Rubbing Our Nose in the Carpet

If Senator Alex Padilla Can Be Forcibly Removed From a Press Conference, Who’s Next?

US Senator Alex Padilla is grabbed by FBI officers, pushed out of the press conference being held by Homeland Security Czar Kristi Noem, dragged to the floor, and then hand-cuffed with his face pressed against the rug for interrupting and attempting to ask how many of the people being rounded in recent large scale raids had criminal histories. | Credit: Etienne Laurent, AP Photo

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SHOCKED & AWFUL: Somehow, I still find myself getting shocked. You’d think maybe by now, I might have gotten the picture. Yet my brain refuses to accept what my eyes see.

Yet, still I persist in being shocked. My clothes have grown stained by the flotsam and jetsam jettisoned by all my wordless sputtering.

To steal a line from Carole Cadwalladr, an English reporter who has paid a high price for her stubborn courage, “It’s already later than we think.”

For those needing help recalibrating their internal alarm clock’s alarm as to what time it is, we need only watch the video of U.S. Senator Alex Padilla as he was muscled out of a press conference held Thursday by National Security Director Kristi Noem in Los Angeles’s federal building on Wilshire Boulevard.

Admittedly, Padilla was interrupting. Noem had just stated, “We are not going anywhere,” referring to the militarized ICE raids now taking place in Los Angeles and throughout the state. “We are here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this city.”

Perhaps Padilla should not have lost his cool. Once upon a time, the word “liberate” was used as a fashionable euphemism for stealing. Maybe in that vein, Padilla didn’t want Los Angeles “liberated.” Or maybe he — being a child of immigrants — didn’t want the constitution of his adopted country “liberated.”

Perhaps he objected that all those people protesting the militarization of civil authority — the vast majority peacefully, but some violently — could be written off as “socialists.” Instead, Padilla started to ask what would have been a pertinently impertinent question: How many of the people picked up in recent ICE raids, he wanted to know, had actual criminal records.

He might also have asked how many rounded up were merely day laborers, in this country — perhaps illegally, perhaps not — to steal car-washing jobs that otherwise able-bodied Americans might have taken. Or perhaps Padilla — an MIT graduate and south-of-the-border immigrant himself — might have suggested that their real crime was being born with brown skin.

Perhaps that was Padilla’s real offense.

As we now all know, Padilla didn’t get to ask any follow-up questions. In fact, he never got the first one all the way out of his mouth. Instead, he suddenly found himself pushed out of the room, forced out into the hallway, taken down to the ground with his nose planted in the carpet, and then handcuffed.

Legally, he was not arrested. Legally, he was not even “detained.” Throughout it all, his stony-faced manhandlers called him “sir.” Throughout it all, Padilla addressed them as “sir,” too, as in, “Sir, hands off!” In fact, it was these loudly voiced objections to having someone else’s hands placed forcibly on his body that interrupted the press conference.

Noem has claimed Padilla was making lunging motions in her general direction and that she did not know he was a U.S. Senator. He was not wearing his Senate security pin, she’s noted. For the record, there’s no indication in the video taken of the incident that Padilla made any lunging motions whatsoever, either toward Noem or the podium at which she stood. He identified himself multiple times as a U.S. Senator. In fact, he’d been escorted into the room — at his request — by members of the National Guard. As for the Senate security pin, he was not in a Senate office building. He, in fact, was going to meet with National Guard brass — it was a scheduled meeting, by the way — to get briefed on what the hell was happening in the City of Angels and by what authority.

Had Padilla actually been arrested, he would have been the afforded the due process our Constitution grants anyone — however imperfectly — accused of a crime and held against their will by government authorities. He could have had a day in court. With Noem, due process is a legal abstraction that does not apply. When questioned about it during her confirmation hearings — about habeas corpus, more specifically — she didn’t merely flub it; she got it completely backward. Habeas corpus, she said, is “a constitutional right the president has to be able to remove people from this country.”

In point of fact, habeas corpus means no such thing. In fact, it means the opposite. Don’t take my word for it; look it up. For you legal nerds out there, habeas corpus is the long-enshrined legal doctrine — more than 1,000 years old now — that bars governments from picking up people and detaining them without providing a list of specific charges that have to be proven. It’s the core foundation to what we mean when we talk about “due process.”

