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      In Canada, I saw how Trump is ripping North America apart – and how hard its bond will be to repair | Andy Beckett

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      As wealthy but lightly defended countries have often learned, being close to a much more powerful state – geographically or diplomatically – can be a precarious existence. All it takes is an aggressive new government in the stronger state and a relatively equal relationship of economic and military cooperation can suddenly turn exploitative, even threatening.Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, this realisation has been dawning across the west, but nowhere more disconcertingly than in Canada. Its border with the US is the longest in the world: 5,525 miles of often empty and hard to defend land, lakes and rivers. Canada’s two biggest cities, Toronto and Montreal, are only a few hours to the north, were you to approach them in a US army tank.Earlier this month, I spent a week in some of this particularly vulnerable stretch of Ontario and Quebec, visiting my daughter at university and encountering a new, more anxious Canada. At times, as the trains I took crawled along the congested trans-Canadian rail corridor, the roofs of individual American buildings were visible, glinting in the cold sun across the border. The feeling of being a foreigner in a tense, contested place reminded me of when I lived in West Germany, near the East German border, during the early 1980s, one of the most fraught phases of the cold war.Until Trump started talking so insistently about making Canada his country’s “51st state”, that would have been an absurd comparison. But not any more. “The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country,” said the new Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, in his first speech as Liberal leader. “If they succeed, they will destroy our way of life.” Supposedly one of the most harmonious – and strategically important – relationships between rich western countries appears to have changed radically.The Canadians I spoke to, in shops, at bus stops and stations, at home and by email, were generally less dramatic about the situation than Carney, who has a reputation as a leader to establish, and now an election to win next month. There was some anger at the US – and at Britain’s failure to condemn Trump’s threats against a Commonwealth country. “The king is proud to align himself with a despot for … a dangled trade agreement,” a Montreal academic told me, referring to King Charles’s recent invitation to Trump to make a second state visit to Britain. “A bold response from us in Canada would be to cut our ties with the monarchy.”More often, however, people shook their heads or rolled their eyes at Trump’s behaviour. He was crazy, chaotic, totally inconsistent, people told me – not like a steady and realistic Canadian, they implied. There were satisfied smiles at the tariff-driven slide in the US stock market. And yet, people also said, Trump’s threats meant that Canadian life would have to change profoundly. Though what those changes might be was a topic they generally avoided – except for a baker in Montreal, who sold me some sourdough while we discussed whether Canada would need to get nuclear weapons.Relations between America and Canada have not always been peaceful. The US invaded Canada in 1775 and 1812, without success. During the 1920s and 1930s it drew up a more hypothetical invasion scheme, War Plan Red. In fundamental ways, fear of the US shaped Canada, encouraging its unification out of what had originally been disparate territories, and also the decision to site its capital in Ottawa, further from the border than its other eastern cities.As in Britain, in the mid-20th century the Canadian state sought to create what it called a “special relationship” with the US. Canada’s export-oriented economy – necessary because of the country’s relatively small and scattered population – got access to US markets. US businesses got access to prosperous Canadian consumers, often close to America’s manufacturing heartlands. During the cold war, both countries saw Canada as a key place to build defences against Russian attack.With Trump seemingly much closer to Moscow than Ottawa, that North American alliance may in effect be dead. By area, Canada is the world’s second-biggest country after Russia, but its armed forces are tiny, about half the size of Britain’s. The feeling that Canada has been abandoned militarily by the US possibly explains the huge “Fuck Trump” flag I saw flying from the back of a pickup truck in the usually polite city of Kingston, Ontario, home of the Royal Military College of Canada.Economic ties will take longer to unravel. There were still California carrots on Montreal supermarket shelves, and my trains were passed by endless goods wagons from the famous old American freight company Union Pacific. Yet the number of Canadians visiting the US is already plummeting: last month it was as low as during the latter stages of the pandemic. In this, as in much else, Canada may be an early adopter of new habits regarding the US which then spread across what is left of the liberal west. For left-leaning foreigners, Americana and American places may lose much of their appeal, because the US has been made so authoritarian and hostile to outsiders by such a quintessentially American figure.Canada is self-consciously following another path. “Canada is a mosaic,” says Carney, and pro-diversity messages pour out of its government and businesses, as if calculated to wind up US conservatives. As well as vast, increasingly coveted supplies of water and minerals, Canada – despite its considerable inequalities and very heavy per capita carbon footprint – offers an increasingly different model of how to live on the North American continent.Will Trump or any hard-right successors in the White House allow this provocation to continue? Another US invasion may not actually be imminent. Trump already has too many ambitious policy goals. Conquering, let alone occupying, as enormous and physically extreme a country as Canada would be an intimidating prospect even for the fantasy-driven Republicans.Yet it’s equally hard to imagine US-Canadian relations returning quickly to their former state. Too many imbalances and contrasts between the countries have been pointed out, too many threats offered. Trust has been lost. Political careers are being made on both sides by acting tough towards the neighbouring government.Canadians are less known than Americans for flying the flag, but there were a lot of them fluttering along the border this month. It may be many years before they come down.

      Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump’s imperial plan is now eroding the rights of people who thought they were safe | Nesrine Malik

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      The imperial boomerang effect is the theory that techniques developed to repress colonised territories and peoples will, in time, inevitably be deployed at home. Repressive policing, methods of detention and controlling dissent, forcing humans to produce goods and services for overlords in the metropolis, or even mass enslavement and killing: all “boomerang” back into that metropolis. First, they are used against those who are seen as inferior; then, they are deployed even against those citizens with full rights and privileges if they dare to question authority. In short, the remote other eventually becomes the intimate familiar.Donald Trump’s second term has so far been a case study in how systems built for those whose rights have been diluted or taken away eventually devour those who were assumed to be safe from such violations. There are three ways in which this process of rebounding happens. The first is through the creation of a domestic caste system that mirrors the one outside a country’s borders, as demonstrated in the recent treatment of those foreigners with permanent US residency and valid work visas who expressed dissenting views on Gaza.Under Trump, their actions meet a threshold of insubordination that justifies their arrest, detention and deportation. The human rights of those individuals, such as due process, are cancelled. In allying themselves with Palestinians and against US foreign policy, they are demoted to the level of those Palestinians in their treatment by the US government. The tenuousness of permanent residency, valid work visas, green cards, marriage to US citizens and parenthood to American children starts to become clear. These are all conditional rights that can be stripped away if, in your alliances and solidarities, you identify yourself as a subject of American power. You mark yourself out as a citizen of the periphery daring to ask for the rights of the citizens of the core.Trump’s invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act is an almost too-on-the-nose demonstration of that two-tier system. Laws that were designed centuries ago, and have only been used to create legal vacuums on US soil in order to detain foreigners, create a second class of human. Franklin Roosevelt relied on the act to create domestic internment camps during the second world war, in which more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent were detained. Another order that he issued, and that mandated the internment of US citizens, was only overturned in 2018. If it had not been, Trump would no doubt be using the law to extend arrests and detentions to US citizens for their political opinions as well.That legal infrastructure, no matter how dormant, is always open to reactivation and capture. A similar process unfolds within the workings of an immigration complex that is already opaque and reflexively punitive. The second rebound mechanism is via this sort of infrastructure. The US immigration system is a vast enterprise of bureaucracy, employment, detention centres and private companies that channels and imprisons immigrants. It is also a system that, even before Trump, was one of legal sinkholes and almost infinite licence. Border guards have the final decision-making authority on whether you enter the US, no matter what visa you are issued from an embassy abroad; customs agents have the right to search devices; and, if you are detained and deported, that whole process can happen without you being given access to a lawyer or standing before a judge. Detention for many is a state of extended limbo.Combine a system so large with a regime that enables it while weakening the judicial and legal proceedings that act as a check on its worst impulses, and you have a recipe for overreach and impunity. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that gave even more power to border officials to “identify all resources that may be used to ensure that all aliens seeking admission to the United States, or who are already in the United States, are vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible”. With increased deportations of undocumented migrants being a flagship policy of Trump’s campaign, and the empowerment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to achieve that end, a practical and political dragnet has been cast so wide that it’s catching a lot more than intended. It is no longer only those whose skin colour, paperwork or political opinions throw them into uncertainty.Over the past few weeks, German tourists were arrested when they tried to enter the US entirely legally through the southern border, and detained for weeks before being deported. Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian citizen with a work visa, was arrested and detained for two weeks but told to “mentally prepare” herself for “months”. A French scientist was denied entry to the US when his phone was searched and messages critical of Trump were found. Those who have been added to the immigration detention prison population, from Mooney to Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder and recent graduate of Columbia University, testify to the state of detainees they met there. “Justice,” Khalil wrote from detention, “escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.”Which brings us to the third way in which the boomerang effect takes place – through the erosion of norms and standards, a cannibalisation of the very political systems meant to govern and protect those at the centre. On 18 March, Trump called for the impeachment of a federal judge who issued a temporary ban on deportations as ordered by the administration. The confrontation between Trump and the judiciary has precipitated a constitutional crisis that is shaking the foundations of US politics. The system of checks and balances – the equality of the legislative, executive and judicial branches under the constitution – is threatened by Trump’s open defiance and desired subjugation of all to the executive office. This is against a backdrop of the limiting of academic freedom, the violation of the first amendment, and a disregard for the US constitution described by experts as a “blitzkrieg on the law”.In this, there is something that can be seen everywhere in regimes that either have or crave absolute power. In order to seize authority and run a whole country according to the interests of a sovereign, more and more parties must be disenfranchised and repressed. The imperial form of governance is the prototype of what is required to exert control in the presence of mass dissent. But all political systems with large components that subdue a significant portion of the population cannot continue without those components overtaking the entire machine. It is a simple, almost elegant fact; something like a law of nature. But a nation that withholds its best ideals from some will end up losing them for all.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

