I mean, you do realize people don’t have to write a letter that says “let’s break the law together.” People in the 19th century were capable of waltzing over to the hermitage, chatting in a backroom, and leaving with an “understanding”.

The Georgia officials took their actions with the accurate perception that the federal government would choose not to enforce federal law. And they were right, and AJ was the person who happened to not be enforcing the law. He doesn’t have to write down on a piece of paper that he didn’t enforce the law, we see that he didn’t.

I really do appreciate your excellent summary of events, and it is interesting to frame it as Georgia ignoring the Supreme Courts ruling rather than Jackson, but I wonder to what extent Georgia ignored the Supreme Court ruling with Jackson’s blessing. You could argue that it is really Pam Bondi ignoring court orders, and not Trump, but, of course, Trump could tell Pam Bondi (or whoever) to stop ignoring court orders. In theory the executive branch’s role is to enforce the orders of the court, and, by making it clear to Georgia that he had no intention of enforcing court orders, this could have enabled the state government to continue on in illegal activities that, if the rule of law were followed, should not have happened.

You clearly know more about this than me, so I’m not trying to argue, but the failure of the rule of law is obviously always a collective failure, and many many people enable it, and it still seems fair to me to pin some of the blame on AJ, though obviously not as much as I was implying.

Right! It’s like when the Supreme Court told Andy Jackson that he couldn’t just forcibly deport Cherokee from their peaceful and prosperous farming communities. He just ignored the law, and brought generational shame to the US government. In a surprisingly close parallel it turns out that DJT can do the same thing, except this time even the Supreme Court doesn’t want him to follow the law. Strange times.

It’s relatively common for lawyers to say something like “we would never do X, but even if we did X, that would not have been illegal”. In this case X is deporting Abrego García against a court order. You will note that the DOJ also claimed to be unable to bring him back, yet, somehow, magically, after they are threatened with sanctions they were able to bring him back. Weird how that happens.

So it is obvious to anyone that the DOJ is lying. It should be obvious to the SCOTUS that the DOJ is lying, but, and this is in a case unrelated to Abrego García, Gorsuch and Roberts get all testy when you say that the Solicitor General, who is lying, happens to be lying. As I said, rule of law isn’t doing well right now.

They also lied and said they didn’t defy a court order. Did you miss that part?

Well. They didn’t though. In court they say that they don’t, they wouldn’t, and would never dream of defying court orders.

It’s just, you know, the Trump DOJ lies to the court. And, some judges are okay with the legal system lying about stuff. It’s a weird position to take, to say, “sure, you planted some evidence, but he was guilty anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.” Most judges, classically, have been in favor of something called the rule of law. Tump doesn’t like the rule of law, the Trump DOJ doesn’t like the rule of law, and now Trump is putting judges on the federal circuit who don’t like the rule of law. It’s not entirely clear that even the SCOTUS cares that much about rule of law right now. As they say “stare decisis is for suckers” or “we don’t care how the law worked yesterday day, we don’t care how the law works tomorrow, this is what we want to happen right now, we put it to a vote, and it’s totally what is going to happen.”

Well, unfortunately Trump and Republicans ARE the US right now, meaning they get to decide what the US goverment does, because they control the US goverment. Unfortunately the US isn’t just the US when it does what you support. As much as we both know wish this wasn’t happening.