At the first whiff of power, these Republicans betrayed the rule of law 

Every day the Trump regime tramples the rule of law makes Americans less free and less safe. 

Every day the president defies the Constitution and courts makes America less America.  

President Trump is increasingly acting like a king or dictator who rules by decree, and whose decree is all it takes to make someone disappear. 

That’s now happening here, and with the full support of people like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has long portrayed himself and the Republican Party as advocates for the rule of law.

“Ours is ‘a government of laws and not of men,’ and the rule of law is our foundation,” says Johnson’s website. 

That’s fine to say, but where is Johnson when Trump sends hundreds of people, mostly without criminal records, to a foreign concentration camp, with no trial and no opportunity to prove their innocence?

Where is Johnson’s professed reverence for the rule of law when Trump and other MAGA-supporting officials mockingly defy the courts and evade a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that the administration must facilitate the return of a man the courts have ruled, and Trump’s team admitted, was wrongly included in one of the trafficking flights to a brutal gulag in El Salvador?

For someone who says God raised him into leadership to be a “Moses” for America, Johnson does not show any inclination to challenge our own heart-hardened pharaoh.

Of course, Johnson isn’t the only one who talks about freedom and the rule of law while undermining both.  

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has a long record of denouncing dictatorial behavior by the late Fidel Castro, but Rubio is now helping lead a brutally anti-freedom campaign in the U.S. With a stroke of Rubio’s pen, foreign students legally studying in the U.S. have been declared unwelcome, abducted from the streets, thrown into detention and threatened with deportation — all for having expressed opinions Rubio disagrees with. That’s not freedom, it’s fascism. 

Meanwhile, constitutional lawyer and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who denounced the 2023 indictment of Trump as a sign of “dictatorship,” tweeted in March, “Alien gang members aren’t entitled to due process — the Trump administration rightly deported them.” 

In fact, Cruz declared flat-out on national television that “due process does not protect foreign nationals.” Years of Supreme Court rulings, including a 9-0 ruling this month, say that Cruz is wrong.

The Trump regime didn’t give any of the people it hustled onto planes a chance to challenge the regime’s claims or prove their innocence. That’s what due process is all about.  

Due process is not just some abstract legal principle. It is at the heart of individual freedom and the rule of law. As journalist Garrett Graff recently wrote, “due process is civilization.”  

In fact, Trump and his allies loudly advocated for due process in his criminal cases, and he used every bit of it to delay being held accountable for breaking the law. As Graff noted, the same Trump is “now the one seeking to rob the rest of us of that tradition and protection.” 

We should all be alarmed at Trump’s expressed desire to send Americans into the concentration camps run by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, Trump’s buddy and self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator.”  

We should all be alarmed that Vice President JD Vance puts scare quotes around the phrase “due process,” as if due process were a legal fiction and not a foundation of our constitutional rights.  

And we should all be alarmed that Trump’s counterterrorism chief Sebastian Gorka is warning that people defending due process rights of people sent to nightmarish imprisonment in El Salvador should be prosecuted for “aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists.”  

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals recently criticized the Trump regime for “asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.”  

Trump’s claim, in defiance of a unanimous Supreme Court, that he can’t do anything to return a man he admits was wrongly shipped off to a gulag in El Salvador “should be shocking” to Americans’ “intuitive sense of liberty,” the judges wrote.  

And yes, it should be shocking to every Republican elected official who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and who declares their support for the rule of law.  

Sadly, what is no longer shocking is to see Trump-fearing Republicans rally around even his most unconstitutional and undemocratic actions. It is what we have come to expect from them. It is why we must resist them with our voices and replace them with our votes.

Svante Myrick is president of People For the American Way.