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      A French university is offering ‘scientific asylum’ for US talent. The brain drain has started | Alexander Hurst

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      In six weeks, the Trump administration’s “rapid scheduled disassembly” of American science has been as sharp and deep as its trashing of the US’s alliances and goodwill; Earth science, weather forecasting and early warning systems, medical research (including cancer research), Nasa. Academic grants more broadly have been cut, paused and subject to review for a long list of banned words (including such contentious terms as “political” and “women”).This has caused universities across the country to reduce their intake of PhD students, medical students and other graduate students, introduce hiring freezes and even rescind some offers of admission. More than 12,500 US citizens currently in other countries on Fulbright research grants recently had their funding paused, along with 7,400 foreign scholars currently hosted in the US, leaving them financially stranded. And, when it came to one foreign academic visiting the US, detaining them and refusing them entry.Even more worryingly, the administration is specifically targeting some universities, including pulling $400m in funding from Columbia University, and $800m from Johns Hopkins, forcing it to lay off 2,000 people. Furthermore, the legally dubious arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, and the cancelling of his green card, is sure to have a chilling effect on foreign students and researchers already in the US – and on the desire of others to go there in the future. As Christina Pagel, a German-British professor at University College London, writes: “This isn’t chaos.” Instead, the attacks on research appear to follow a three-pronged objective: to forcibly align science with state ideology; undermine academic independence and suppress dissent; and maintain geopolitical and economic goals.The Saturn V rockets that took US astronauts to space – and eventually the moon – in the 1960s owed their existence to Operation Paperclip, which brought 1,500 former Nazi scientists (such as Wernher von Braun, the former director of Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center) to the US. In the week after Donald Trump’s election, I wondered whether the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas may inadvertently get his wish (of a Europe that unified through opposition to the US) and suggested that Europe position itself to reverse the decades-long transatlantic brain drain by welcoming highly educated American researchers and scientists who were sure to find themselves under attack. This time, there is no moral quandary about it, no Nazi pasts to ignore; only as much advantage to be gained as can be in a world where the EU must hold the ground for liberal democratic society, joined by Canada to the west, and Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand to the east.To some extent, EU governments and institutions are already picking up on the opportunity. For example, on 7 March, the University of Aix-Marseille announced Safe Place for Science, a three-year, €15m programme to bring 15 American scientists working in climate, health and astrophysics to its campus. According to a university spokesperson, more than 60 applications have been received, 30 of them coming within the first 24 hours. The university indicated that it has been in contact with other universities and the French government about expanding “scientific asylum” on both a national and European level, and to help coordinate welcoming and relocating different researchers.US federal government spending on all research and development (R&D) totalled roughly $195bn in 2024. That sounds imposing, but let’s put it into greater context. As of 2023, US GDP was $27.7tn and EU GDP was $26.5tn, when adjusted for purchasing power parity. Taken as a whole, both polities are roughly the same economic size. Let’s imagine that the EU were to put real money on the table to lure science of all kinds out of the US and to the continent. It wouldn’t need to match $195bn, euro for dollar, in part because more than half the US total is defence R&D, and the EU is already boosting defence spending … bigly. So, say it just picked a bold, round number that lends itself well to narrative, storytelling and headlines, and is enough to rope in the cuts happening in the US.A sum of €25bn a year would represent just under 0.1% of the EU’s GDP, and even less if the UK, Norway and Switzerland (all of which participate in the Horizon Europe research funding programme) were included. As it is, R&D spending in the EU lags behind the US – and a report ordered by the European Commission’s research department recently recommended more than doubling Horizon Europe’s €95bn, seven-year budget. What I’m suggesting goes further, yes. But not only is it well within the EU’s ability to afford, it would ultimately pay for itself: research found that non-defence R&D spending returned 200% for the US during the postwar period.But let me push the boundary of fantastical again, and suggest that the EU may lure not just American researchers, but American universities themselves. According to the Cross Border Education Research Team, US universities maintain 29 actual campuses in Europe (and far more if you include “centres” and study abroad programmes). There are dozens of American colleges and universities with enormous endowments that regularly splash out hundreds of millions of dollars at a time on new buildings. If US crackdowns (like the recent demands made of Columbia) on academic freedom, funding, and foreign students and faculties become more frequent, they may find the idea of second campuses in Europe tempting indeed.

      Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist

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      Trump news at a glance: reports of IRS data deal spark fears for undocumented migrant workers

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      The US Internal Revenue Service is reportedly nearing a deal to allow immigration officials to use tax data to support Donald Trump’s deportation agenda.Under the proposed data-sharing agreement, said to have been in negotiations for weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) could hand over the names and addresses of undocumented immigrants to the IRS, raising concerns about abuse of power from the Trump administration and the erosion of privacy rights.If access to this confidential database is agreed on, it would mark a significant shift, likely becoming the first time immigration officials have relied on the tax system for enforcement assistance in such a sweeping way.Under the agreement, the IRS would cross-reference names of undocumented immigrants with their confidential taxpayer databases, a move that would breach the long-standing trust in the confidentiality of tax information. Such data has historically been considered sensitive and thereby closely guarded, so the reported deal has raised alarm bells at the IRS, according to the Washington Post.Here are the key US politics story from Sunday:IRS nears deal with Ice to share data of undocumented immigrants – reportsThe potential shift in taxpayer data use, from once being used to rarely build criminal cases to now reportedly becoming instrumental in enforcing criminal penalties, aligns with many of the more aggressive immigration policies Trump is pursuing.Read the full storyAnger in Greenland over visits this week by Usha Vance and Mike WaltzUsha Vance, the wife of US vice-president JD Vance, will travel to Greenland this week as President Donald Trump clings to the idea of the US annexing the strategic, semi-autonomous Danish territory.Vance will visit Greenland on Thursday with a US delegation to tour historical sites, learn about the territory’s heritage and attend the national dogsled race, the White House said in a statement.Read the full story‘I’m not stepping down’: Chuck Schumer defies Democrats’ calls over funding billChuck Schumer rejected calls to give up the top Democratic position in the Senate after he voted for Republicans’ funding bill to avoid a government shutdown, saying on Sunday: “I’m not stepping down.”Schumer has faced a wave of backlash from Democrats over his decision to support the Republican-led bill, with many Democrats alleging that the party leader isn’t doing enough to stand up to Donald Trump’s agenda.Read the full storyBernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the courage to brawl for the working classBernie Sanders is not running for president. But he is drawing larger crowds now than he did when he was campaigning for the White House.The message has hardly changed. Nor has the messenger, with his shock of white hair and booming delivery. What’s different now, the senator says, is that his fears – a government captured by billionaires who exploit working people – have become an undeniable reality and people are angry.Read the full storyTrump’s defiance of court orders is ‘testing the fences’ of the rule of lawDonald Trump’s second administration has shown an “unprecedented degree of resistance” to adverse court rulings, experts say, as part of a forceful attack on the American judiciary which threatens to undermine the rule of law, undercut a co-equal branch of government and weaken American democracy.Read the full storyThe Trump administration is descending into authoritarianismTrump’s breach of the justice department’s traditional independence last week was neither shocking nor surprising. His speech quickly faded from the fast and furious news cycle. But future historians may regard it as a milestone on a road leading the world’s oldest continuous democracy to a once unthinkable destination.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Three major wildfires that broke out in one North Carolina county still recovering from Hurricane Helene have exploded to burn more than 3,000 acres combined as South Carolina’s governor declared an emergency in response to a growing wildfire in the Blue Ridge mountains.

