Rules, whether laws, by-laws, or policies are not neutral. They are interpreted, applied or forgotten, used or abused. They’re often used to defend the status quo. What better way to say, “this is how we’ve always done this,” than pointing at a piece of paper no one has thought about for 30 years. Or you happen to forget about the rule, or pretend you didn’t know the rule wasn’t being applied evenly.

This is often described as discretion. Yes, the law says the speed limit is 25 miles per hour, but this person was trying to get their kid to school on time. This person is a doctor who was late for an emergency surgery. This person was playing music I don’t like. This person was driving while Black.

Most questions subject to discretion never get reviewed or re-evaluated. Overplaying, or under enforcing rules, is often how the effective policy is actually shaped. What’s more likely to slow down drivers, reducing the speed limit or aggressively issuing speeding tickets? Is it more effective to warn students that using AI will mean they don’t actually learn the material, or enforcing a zero tolerance, AI usage gets you an F, policy (not based on defaming the venerable em-dash)?

Given that rules are more a framework or suggested path, it should be clear that it’s not just the intent or specific language of a rule that determines if it’s “good” or “bad.” It’s a question of how that rule is deployed and what outcomes that drives.

So we must ask ourselves what does that mean in the context of something like the concentration camp deployed as part of enforcing civil law? Who decides what is or isn’t a flag and what is or isn’t a raising as part of a unpublished flag raising ban? What is a war and does changing the name reset the clock on Congressional authorization being required? What does it mean to not supply and support military units committing war crimes, and are they even really war crimes if they’re done against brown people? Are these actors simply following the rules? Is that actually an excuse?

It’s great that the state of New Jersey is now using its powers to try to shut down Delaney Hall. But it’s been operating for more than a year, where was that effort before the hunger and labor strike inside Delaney? As much as the protestors outside Delaney have been derided and vilified, including by Democrats that supposedly want to shut down Delaney, can anyone seriously argue that this action would have taken place without the protests? Because we have over a year of history that would suggest otherwise.

How has the state never challenged the constitutionality of using detainees to do labor within the facility for $1/day? Enslaved labor is unconstitutional isn’t it? Governor Sherrill and AG Davenport mindlessly regurgitated lies from the State Police, ignoring the First Amendment rights of protestors, and our human rights to not be violently assaulted at the hands of our government. Now they’re finally bringing the weight of the state to bear on the actual bad actors, the private prison contractors who are exploiting our neighbors to pad their shareholders’ pockets.

So the credit doesn’t go to Sherrill and Davenport, it goes to those who put their bodies and lives on the line. To those who acted despite being at risk as immigrants, LGBTQIA+, Black people, and women, not just in a Trump Administration, but every day, under every Administration. Because the rules weren’t written by them, so rules are weaponized against them.

Ambiguity, interpretation, discretion, all provide space to shape rules to be useful or ineffective. So we need less rule followers and more rule experts. We need leaders and organizers who read the rules with an eye toward exploiting them, not being exploited by them. We need people willing to stand up and call attention to the rules being applied unequally.

Because everything is a choice. A choice to notice, or ignore. A choice to call it out, or let it slide. A choice to act, or remain silent. The rules won’t save you.

Reading

Governor Mikie Sherrill Is Protecting the Wrong Side at Delaney Hall by Declan

You should read the whole thing. It was tough to pick out just small parts to quote. I don’t know Declan but their writing has been killing it on Delaney Hall.

New Jersey State Police were sent to Delaney Hall in the name of public safety. But when the result is tear gas, rubber bullets, arrests, mounted police, and protesters being pushed farther away from the very gates they came to confront, then whatever the intention was, the mission is failing.

One can argue that it was the wrong decision to ever send in the state police, but once that decision was made, the mission should be to protect the protesters’ First Amendment right to engage in peaceful civil disobedience 24 hours a day against a rogue federal agency operating within New Jersey. The mission should be preventing actual physical harm, not redefining protest, obstruction, and noncompliance as violence. It should be protecting people, not protecting ICE’s ability to move human beings in and out of a facility accused of inhumane conditions without public interference.

