So, anyone here in Portland?

[GethN7]

I tend to lean culturally conservative but am otherwise pretty classically liberal, and I hang around communities that in different spheres of political alignment where I can usually find some sort of common ground, and ironically, even in the spheres I hang out where Trump, Republicans, and hard right views are typically championed, even they are getting a bit disturbed by how casually the process of the rule of law is being glossed over by those same entities they usually support. Even some pretty dedicated Trump supporters I know are starting to get concerned that even if Trump is letting federal agencies stretch the limits of their powers without actually breaking them to clamp down on civil unrest, they find it troubling the precedent that could set.

For the record, I tend to agree. While Abe Lincoln did suspend habeus corpus and perform other chilling acts as part of his war powers in the American Civil War, even he otherwise had reservations about going whole hog with doing so, and even was in favor of letting normal elections and other parts of due process proceed as normally as possible when and where there was no excuse not to do so. He was also a lawyer by training and he was petrified of setting a terrible precedent that could erode the concept of due process then or in the future.

If you ask me, assuming Trump is acting with the best of motives, it would be best for him to encourage those federal agents who have been detaining people to go out of their way to observe due process even more stringently than in a time of relative civil peace, because even a lot of hard right types rightly fear that casual abuse of extraordinary situations could mutate into a degradation of civil rights in regards to safeguards of our civil freedom down the road. The fact we aren't seeing that is something I believe anyone with a respect for the idea all are entitled to due process can agree could be a very slippery slope once this madness has passed.