      Bald eagle that went viral for incubating a rock dies after fierce storms in Missouri. Murphy, who lived to 33, took in the rock in 2023 and tried to hatch it, captivating hearts, and later fostered two eaglets.

      Luigi Mangione lawyer says arrest flaws invalidate evidence – but will it work? Pennsylvania attorney for suspect in UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson shooting claims police violated his client’s constitutional rights in arrest. More

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      IRS nears deal with Ice to share data of undocumented immigrants – report

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      The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is reportedly nearing a deal to allow immigration officials to use tax data to support Donald Trump’s deportation agenda, according to reports by the Washington Post.Under the proposed data-sharing agreement, said to have been in negotiations for weeks, Immigration And Customs Enforcement (Ice) could hand over the names and addresses of undocumented immigrants to the IRS, raising concerns about abuse of power from the Trump administration and the erosion of privacy rights.If access to this confidential database is agreed upon, it would mark a significant shift, likely becoming the first time immigration officials have relied on the tax system for enforcement assistance in such a sweeping way.Under the agreement, the IRS would cross-reference names of undocumented immigrants with their confidential taxpayer databases, a move that would breach the long-standing trust in the confidentiality of tax information. Such data has historically been considered sensitive and thereby closely guarded, so the reported deal has raised alarm bells at the IRS, according to the Washington Post.The IRS website says that undocumented immigrants “are subject to US taxes despite their illegal status”, and because most are unable to get social security numbers, the agency allows them to file with individual taxpayer numbers, known as ITINs. The agency also subjects them to the same reporting and withholding obligations as it does to US citizens who receive the same kind of income. More than half of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US file income tax returns to document their payments to the government.While the IRS mandates that taxpayer information is protected, section 6103 on the agency’s website outlines that “under court order, return information may be shared with law enforcement agencies for investigation and prosecution of non-tax criminal laws.” However, sources familiar with the matter told the Washington Post that it would be rare for these privacy law exceptions to be weaponized for cooperation with immigration enforcement and that this is outside of standard procedure.The potential shift in taxpayer data use, from once being used to rarely build criminal cases to now reportedly becoming instrumental in enforcing criminal penalties, aligns with many of the more aggressive immigration policies Trump is pursuing.During his campaign, Trump promised to deport millions of undocumented people in the US, and the reports of this new deal shine a light on how he is planning on doing so. Since becoming president, he has ended legal pathways for immigrants to come and stay in the US.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Friday they would revoke the temporary legal status of more than 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicararguans and Venezuelans, and Ice raids and enforcement operations have been commonplace in major cities across the US – like Chicago and New York – with high immigrant populations.And on Sunday, members of the Trump administration defended using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law, to deport the 137 Venezuelan migrants last weekend on the grounds that they were committing violent crimes and sending money back to Venezuela. The administration deported the migrants despite a judge’s verbal orders telling them not to do so.The border czar Tom Homan said in an interview with ABC News that the administration would not defy court orders stemming from legal challenges over its invocation of the wartime Alien Enemies Act to deport the alleged Venezuelan gang members.“I don’t care what the judges think as far as this case,” Homan told ABC, referring to a federal judge’s efforts to determine whether the administration already ignored an earlier order to temporarily halt deportations.The attorney general, Pam Bondi, also addressed the deportations in an interview with Fox News on Sunday, calling the fight against the alleged gang members was akin to “modern day warfare”. More

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      ‘I’m not stepping down’: Chuck Schumer defies Democrats’ calls over funding bill