…

Protest in the form of active civil disobedience, by their very nature, is conversational. And that predictability matters because police can always claim they were responding to violence. That seems to have happened repeatedly at Delaney Hall. Officials describe dangerous or violent protesters. But journalists, legal observers, advocates, and video evidence have already challenged the accuracy, completeness, or exaggeration of some of those claims.

That is why the standard cannot be “police may escalate when police claim violence.” That standard gives the state permission to justify almost anything after the fact. The standard should be immediate, specific, articulable physical harm. Not refusal to move. Not blocking a gate. Not chanting. Not surrounding. Not delaying. Not shaming ICE or State Police. Not shouting abusive profanities. Not violating the state’s preferred choreography for dissent.

The state cannot create a “First Amendment zone”; the United States is a First Amendment zone. Ordering protesters away from the very place where their protest has meaning, and then calling them violent when they refuse to turn civil disobedience into a managed display, cannot be an excuse to teargas and shoot people with rubber bullets. Refusing to move is not violence. Blocking a gate is not violence. Making ICE’s work more difficult is not violence. It is the point. Peaceful interference with ICE is not a threat to public safety. It is a democratic response to federal abuse.

Governor Mikie Sherrill Is Protecting the Wrong Side at Delaney Hall

At Delaney Hall, Mikie Sherrill is treating protesters as the problem when the real crisis is an out-of-control federal agency operating inside New Jersey.

Motion to dismiss charges against 40 Delaney Hall protesters filed by NJ public defender by Nicolas Fernandes

However, the state Office of the Public Defender argues that many of the criminal complaints contain general information and do not specify the conduct that led to the arrests for each defendant.

“The complaints contain nearly identical, generalized allegations and fail to identify the specific conduct attributed to each individual,” Public Defender Jennifer Sellitti said in a statement. “Based on the information available to us, we contend that the complaints do not provide individualized facts sufficient to support the charges.”

…

Sellitti added that criminal charges must be supported by facts particular to the person accused.

Following the arrests, the protesters were held at Essex County Jail for 24 hours, according to the motion. During that 24-hour period, the defendants were denied access to telephones and legal counsel, the Public Defender’s Office said.

The Fight to Close Delaney Hall Has Reignited the Movement Against ICE by Samuel Karlin

This is exactly why the fight against Delaney Hall has galvanized people across the country, drawing activists from New York, Pennsylvania, and even Minnesota. It is exactly why Sherrill and NJ Attorney General Jennifer Davenport have slandered supporters from other states as “outside agitators” in a desperate effort to isolate New Jerseyans and contain the struggle. And it is exactly why it is essential that those fighting in the state seize the current moment. This requires pursuing a strategy that can build off of the growing attention and solidarity our fight is receiving, and to develop our own collective power independent of the Democrats who are trying to channel our movement back into the safety valves of the courts and the midterm elections.

…

First, we need to learn from Minneapolis how valuable it is when our local struggle becomes an example for the entire country. It bears repeating that Sherrill wouldn’t be coming out so strongly against “outside agitators” if the prospect of this fight reaching beyond New Jersey wasn’t such a serious risk. 

In fact, part of what made the organizing in Jersey so strong in 2021 was that it was led by a coalition of activists from New York and New Jersey who had a strong analysis of how ICE detention centers are used to ramp up operations not just throughout our state, but also in New York and Pennsylvania. Now, as New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians join the fight against Delaney Hall, we have an opportunity to rebuild that cross-state solidarity.

Delaney Hall is located where it is because ICE hopes that its worst abuses will be out of sight and out of mind. But the center’s existence has led to an uptick in ICE activity throughout New Jersey. From our cities to our suburbs, we’ve witnessed agents abduct people off the streets, lurk around our schools, and stomp through our neighborhoods. We also know that immigrants are our neighbors. One in four of all New Jersey residents are immigrants, making us second only to California in having the largest immigrant population of any state. For most people in New Jersey, it is impossible to go about life without at least some form of relationship with immigrants.

