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In
Portland, our intrepid legal affairs editor braves ICE and kombucha to
report on the Justice Department’s Orwellian arguments and how a
Trump-nominated jurist is holding the line for democracy.
by Garrett Epps
“Freedom,” wrote George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “is the freedom to say two plus two make four. Once that is granted, all else follows.”
But what if the test is whether a president can add two and two and get in the neighborhood of four? What if the president says 2+2=10,000?
Is that close enough for government work?
Federal Judge Karin J. Immergut of
the District of Oregon, 64, confronted this question—which is of a
quality strange to laypeople with common sense but, alas,
all-too-familiar to lawyers—in a hearing Friday in the case of Oregon v. Trump, a
challenge by the state of Oregon and the city of Portland to Trump’s
commandeering of 200 members of the Oregon National Guard for the
purpose of subduing Portland. The case calls to mind a different Orwell
quote: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant
struggle.”
What
is in front of our noses is that Portland, Oregon, is an average
American city, or I think, a city where, for many people, the living is
better than in an “average city.” Despite some classic urban
problems—persistent homelessness, the high cost of housing, a falling
crime rate that ranks 56th in the nation but makes some neighborhoods
unsafe, traffic, and political divisions that sometimes become street
brawls—the only profound difference between Portland and where you live
is that the chief executive of the United States has declared war on
this city and ordered federal forces to invade it. Trump has done that
under a statute that requires two plus two to equal four; anyone with
eyes can see that he is proclaiming that zero plus zero equals Defcon One.
Many
Americans, including the eager Fox News watcher in the White House, are
convinced that Portland is a hellscape of arson and violence.
It’s not.
Over the weekend, Portland’s 50-year-old Saturday Market unfolded as
usual on the banks of the Willamette River; 9,000 people ran the
Portland Marathon; the Portland Thorns soccer team beat the Bay Football
Club 2-1 in front of a nearly 17,000 fans, and Powell’s City of Books,
perhaps the world’s greatest bookstore, was jammed full of readers
scanning bestsellers while sipping lattes and kombucha.
True, Treebeerd’s Taproom did not open until 2 p.m. on Friday, but on
investigation, it was determined that Treebeerd’s Taproom never opens
until 2 p.m. Also on Saturday night, several hundred protesters marched
to the city’s ICE headquarters to decry the treatment of immigrants. ICE
personnel handled the protest just fine with tear gas, and even managed to send two 84-year-old demonstrators to the hospital after beating them to the ground.
And
after being served with a federal court order forbidding him from
taking over Oregon National Guard troops and sending them in, Trump, as
he often does, decided to go to court by sending in California Guard troops to do the same work.
Could
President Trump really think Portland is Hell? Or to put it
differently, could a reasonable Donald Trump, if such a thing can be
imagined, really think it is? |