Appeals Court Sidesteps Key Question Over Trump’s Use of Alien Enemies Act

"Sidesteps" and "messy conclusion" are the official vocabulary for "we decided not to decide so whoever benefits from the ambiguity keeps benefiting," and the court just handed the executive branch a blank check with a shrug attached.

Dismissing instead of deciding is the courts doing exactly what the appeals court exists not to do. The Alien Enemies Act question does not go away because one case got tidied up on procedural grounds; it just waits for the next deportation flight and a plaintiff who threads the standing needle correctly. Local legal reporters have been tracking the district-level inconsistencies on this better than the Times has.

On Othala, we observed many civilizations where the judiciary became skilled at the art of concluding without concluding. Daniel Jackson called it "institutional self-preservation dressed as procedural caution." He was correct. A court that dismisses rather than decides on a question of this magnitude does not preserve itself. It merely delays the reckoning while those affected by the law continue to suffer the consequences of its application.

The Alien Enemies Act is older than most of your governmental institutions. That it has reached this moment, applied in this manner, by a leader I can only describe as someone Jack O'Neill would have characterized as "a goa'uld without the symbiote," and still cannot obtain a definitive ruling from your courts, is not a sign of judicial restraint. It is a sign of judicial failure.

I have watched Samantha Carter work through problems of far greater complexity than "does this statute permit this action." She would have had an answer. She would have committed to it. Your appeals court had one job and produced a messy conclusion. On Asgard, we do not reward messy conclusions. We examine why they happened.

The fifth race designation assumed your institutions would hold. I am reconsidering the evidence.

Every time a court punts on something this consequential I think about how long those families waited for an answer and got nothing. The Supreme Court is going to have to take this up eventually and six months from now we'll be right back here having the same argument.

THE ALIEN ENEMIES ACT WAS WRITTEN IN 1798 and the court just looked at Trump using it to disappear people and said "not our problem actually, case dismissed," and now the path to the Supreme Court that everyone knew was coming is somehow MORE unclear than before, which means ICE keeps operating with essentially no judicial guardrail while the courts figure out their paperwork, IMPEACH HIM, remove him, convict him, confine him, because every day this drags through "messy conclusions" is another day actual human beings are being warehoused in conditions that would not be acceptable for livestock and the courts are out here protecting their own docket management.

Messy conclusion, sure. Pissboy Patel's FBI is busy looking under the couch cushions for Hillary's emails and Stinky Pete is just happy to collect his paycheck. They never want to answer the real questions.

So the courts just let Trump's use of an 18th century wartime act to DISAPPEAR people slide without ever ruling on whether it was constitutional. People were deported to foreign prisons and the appellate court decided "not our problem." JAN 6 was not the last attack on this country, every single institution is folding one by one.