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      Chuck Schumer defied calls to give up the top Democratic position in the Senate after he voted for Republicans’ funding bill to avoid a government shutdown, saying on Sunday: “I’m not stepping down.”Schumer has faced a wave of backlash from Democrats over his decision to support the Republican-led bill, with many Democrats alleging that the party leader isn’t doing enough to stand up to Donald Trump’s agenda.Explaining his decision during an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Schumer said: “I knew when I cast my vote against … the government shutdown … that there would be a lot of controversy.” He said that the funding bill “was certainly bad”, but maintained that a shutdown would have been 15 or 20 times worse.Schumer has argued that billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) would have used a shutdown to “eviscerate the federal government”, which he said would have been “devastating”.Schumer, describing his decision as a “vote of principle”, went on to say that as a leader: “You have to do things to avoid a real danger that might come down the curve. And I did it out of pure conviction as to what a leader should do and what the right thing for America and my party was. People disagree.”In response to whether he believes he is making the same mistake as Joe Biden did last year when he refused to move aside to allow for new Democratic leadership, Schumer said: “No, absolutely not,” adding, “Our caucus is united in fighting Donald Trump every step of the way. Our goal, our plan, which we’re united on, is to make Donald Trump the quickest lame duck in modern history by showing how bad his policies are.”Schumer’s latest pushback against calls for his resignation comes after Maryland representative Glenn Ivey became the first Democratic lawmaker this week to publicly call for Schumer’s resignation.Speaking to constituents at a town hall earlier this week, Ivey said: “I respect Chuck Schumer. I think he had a great career … But it may be time for Senate Democrats to get a new leader.”Meanwhile, the New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized what she called an “acquiesce” by Schumer to the Republican-led bill after almost every single Democrat in the House voted against the Republican spending bill.“There are members of Congress who have won Trump-held districts in some of the most difficult territory in the United States who walked the plank and took innumerable risks in order to defend the American people,” she said.” Just to see Senate Democrats even consider acquiescing to Elon Musk, I think, is a huge slap in the face.” More

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      Arizona’s execution pitted experts against politicians. Experts lost | Austin Sarat

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      On Wednesday, 19 March, Arizona executed Aaron Gunches by lethal injection. As ABC News reports, he was put to death for “kidnapping and killing 40-year-old Ted Price by shooting him four times in the Arizona desert”.Gunches’s case was unusual in many ways, not least that he stopped his legal appeals and volunteered to be executed, then changed his mind before changing it again. His execution was scheduled to be carried out almost two years ago. It was put on hold when the Arizona governor, Katie Hobbs, commissioned an independent review of the state’s death penalty procedures after a series of botched executions.But over the last several months, she pushed hard to make sure Gunches died for his crime. She even fired the expert retired Judge David Duncan who she had chosen to do that review, before he could complete his report.Her decision to let Duncan go was shocking. At the time, she offered the following explanation: “Your review has, unfortunately, faced repeated challenges, and I no longer have confidence that I will receive a report from you that will accomplish the purpose and goals of the Executive Order that I issued nearly two years ago.”The governor also noted that the department of corrections, rehabilitation & reentry had conduct “a comprehensive review of prior executions and has made significant revisions to its policies and procedures”. But doubt about whether she could rely on a review conducted by the group which is in charge of the state’s executions in why she appointed Duncan in the first place.That is why I suspect that Hobbs tossed Duncan aside because she didn’t like the facts he was finding or the conclusions he seemed to be reaching.Facts are stubborn things, but, in our era, they can be tossed aside with little political cost and no regret. Why rely on expertise if it gets in the way of achieving a result you want to reach?Still, Hobbs’s unprecedented decision to “kill the messenger” was another low moment for a society increasing living by a line uttered by a newspaper editor in the classic movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”In the world of capital punishment, the “legend” to which politicians like Hobbs are attached is that it can make America a safer and more just place. They want us to believe that they embrace the death penalty to bring closure to family members of murder victims rather than to accrue