And that, like states’ rights, is something in which Republicans used to say they believed.

I don’t pretend to know what Noem knew or didn’t know in the moment. Her real motivation in the moment was to demonstrate that the rule of law starts with Donald Trump and ends with Donald Trump, and that anyone who thinks otherwise can go straight to hell. The whole point is to demonstrate maximum contempt — “You and what army?” — and to inflict maximum humiliation along the way.

But really, grinding Padilla’s nose in the carpet?

Santa Barbara Sheriff Bill Brown: “The events unfolding in Los Angeles, other cities and across the nation are far from peaceful First Amendment protests. We are witnessing destructive attacks on private property and targetted attacks on law enforcement officers, both of which are completely unacceptable.” | Credit: Daniel Dreifus file

On what planet was that necessary? Speaking personally, I got escorted out of the Canary Hotel by a handful of Secret Service agents. Not once, but twice when I tried to go back in. They let me know who was in charge. Politely but most definitely. No hand was ever applied. No nose was put on the rug.

That was then; this is a new now.

I should know better, but still, I’m shocked.

Any and all norms appear to have been shattered. The “center” famous with all you Joan Didion lovers out there for “not holding” — a line she famously borrowed — does appear thoroughly cratered and collapsed.

Except not entirely.

This Thursday evening, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s orders to mobilize the National Guard to restore order in Los Angeles was illegally and unconstitutionally issued. The judge ruled that because Trump never consulted with Governor Gavin Newsom — the commander-in-chief of California’s National Guard — the order to muster 4,000 of them was invalid. There had been no pretense at consultation with Newsom, as federal law requires, and the federal government had not demonstrated that local law enforcement could not contain those protestors who took to rioting.

The judge took note of arguments that the presence of the National Guardsmen was inclined to make the rioting worse, not better. But his key issue was this: For Trump to activate the National Guard, federal law required that he demonstrate doing so is necessary “to repel an invasion” or “to suppress a rebellion.”

Santa Barbara Police Chief Kelly Gordon sent out a memo to the community written both in English and Spanish embracing the right to demonstrate as a constitutional right. The chief asked demonstrators to be “non-violent and respectful of others.” If some chose otherwise, she warned that her officers would act swiftly and decisively “to separate agitators from lawful demonstrators.” Gordon expressed pride in her department’s racial diversity, saying racial and ethnic minorities make up the majority of the department’s personnel. | Credit: Zach Mendez

To qualify as a “rebellion,” you need armed and organized resistance for the purpose of overthrowing a national government. However out of control it may have sporadically gotten in circumscribed locations in Los Angeles, we never got remotely close to meeting the definition of a rebellion. Rebellions are defined in law books as organized and armed efforts to replace an existing government. Have the protests been organized? Not hardly. More like spontaneous. Armed? No evidence for that other than a few fireworks, some rocks, a few chunks of concrete. Toppling the government? Not hardly. Just a bunch of people expressing their First Amendment outrage over police state immigration sweeps.

Attorneys for Trump argued that the president need present no evidence to make such findings; he could simply make them. Likewise, his actions — they argued — were immune from judicial review. The judge begged to differ. “We’re talking about the president … exercising his authority, and, of course, the president is limited in his authority,” the judge said. “That’s the difference between the president and King George.” The judge went on, “We live in response to a monarchy. Line drawing is important because it establishes a system of process.”

Yes, the judge in question — Charles Breyer — is from San Francisco. Yes, he wears a bow tie. Yes, he was appointed to the bench by Bill Clinton. And yes, his order granting Governor Gavin Newsom’s motion for a restraining order was put on ice until Tuesday based on a subsequent ruling by a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals.

We’ll see what happens then. But for the moment at least, Breyer got his point across. As long as other judges keep making similar points, maybe our goose hasn’t been totally cooked.

Yes, I should know better, but I am still shocked.

The day might come when I no longer am.

And that will be so much worse.

To read the companion piece to this Angry Poodle, click here.