When the US Government Snatches Children, It's Biblical to Resist the Law

By Daniel José Camacho, Guardian UK

17 June 18

There is no divine mandate requiring us to accept an unjust policy or law. You wouldn’t know that by listening to the Trump administration

hile sitting in an Alabama jail, Martin Luther King Jr began writing a letter about the moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. He invoked the legal maxim originating with St Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all. This week, attorney general Jeff Sessions quoted the bible to justify a cruel policy that is, in fact, not a required law: the forced separation of immigrant families at the border.

Sessions cracked a smile when he said, “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.” The former Alabama senator knows what he’s doing. Surely, he’s familiar with King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. In contempt for a rich tradition of Christian resistance to injustice, he is cherry-picking the bible to serve a despotic white nationalist agenda. Racism under the guise of “law and order” redux.

Day by day the harrowing stories increase, from infants being snatched from their nursing mothers to the construction of prison camps for children. As others have pointed out, the zero-tolerance policy plays into a longer American history of Native American and African American children being ripped from their parents.

Just one day before Sessions’ public statement, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement condemning the administration for separating young immigrant children from parents and creating new asylum limits for those fearing domestic violence. Even the Southern Baptist Convention and Reverend Franklin Graham have criticized the administration’s actions. Yet, Sessions, in his statement, explicitly dismissed the concerns of those he called “our church friends.”

Responding to a question about Sessions’ bible comment, press secretary Sarah Sanders claimed “it is very biblical to enforce the law.” But this reflects a selective reading of scripture with its own troubling past. Moreover, it erases the sacredness of resisting oppression.

As writer Rachel Held Evans points out in her new book about the bible, Inspired, nearly half of all defenses of slavery in the buildup to the American Civil War were written by Christian ministers citing scripture. Later, many white Christians anchored their objections to the Civil Rights movement in Romans 13 and a decontextualized reading of the apostle Paul.

For every passage in the bible about submitting to authority, there’s another passage about a prophet calling out the authorities. Jesus Christ, himself, was crucified for subverting religious and political authorities. At the very beginning of the Exodus story, a group of midwives disobey a king’s cruel policy targeting children.

These are the kinds of biblical stories that informed Angelina Grimké when she became one of the very few white southern women to openly support the cause of abolition. In her “Appeal to Christian Women of the South” written in 1836, she states: “If a law commands me to sin I will break it ...The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians.”

There is no divine mandate requiring us to accept an unjust policy or law. But, some might ask, how do we differentiate a just law from an unjust law? Who decides? That was a question King addressed with the following principle, “a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself.” It’s the golden rule writ large.

This is what was at stake when a reporter passionately asked Sarah Sanders if she has any empathy for separated immigrant families given the fact that she’s a parent of young children.

Tellingly, she never answered the question.

Can the President Be Indicted? There's Significant Reason to Doubt Those Saying "No."

By Danielle Brian and Sarah Turberville, Just Security

17 June 18

Arguments originating in an office working for the president are not objective—nor are they final.

an a sitting president be indicted? The public should be skeptical of arguments saying no, which frequently rely on two opinions by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). This office, in part through its opinions, provides legal advice to the executive branch. As legal counsel to the executive, OLC is naturally biased in favor of helping its client achieve its goals through legal analysis. Media coverage of this important question concerning presidential immunity, however, has largely failed to question the underlying rationales found in those OLC memos. And when it comes to preserving the rule of law and our constitutional system of checks and balances, OLC does not have the final word, and we should not treat its views as such.

The plain fact is that OLC, responsive to its own institutional incentives, sometimes gets things wrong. Its opinions legitimizing the CIA’s torture program were later withdrawn because of errors. Its opinion that federal courts could not hear appeals from prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay was later rejected by a 2008 Supreme Court decision. Its opinion allowing government agencies to ignore requests for information from individual members of Congress was disavowed by the Trump administration at the urging of Sen. Chuck Grassley. Its opinion supporting warrantless mass surveillance absent any congressional or judicial approval was refuted by a later OLC opinion. And its opinion saying Congress cannot give federal employees whistleblower rights to provide the legislative branch with classified information was found unpersuasive by Congress.

(We don’t know how many OLC opinions would hold up to scrutiny, given the fact that many are kept secret. Right now, we at the Project on Government Oversight are in the process of challenging the OLC for withholding even the titles and dates of several recent unclassified opinions, which were redacted in response to our Freedom of Information Act request last year.)

There are reasons to believe OLC might be wrong about presidential indictments, too. The office’s legal analysis largely relies on the assertion that a criminal indictment is so burdensome that a president subject to one would not be able to fulfill the office’s constitutionally assigned duties—and therefore cannot be indicted. To follow the opinion’s logic further, one could argue that any legal process that has the potential to substantially distract the president from his duties runs the risk of being unconstitutional. More specifically, as former White House Counsel Bob Bauer recently put it when discussing one of the OLC memos, the mere stigma related to the special counsel’s investigation would also harm the president’s ability to lead the nation:

… if the special counsel submits to the Deputy Attorney General a damning conclusion about the president’s conduct, and Rosenstein elects to disclose it “in the public interest,” the public will know that, absent the special immunity crafted by OLC, the president would have been indicted. It is difficult to see how the president will have been spared to any significant degree the “stigmatization” and distraction that OLC believed would follow from indictment.

We agree with Bauer’s prediction that the likely outgrowth from the special counsel’s report would be a nearly endless series of distractions as indictments, pleas, and trials of related parties ensue, ensnaring the president’s responsibility for the country’s welfare in its crosshairs.

With this reality in mind, the arguments presented in the OLC memos immunizing the president from indictment would do little to quell the disruption to the office of the president. What would remain, however, is the appearance that the president is the most important constitutional role in our system and therefore must be protected even at the expense of the rule of law.

The Supreme Court has held that a sitting president can be subject to lawsuits for actions unrelated to their official duties—even though these can also be time-consuming. In its decision in Clinton v. Jones, the high court held that just because a legal case “may significantly burden the time and attention of the Chief Executive is not sufficient to establish a violation of the Constitution” if the case is brought. Moreover, one nonpublic OLC opinion notes that presidents have been subpoenaed to testify before grand juries since the days of Thomas Jefferson.

Regardless of whether the OLC opinions at the heart of this conversation are sound legal interpretation, we firmly reject the notion that the office’s interpretation is the final word on the matter.

There may be countervailing concerns supporting presidential immunity from prosecution—but is it appropriate for executive branch lawyers to get the last say on the question? To uncritically accept OLC’s opinion is to argue that the president can be above the law in certain circumstances, contrary to the principles of our system of government. Should that view—with its profound implications—prevail without an independent body, such as a court, publicly weighing in?

Our courts operate quite differently from the other two branches of government, with each side presenting legal and factual arguments before an independent tribunal that is beholden to the Constitution and not to a voting constituency or client. Accordingly, the public should remember that the third branch is a far more credible and independent venue for rendering a verdict on the proper balance of the competing legal equities at stake here than an office, headed by a presidential appointee, that has functioned as a legal enabler of the White House, even if in good faith. Because the judicial branch makes great effort to constrain its decision-making by only deciding “cases or controversies,” the courts have not yet examined the legality of President Trump’s claim (or that of any of his predecessors) that he cannot be subpoenaed or indicted while in office.

We may be fast approaching a reckoning on the limits of the president’s immunity from prosecution that will appropriately be reserved for the courts to decide, when the time comes. For now, it’s an open question. But to treat an executive branch memo which does not have the force of law as a final statement on the matter turns our system of checks and balances on its head.