25 Apr My Ad in Seattle Times 4 27 2025: It’s the 800th Anniversary of Due Process

posted from Seattle, WA April 25, 2025

800 Years!- But don’t expect a celebration

(Pope Francis died as the ad-deadline was upon us. It pains me that at this moment I would be making a public statement that did not express my own sadness at the loss of this great man)

Exactly on the 800th Anniversary of Due Process, the US and the World finds itself in epic struggle between Democracy and Autocracy. While the idea of democracy is often dumbed-down to mean “the rulers are elected,” the real definition must include Due Process and the cavalcade of rights that flow from the existence of a robust Due Though enshrined in our Constitution where it was lifted from the 1225 rewrite of the Magna Carta, Due Process can never be said to have been anywhere near in perfect existence anywhere. In the US Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt dispensed with it entirely at various points and it’s been a terrible struggle for Minorities, try reading the book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson about struggling to get innocent young Black kids off death row in Alabama.

But never has Due Process faced such a broadside frontal attack as under the current regime of the Dictator Donald Trump, who is now openly defying court orders and attempting and succeeding so far in bringing down our courts and along with it our three-branch form of government Even when one of the most evil of our Presidents, Andrew Jackson, defied the Supreme Court when they stood up for the rights and lives of the citizens of the Five Nations of the Carolinas, he wasn’t playing toward an ideological end-game of destroying the Court system. Even when another of our worst Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, jailed 20,000 Americans for thought-crimes, much worse than anything Trump has done so far–his end game was more to get his pet project, WWI done rather than creating a Wilsonian Royalty and reverting to monarchy. (although for me he killed my great uncle Tom, killed by a sniper while leading his men from foxhole to foxhole, and my great grandmother by not calling off a rally to support the War and spreading the Flu). Similarly, FDR wrongly thought he was helping the war effort when he egregiously imprisoned Japanese citizens, stealing all their land and belongings in the process. Yes, horrible to the nth degree, but not in the service of the goal of creating a new royalty-based autocracy.

But the current President is more like King John, he wants to get rid of the whole concept of due process. In his mind, it does nothing to advance his wealth and power. After sending an innocent man to a freezing dungeon of Hell in El Salvador, America’s own new Gulag, he cracked jokes about it with that country’s Autocrat leader. And Kilmar Abrego Diego, whose terror I can only imagine now, is only of thousands of innocent people whose lives have been disrupted. Afghans who helped Americans during the war and will face death if sent back, International students who have come here to learn, Venezuelans who have fled an Autocrat to our south, students who adopted the American practice of freedom of expression and assembly, Haitians and Ukrainians lives and dreams secure up till recently now in play and in limbo.

All the while, as I have argued before, America is paying the price for not truly understanding just how great of a President George Washington was. All the fawning has been directed toward Lincoln. But because the long line of Presidents who succeeded Washington didn’t have the unusual combination of luck and skill to be in a position to become strongmen, we have always assumed that Washington was somehow normal, that he wasn’t head and shoulders above most of the founders of states, most of the Fathers of countries, and indeed, in a sense, all the other Presidents who merely followed dutifully in his footsteps, again, with a few exceptions.. He was in a position to create a new royalty, it was almost harder for him not to do this than to do what he did.

As for his underlings once preparing a coup, the story is told in an article in the November 2024 Atlantic by Tom Nichols..

In 1784, at the time of the Newburgh Rebellion, Washington had real grievances against the Congress, which was far behind in its financial obligations to the Army, which had gone unpaid. And Washington personally as well as the Continental Army generally were held in vastly higher esteem by the people than the Congress was. Washington listened patiently to the plan to confront and defeat Congress but was appalled and repelled by the very idea and sternly rebuked those who had crafted it. That was the decisive moment but it was only one instance in which Washington demonstrated an understanding of and a commitment to democracy. He entered all of his government positions in debt and emerged from them still in debt. It was hard for some people at the time to even comprehend why he would do this just as it would be impossible for Trump to understand if he were capable of learning the story of George Washington. Nichols quotes retired Marine Corps General John Kelly as describing Trump as a “person that has no idea what America stand for and has no idea what America is all about.”

Meanwhile Kilmar Abrego Garcia continues to languish in the New American Gulag of an El Salvadoran prison,. having been cut off from his job, his family and wife, and his university studies. And he is one of many, including people on student visas who embraced America to the point of expressing their views in forums and protests–what could be more American and what kind of person do we want as World Citizens more than this kind?

The road ahead will surely be tough. We must remember that Democracy is not just a system where the people choose their leaders through elections. If anyone thinks that, the American Educational System really is failing. Democracy is full of checks and balances and all these checks and balance are built around the first building block of democracy: due process. We must defeat the Ghost of King John!

Caveat about “economic impverishment”

In a small ad I can’t be putting in every caveat that I’d like to. One is I am not predicting impoverishment in the short run, I’m making no predictions for the short run. The stock market is likely to regress to the mean, that is to go up, if only because the Fed has been putting so much money into the system and capitalism has a way of making the best of things. As to the tariffs, there could be feel-good victories for Americans especially benefiting various industries, all thanks to the dealmaking. But tariffs are not the way to wealth–that was figured out in the 1700s with the theory of competitive advantage. And uncertainty is bad for business, and sometimes a customer lost in the short run is a customer lost forever. The tariffs are already bad for the Amazon rainforest as China has switched from buying soybeans from American farmers and is now going to Brazil, which will cut down more rain forest. All the uncertainty has driven up the price of Gold so more of the Amazon will be dug up and poisoned to get Gold. Still, there could be intricacies in the law and the way tariffs are operated that are beyond any knowledge I have that could get fixed and could result in improvement.

But where I stand by my prediction of impoverishment is when and if America truly descends into becoming a country without due process. By that I mean a country where nobody really has due process rights, not just various small groups. We are already headed in that direction. In order to operate anywhere near its capacity, capitalism absolutely requires due process. All rights are the same–the right to private property and the right to freedom of speech is the same right–look at CNN, which Trump wants to dismantle. When aspiring entrepreneurs aren’t certain that the rewards of all the hard work they plan to do will be kept from a capricious ruler, they won’t bother to do anything, and capitalism, at least the kind that keeps generating increasing wealth that we have come to expect over the last couple centuries, will cease to exist.