political capital.Note what Arizona attorney general Kris Mayes said during a news conference following the execution: “An execution is the most serious action that the state takes, and I assure you that it is not taken lightly. Today, Arizona resumed the death penalty, and justice for Ted Price and his family was finally served.”After Gunches’s death, the sister of the man he murdered echoed that sentiment. Karen Price called the execution “the final chapter in a process that has spanned nearly 23 years”.Ted Price’s daughter added that Gunches’s death means that she will no longer have to revisit “the circumstances surrounding my father’s death” as she had to for over two decades of seemingly endless legal proceedings. “Today,” she said, “marks the end of that painful chapter, and I couldn’t be more grateful”.That chapter would not have ended if Governor Hobbs had been willing to listen to her own expert.Before being sacked, Judge Duncan prepared a draft of his report and wrote a letter to the governor’s office previewing his conclusions. He called lethal injection an unreliable method of execution and said: “Drug manufacturers don’t allow states to use the appropriate drugs.”Duncan had spent nearly two years reviewing Arizona’s use of lethal injections. As he explained, “Early on, I thought lethal injection would work. The more I learned about it I learned that that was a false hope.”Duncan told the governor that, in his view, using lethal injection was too risky. In his view, the best course would be for Arizona to adopt the firing squad because “it has the lowest botch rate.”That was not the news Hobbs hoped her expert would deliver, so she let Duncan go. It seems he just didn’t understand that she wanted him to ease the way toward a resumption of lethal injection executions rather than suggesting that the state should not execute anyone until it could adopt what he considered to be a better method.And Duncan was not the only one raising questions about Arizona’s resumption of lethal injection executions. Last January, law professor Corinna Lain, a leading expert on lethal injection, said: “The evidence is overwhelming that Arizona cannot lawfully carry out an execution by lethal injection at this time. Its pentobarbital protocol is sure or very likely to cause a tortuous death even in the best of circumstances.”She went on to say: “The circumstances here are far from optimal. The State is on the cusp of using an inexperienced, untrained team to inject likely expired drugs stored in unmarked mason jars that were produced by a company that does not make drugs for human consumption and that will be compounded by a pharmacy that the … (the state) itself has previously disavowed.”Disregarding expert knowledge is very much in fashion in many areas of American life, not just where the death penalty is concerned. The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols explains that “Trump allies make noises about expert failures … [and] demonize what its constituents believe was the medical establishment’s attempt to curtail civil rights during the coronavirus pandemic.” He argues that Elon Musk’s attack on civil servants is really an attack on the “very notion of apolitical expertise.”But, as Nichols explains, such doubt is not confined to Washington DC. It is found in the “homes of ordinary American families”. There, “knowledge of every kind is also under attack. Parents argue with their child’s doctor over the safety of vaccines. Famous athletes speculate that the world might actually be flat. College administrators ponder dropping algebra from the curriculum because students keep failing it.”So, it is not surprising that the attack on knowledge would infect decisions about how to end the lives of people condemned to death. Political leaders – including Democrats like Hobbs – know they can play into the burgeoning culture of disrespect for what experts have to say, so they dispense with Duncan and ignore Lain.The more publicly they display that disrespect, the more politically they can benefit.It wasn’t always this way when decisions had to be made about methods of execution. At the end of the 19th century, before New York decided to abandon hanging, the state convened a commission to consider and recommend alternatives.That commission sought out the best minds to help them make their decision. It chose the electric chair.The decision whether electrocution “would be by Alternating Current (AC) or Direct Current (DC)” was informed by a competition between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, both pioneers in the development of electricity.That was then. Today, as the Arizona example shows, such expertise does not govern the choice of execution methods.In the wake of the Gunches execution, Governor Hobbs and the “down with experts crowd” may feel vindicated because nothing seemed to have gone awry. But they should not rest easy, and neither should any of the 112 inmates on Arizona’s death row.Studies have shown that lethal injection has the worst track record of any method of execution used in the last century in this country. That is why it is only a matter of time before an execution in Arizona proves the folly of ignoring experts and the insights they offer. More

