Shame is not dead.
Shame lost power as a motivator in public life in this era of Trump. Maybe it is regaining influence.
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh didn't like what the term "Kavanaugh stop" was doing to his reputation.
Democrats are reluctant to admit it, but Trump has been extraordinarily successful as a change agent. He has changed settled American policy in multiple areas, running roughshod over entrenched institutions and processes. He exemplified the Nike slogan: "Just do it." His superpower is his lack of shame. Trump reveals that the most important checks and balances are not the formal structure of our constitutional system. They are our norms, our handshake agreements, our supposed shared consensus on what is true and reasonable and fair. Trump makes up his own facts. He doesn't bother with hypocrisy.
If a president said we were at war, said we were under armed invasion, said we had a trade crisis, said Portland was a war zone burning up in flames, then he could claim emergency powers to do what he wants. He showed he could get away with this. Pretense drives a hole through supposed limits on a president's power.
The most corrosive effect of this shamelessness is that a shared agreement on reality is revealed as weakness, something feckless Democrats and RINO turncoats like Liz Cheney or Mike Pence care about. Rules don't matter. Just assert something is true and dare people to prove otherwise. Pretense is truth. He won the 2020 election by a landslide. He never had government documents at Mar-a-Lago.
The U.S Supreme Court majority shared in that zeitgeist. Pretense was good enough. In that context, the Supreme Court ruled that ICE agents could use signals of ethnicity -- skin color, Spanish language -- and call that probable cause to detain people, inquire about their immigration status, rough them up, and put them in jail. The pretense was that the stop would be brief and unobtrusive, and that this was consistent with due process and equal protection of the laws. A person could call it a narrow and limited license to investigate, and potentially Constitutional, but in the wink-wink reality of enforcement under current policy, it was a license to round up and arrest Hispanic-looking people on sight. Rough justice, with some conspicuous cruelty, was policy, advancing the optics of self-deportation.
The blanket authorization for arrests of Hispanics created the term "Kavanaugh stops." Justice Kavanaugh's name entered mainstream discourse along with "Miranda warnings," the "Heimlich maneuver," and "Lou Gehrig's disease." A "Kavanaugh stop" was a thing. It was a license to profile Hispanics and presume illegality.
In the current Trump might-makes-right zeitgeist, I think some administration officials would welcome the name. Had they been named "Noem stops" after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, it might have been a point of pride for her. She might proudly claim that we aren't letting squeamish goody-goodies hide behind the Constitution and tell us not to protect our country by making Hispanics prove they aren't guilty of something.
But not Brett Kavanaugh. He is a Supreme Court justice, in a role supposedly devoted to truth and justice. He wants this cleaned up. He wrote a footnote in a case this week saying that "race and ethnicity" are NOT to be considerations when officers make immigration stops. It contradicts what he wrote in the prior case. I consider this a good portent for the new year. He does not want to be known for empowering cynical use of police power, branded under his name. He doesn't trust this administration not to embarrass him and further sully his reputation. He is be ashamed to be associated with what is going on and what might come next.
That is a good sign. Happy New Year.
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