Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
Pygmalion and the Image - The Hand Refrains
(1878)

"Then, perhaps, equal justice under the law might start making sense to even them, though I doubt it."

Equal protection under the law serves as the bedrock principle under which these United States have operated at least since the 14th Amendment was enacted after the Civil War. If enforcement has been anything but consistent, Congress’s intent in proposing it and the majority of the States’ intent in ratifying it seal its presence as something other than inadvertent. This administration still struggling to comprehend the concept of administration, which has been seemingly deliberately failing to abide by this fundamental underlying principle, as it has been consistently inconsistent in how it enforces laws. Clearly, race and national origin, as exhibited most profoundly in their vicious prosecution of so-called illegal aliens, have appeared with obvious intent to overtly violate this most fundamental legal principle. Declaring an alien illegal merely due to their due process being delayed by an overwhelmed judiciary does not render them illegal in any actual legal sense. If anything, they might find themselves temporarily suspended between legal statuses. Pending might better describe their formal status, and, under the principle that no one can be fairly characterized as guilty until found so by a jury of their peers, it cannot be treated as even a preliminary form of guilt. These “illegals” are clearly still innocent, until.

Those who arrive here illegally are also guaranteed due process, for that right is not reserved only for citizens but for any person present in this country, as our Constitution insists. The fiction that we were overrun with “illegals,” then, was always an abomination. It was created to encourage what I consider the most fundamental miscarriage of justice imaginable under our Constitution, a condition I will label Capriciousity. This amounts to capriciousness on steroids, the malignant prosecution of a supposed other, typically a minority, to the point of deliberate persecution. In practice, it’s invoked as a series of double binds. An infraction’s imagined. It never matters if that infraction actually occurred. The accusation serves as grounds for detaining a person for further investigation. The investigation, as executed by this administration which can’t seem to properly investigate any more than they can competently administer, typically holds each detainee incommunicado, without legal representation, and in isolation from their family and community. They intend the detention to seem like punishment and perhaps to make the innocent detainee feel guilty.

Then, the threats begin. Let’s Make A Deal choices are proposed. “Would you prefer what’s behind door number one or door number two?” Coerced choices, insisted upon without legal representation, seal many detainees’ fates. Because they chose not to choose or opted for an option that inconvenienced their captors, they might be raptured to a country other than the one they originally came from. They might be threatened with being sent to some place in Africa where an Ebola epidemic rages, without resources to defend or support themselves once abandoned there. If this threat itself doesn’t amount to cruel and unusual punishment, I really don’t know what might. Those who puff themselves up with this sort of righteousness deserve the worst our judicial system might bestow upon them, though even they deserve far better than they gave to these legally innocent civilians, whether or not they had ever been sanctified as citizens.

I plead for nothing other than what even the least devout Christian might consider anyone’s due. Nobody, not even you, can ever legally be above any law, but nobody ever deserves to be held below it, either. How ever one might calculate their fear or revulsion at another’s origin, they are never free or legally sanctioned to capriciously enforce even the least of our immigration laws. I find such behavior intolerable. I expect—Hell, I pray—for a decade of reconciliation following the downfall of this capriciously non-administering administration. I expect a full-blown Reconstruction, where the work interrupted by the traitorous President Johnson, finally continues to completion. Where those who chose Capriciousity will receive their days in court, and then serve their sentences as prudence against any such future serial misrepresentation of our lawmakers’ and our Constitution’s intentions. The punishment for Capriciousity should properly exceed the sentence for virtually any other felony, for it violates such a fundamental principle under our law that such perpetrators should not roam free.

Maybe the proper sentence for Capriciousity should simply be to deport one convicted of it to some “shithole” country whose constitution insists upon Capriciousity as the most fundamental legal principle. Let them live where the country feels free to persecute those it should only ever prosecute, and even then, only under the goddamn law. Let them have their cake, eat it, and then eat the shit they make with it. Then, perhaps, equal justice under the law might start making sense to even them, though I doubt it.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz