Late last week, the Supreme Court ruled that Elon Musk’s brainchild, DOGE, can access Americans’ Social Security data.
Around the same time, the same court, ruling along the same conservative-liberal divide, said DOGE doesn’t have to hand over internal records under Freedom of Information Act requests.
Each of those rulings is egregious in its own right. The juxtaposition between the two is nothing short of appalling.
According to two SCOTUS justices who’ve demonstrated, in their own way, fealty to Donald Trump the person (i.e., not just to Trump the executive), three justices appointed by Trump and, unfortunately, the Chief Justice, DOGE’s entitled to access the most sensitive of all personal data held by the government about US citizens (including, potentially, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, bank account numbers and even medical records, as well as records pertaining to family court proceedings and children’s schooling), but DOGE’s not obligated to reveal anything (at all, apparently) about how it operates to the American public under a process (FOIA) which compels even the US military to disclose, upon request, delicate information related to, for example, war crimes.
Part and parcel of the conservative majority’s decision to grant DOGE — an organization that’s a government agency when it “needs” to look at, to use a hypothetical, the medical histories of Americans who’ve filed for disability insurance, but not a government agency when the media or watchdog groups file FOIA requests — access to citizens’ entire life as cached by the Social Security Administration was the notion that the alleged urgency of DOGE’s effort to get its eyes and hands on the data somehow outweighs the public’s interest in maintaining strict limits on access to that information.
“On the one hand, there is a repository of millions of Americans’ legally protected, highly sensitive information that — if improperly handled or disseminated — risks causing significant harm,” Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote, in a dissent joined by Sonia Sotomayor. “On the other, there is the Government’s desire to ditch the usual protocols for accessing that data, before the courts have even determined whether DOGE’s access is lawful.”
This is the sort of development which should send any self-respecting libertarian into conniptions. The notion that a motley crew of unelected, untrained and, except for Musk, completely unknown operatives acting at the behest of a president carrying out an extra-legislative agenda should be privy to Social Security Administration records with no oversight and no obligation to comply with FOIA requests, is the stuff of libertarian nightmares. You couldn’t conjure a scenario more anathema both to academic (textbook) libertarianism and bumper sticker (“Don’t tread on me”) libertarianism if you tried.
Wait, I take that back. You could conjure one scenario that’s more diametrically opposed to the Gadsden flag than SCOTUS ceding Americans’ Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, bank account numbers and medical records to an organization named after an internet meme: The willy-nilly usurpation of states’ rights in the course of sending federal troops into the streets of American cities.
I can’t emphasize this enough: Libertarian crusaders — a voter bloc which comprises a meaningful share of Trump’s support base — should be absolutely aghast at what’s happening in Los Angeles and no, I don’t mean rioters waving the Mexican flag while standing next to, or on top of, a burning Waymo.
I realize everyone knows what happened, but I’m not sure it’s obvious to the Patrick Henry crowd just how ideologically abhorrent Trump’s actions are. Without a request from the state, he federalized the National Guard and stationed troops in the streets. Then, without even bothering to invoke the relevant federal statute, he mobilized the Marines.
If readers will forgive the language, that’s the sort of thing that would’ve prompted an irascible colonist in a tricorne and a waistcoat to lose his goddamn mind.
Trump’s haphazard, unilateral militarization of Los Angeles flies in the face of virtually every precept cherished by limited government types, including and especially notions of federalism that crowd holds up as sacrosanct. Asking citizens to wear a mask at the grocery store during a pandemic is too much, apparently, but federal troops patrolling the streets is somehow tolerable? Why? Because Mexicans?
In an article published late Monday evening, The Wall Street Journal detailed a May meeting at the ICE headquarters where Stephen Miller, impatient at the pace of deportations, intimated that if the immigration crackdown was limited to gang members and violent criminals (i.e., to the only people a majority of Americans consistently support removing), it wouldn’t be far-reaching enough. Agents, Miller said, should “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens.”
According to the Journal‘s account, Miller suggested hanging out at Home Depots and 7-Elevens. To quote directly from the article, “Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away” using that strategy. The violence in Los Angeles was sparked, in part, by dozens of arrests targeting immigrants searching for work at a Home Depot parking lot.
Here again, I’m compelled to suggest this is — or should be — repugnant to absolutist libertarians, particularly given the extent to which, as I put it Monday, the Trump administration’s instrumentalizing immigration raids as a means to militarize America’s streets.
Around the time Trump descended the golden escalator, I was in New York working as a kind of geopolitical “consultant” for a tabloid baron keen to exploit the deepening fissures in American society for his own financial gain. Or for the strategic benefit of a foreign government. I was never sure which.
That propagandist played the libertarian card regularly against the American public, which is to say that man (an immigrant who spoke with a heavy foreign accent) played up each and every instance of alleged US government overreach in a bid not to earnestly champion classical libertarianism (his knowledge of which was limited at best), but rather to inflame divisions. In one particularly absurd example, he framed the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge standoff in Oregon as an act of defiance on par with the Boston Tea Party.
Fast forward a decade and Trump’s MAGA movement counts among its considerable ranks what it’s probably fair to call a majority of self-described American libertarians. To those voters, I’d politely suggest summoning the same indignation you directed at pandemic mask and vaccine mandates to lodge complaints against what, on any interpretation, are some of the most flagrant examples of federal government overreach in modern American history.
Apparently as long as the actions are taken against a blue state they don’t care. Bring them to heel and kiss the ring.
I’ve never met a Libertarian who didn’t scream under the dentists drill.
Libertarians, “originalists”, and evangelicals are the three most hypocritical portions of the American electorate. These are the descendants of the Lost Cause and will never acknowledge that all their animus toward the developed world is built on the anger over having being told they couldn’t hold people in bondage or at least prevent them from having the right to own property or vote. That’s the freedom they want.
Reichstag fire.
A well articulated and accurate plea that will unfortunately fall on deaf ears. As long as it’s happening to “them” or as long as they like who wields the power, they will not care what happens. As always though, they will scream and yell and commit violence as soon as “they” command the same power.
Americans tend to be a nihilistic bunch, megalomaniacs who assume some sort of birthright superiority to all other humans. These people have no real principles, preferring tribal associations as a means to access power. They will invent or adopt principles when they are defeated that they immediately abandon when they regain power. They will wear the masks of Christians, conservatives, colonials, or rebels when it is convenient and to bind the tribe together. But ultimately what they crave is dominance, to control the people they hate and to make them feel pain for rejecting or not fitting into their clan.
I agree, but they, “libertarians,” don’t care. I’ve tried getting through to some. Only racist white guys, and Enrique Tarrio, have freedoms to violate. Mexicans hoping to earn enough money to buy their next meal fall into the NRP category, where that means not real people.
Yeah, well all those white guys are subject to the DOGE SSA ruling too which is to say their personal data — and that of their families — is just as exposed as everyone else’s.
I hear you and agree. They still don’t care. It was never about freedom.
Most will tell you that they have nothing to hide, a sign they are not actually libertarians. Plus if rifling through the SSA will root out those pesky illegals who are getting something for free from “their” tax dollars, well thats just the price to pay. Oh, wait, if an undocumented worker is in the SSA that means he/she is mostly likely paying taxes that help support Bubba’s memaw’s Capri Sun addiction, and they most likely won’t get anything back for themselves.
Libertarians like Thiel who install VPs, Senators and co-founding the company tasked with aggregating all the DOGE data. Those Libertarians?
Maybe all those guns we all own are going to become more of a problem than Trump imagines. No political party affiliation required on a gun license (380 million last I saw).
The libertarians will come crawling back from under the carpet if and when the present regime loses power.
Emphasis on “if.”
Remember federalism and states’ rights? Republicans brayed about that for years- then they passed Salt limitations when it suited them. This is far worse but no different in principle.