The Men Defending Graham Platner in All the Wrong Ways by Alan Elrod

This essay is not about Platner’s fitness, at least not directly. Instead it’s about the conversation around it. In the wake of the cheating story, a certain set of commentators have mocked the idea that cheating and character matter at all. Some have gone so far as to revel in the chance for Democrats to put forward a candidate who flouts perceived liberal prudishness. It’s a display of sexism and hollowness that warrants attention. So, I want to discuss this and the deeply misogynistic way some of Platner defenders have tried to dismiss the scandal and address what this says about the state of our politics.

The Men Defending Graham Platner in All the Wrong Ways

You cannot defeat misogyny by behaving like a misogynist.

We Need a Fourth Branch by Asha Rangappa

And yet, our current structure in the U.S. is simply not sustainable. That has been made crystal clear by <waves hands at everything> but especially with the latest January 6 “slush fund” — the “unitary executive” is, quite simply, incompatible with a theory of checks and balances. A President who is 1) above the law; 2) can hire and fire everyone under him at will; and 3) decide to withhold or spend appropriated funds as he sees fit with no real way to stop him other than impeachment is no longer a “coequal” branch. I mean, if we’re at the point where the President can basically siphon funds directly from the U.S. Treasury (via the Justice Department) into his own pockets, we have to go big or go home.

I know many of you are thinking: But that would require a constitutional amendment! GET REAL, ASHA. Look — I’m not saying this is a short-term fix. But the U.S. has amended the Constitution twenty-seven times in 235 years. Three of those, the Reconstruction amendments, were passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, within a five year period. Four amendments — the 16th through the 19th — were passed between 1913 and 1920. And one of them, the 21st amendment, literally undid a prior amendment (the 18th, Prohibition) thirteen years after it was passed because it was so dumb. My point is, let’s not let the fact that something is hard keep us from imagining what would be best. Put on your Tiger Mom pants and let’s go.

We Need a Fourth Branch

Why our most vital institutions should be placed in a constitutional vault - beyond the reach of any President.

The VRA Was the Nice Version by Gracchus

This isn’t a threat. It’s decision theory. And the people doing that math right now aren’t a base or a constituency to be managed in a slide deck. They’re Americans who’ve been told for generations that the system works if you work it, and who have watched, for those same generations, as the rules got quietly adjusted the second they started winning anything inside them.

We are out of the patience business. Patience is the enemy now. Patience is what people with power ask of people without it, and it gets asked again every time another court ruling or another statute or another “norm” is used to lock the door a little tighter. The Democrat counseling patience, the one saying we can’t break the rules even as the rules are being rewritten against us in real time, is doing the work of the people doing the rewriting.

The VRA Was the Nice Version - by Gracchus

SCOTUS has forced our hands, and now patience is our enemy.

If the FBI Approaches You to Become an Informant in CrimethInc

Federal agents approach you. Perhaps they just ask a couple offhand questions; perhaps they have a deal to propose. They might tell you they are trying to help you; they might tell you that you are in a lot of trouble and it will just get worse unless you cooperate with them; they might tell you that they need your help to prevent something terrible from happening. But whatever they say, you can’t be sure what their real agenda is or what they’re trying to learn. Whether you’ve already been approached for interrogation or you simply want to be prepared for the possibility, this FAQ answers all the questions you might have. Don’t take our word for it—follow up with other  legal scholars for more perspective

CrimethInc. : If the FBI Approaches You to Become an Informant : An FAQ: What You Need to Know

When federal agents approach you, you can’t be sure what their real agenda is or what they hope to learn. Whether you’ve already been approached or you just want to be prepared, read this FAQ.

N.J. filmmaker: We watched ICE agents brutalize protesters at Delaney Hall — then we closed our accounts at this bank. by Paul Barrett and Julie Cohen

There are multiple ways to protest the Trump anti-immigrant agenda, and not all of them require you to show up in person at an ICE detention facility.

You can pressure your local government to refuse to allow ICE to open one of its privately operated jails where you live — a tactic that has succeeded in Kansas City; Oklahoma City; and smaller towns like Merrimack, N.H.; and Roxbury, here in New Jersey.

Or you can target the private prison industry in terms of dollars and cents by boycotting Citizens Bank, [which should not be confused with First Citizens Bank.]