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      Trump’s defiance of court orders is ‘testing the fences’ of the rule of law

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      Donald Trump’s second administration has shown an “unprecedented degree of resistance” to adverse court rulings, experts say, part of a forceful attack on the American judiciary that threatens to undermine the rule of law, undercut a co-equal branch of government and weaken American democracy.The attacks, experts say, threaten one of the fundamental pillars of American government: that the judicial branch has the power to interpret the law and the other branches will abide by its rulings.The attack came to a head this week when the Trump administration ignored an order from US district judge James Boasberg to turn planes carrying deportees around. “I don’t care what the judges think,” Thomas Homan, charged with enforcing Trump’s deportation agenda, said in a Fox News television interview on Monday as the decision came under scrutiny. The next day, Trump called for Boasberg to be impeached, calling him a “radical left lunatic”.For months, the Trump administration has made it clear they believe they can ignore judicial orders. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” vice-president JD Vance tweeted on 9 February. Elon Musk, Trump’s top adviser, has repeatedly called for impeaching judges, and is donating to Republicans in Congress who have supported doing so. House Republicans have introduced resolutions to impeach Boasberg and four other judges who have ruled against Trump.Trump’s call for impeachment prompted a rare public rebuke from chief justice John Roberts, who said in a statement on Wednesday: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate process exists for that purpose.”Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University who studies the federal courts, said there was no parallel situation in American history. Trump officials, he said, were trying to see what they could get away with in front of federal judges.“They’re testing the fences in ways in which they can claim plausible deniability when congressional Republicans say, you can’t defy the courts,” he said. “Whether you call it a crisis or not, this is certainly an unprecedented degree of resistance on the part of the executive branch to adverse court rulings.”J Michael Luttig, a well-respected former conservative federal judge, said on MSNBC on Tuesday that “America is in a constitutional crisis”. “The president of the United States has essentially declared war on the rule of law in America,” he said.Luttig told the Guardian that he believed the US supreme court’s ruling last summer finding Trump had immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts undergirded his attacks on the courts. “It is the reason for his emboldenment,” he said.During Trump’s first administration, the federal courts played a major role in constraining administration policies that violated the US constitution and federal law. Of the 246 cases litigated involving efforts to implement policies through federal agencies, the Trump administration won 54 cases and lost 192 cases or withdrew the actions, according to the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University.Since Trump’s second term began in January, more than a dozen judges have blocked his executive actions, including efforts to mass fire federal workers, freeze federal funding and end birthright citizenship.During the first Trump administration, Vladeck noted, officials appeared more willing to “go back to the drawing board” to rework policies after they had been halted by the courts to make them comply with the law, he said.“You saw a lot more effort to rationalize everything the administration was doing in law, as opposed to in power,” he said.The attack on the judiciary has not just included impeachment, but also has extended to personal attacks on judges, prompting concerns about their safety. Supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett’s sister received a hoax bomb threat, the New York Times reported. Some of the attacks have included sending pizza orders to the homes of judges and family members as a way of threatening jurists that the public knows where they live.Another judge, John Coughenour of the western district court in Washington, told the Times he had been the victim of a “swatting” attempt in which law enforcement descended on his home after he blocked a Trump administration order ending birthright citizenship.Unlike politicians and public figures, judges are prohibited from speaking out on political matters and saying anything about a case that could give the impression they are biased. That leaves them unable to correct misinformation and respond to attacks against them.“It is difficult when you’re in a position where you can’t necessarily traditionally respond to what you think might be unfair and unwarranted attacks,” said Esther Salas, a federal district judge in New Jersey who has been outspoken about the need for protections for jurists after an unhappy litigant killed her son in 2020 and shot her husband at their home.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I will tell you that judges are human, just like everybody else. We have emotions, we have fears, we have concerns for our family members and for our own safety,” she said. “It does impact a judicial officer.”Judges have some tools at their disposal to force compliance with their orders. They can sanction attorneys, or if a party refuses to comply with a directive, a judge can issue civil or contempt orders. A civil contempt order, which could be something like a daily fine, punishes the non-compliant party until they adhere to a court ruling. Criminal contempt is more akin to a prosecution. In 2017, Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio after the former sheriff was found in criminal contempt of court.Federal courts also depend on US marshals, who are part of the justice department to enforce their rulings, prompting concerns Trump could interfere with their functioning.Indeed, Boasberg has already asked the Trump administration to “show cause” as to why the administration did not comply with his ruling to turn around the plane.But a motion of contempt and a finding of one often comes at the end of a long legal process and there can be long legal disputes about whether a party is actually complying with a court order.When a court blocked the Trump administration’s freeze of federal funds, for example, there was evidence the administration was not complying. The 22 states that sued filed a motion to enforce the court’s ruling, which they won, and were considering asking for a contempt order, but ultimately decided not to, Letitia James, the New York attorney general, one of the state attorneys general involved in the suit, said on Thursday.“We were considering a motion for contempt, but there was some explanations that they provided to us,” she said. They went ahead with the motion to enforce, which released the remaining funds, she told reporters at an event on Thursday.Vladeck speculated there were other actions courts could take if the Trump administration’s defiance reached a “break the glass moment”. The government, he said, relies on the federal courts for many things, including approving warrants and allowing criminal cases to proceed.“If noncompliance in case A led courts to be less likely to do the federal government’s bidding in case B, that’d be a real problem from the government’s perspective,” he said. The federal court in Washington , for example, could hypothetically dismiss all of the indictments the government brought out of hand. “That would be quite an escalation, but I think we’d be in response to quite a provocation.”But the larger point, Vladeck said, was that no one benefits from an unstable legal system in the United States. Economic markets depend on everyone being able to accept that the judgments of courts will be followed.“There’s no long-term political endgame that results from openly defying a judgment,” he said.Rachel Leingang contributed reporting More