. King did some of his best writing in that famous stay in the Birmingham jail. 

The civil-disobedience position, being a revolutionary position, is always and everywhere a dangerous position, even where it is good or necessary. It is a way of saying, “I am the law,” or, “My moral sensibility is the law.” As I wrote some years ago in the matter of Cliven Bundy, the right-wing militant rancher waging a desultory guerilla war against federal land-use practices, the problem with civil disobedience is that every Timothy McVeigh and Unabomber thinks he is Patrick Henry. There are plenty of people out there who are full of rage and resentment and who are simply spoiling for a fight—and who will accept any moral pretext that offers them a rationale for the violence they wish to do. And there is a less dramatic version of that, e.g., perhaps the case of a judge looking for any opportunity to stick a thumb in the eye of the Trump administration. 

The Trump administration deserves all the thumbs in its eyes, of course, Kash Patel more than most of the rest of that feckless gang of self-serving malefactors. Give or take an accident or two, there are 1070 thumbs in Congress, all of them attached to elected representatives who under the Constitution are invested with the power—and the duty—to exercise oversight and to limit by statute the Trump administration’s shenanigans, abuses, and lawlessness. This, owing to reasons of cowardice and stupidity, they refuse to do. Judges may rule against the administration, but the administration has shown itself more than willing to ignore the courts—and to lie to the public about what the courts have ruled. And, so, what do you do? 

What the administration hopes Americans do is what most Americans are going to do: knuckle under, hope that none of this mess lands on their heads, and wait for the next election. Others will do what Judge Dugan is accused of doing: work to subvert the administration, including through illegal means. And, America being America, you’re a fool if you think there isn’t some would-be John Brown out there thanking God and the spirit of Eugene Stoner that, at last, his day has come. 

Dugan has been suspended by the state supreme court. Her lawyers say she “will defend herself vigorously and looks forward to being exonerated.” If she has something more to say for herself, now is the time. So far, her attorneys have not disputed the facts of the case but have argued only that she is being targeted for “performative” reasons.” No doubt that is true—this is above all else, a performative administration.

This is, for the moment, a minor kerfuffle. But if Congress does not step up, be sure that someone will. If you think Judge Dugan is being irresponsible and reckless, then you almost certainly are not going to like who and what comes next as the lawlessness and chaos continues. Chaos begets chaos. And the hard part for honest and intelligent Americans will be that, whatever dumb and destructive excesses Trump’s opponents get up to, nobody will be able to say that they don’t have a point.