Caving to unconstitutional order is a grave disservice to our country's 250 years of independence and unparalleled in the prior 169 years of Colonial history. Due process rights date back to the Magna Carta in 1215. They should not be given up so easily. It is long past time for Congress to stand up for itself, and by doing so, for our democracy. To subjugate Congress to every Executive whim is to abandon our Constitution and over 800 years of the Rule of Law.

When Congress repeatedly caves to ever-expanding presidential power seized in blatant disregard for the law (and eventually ruled unconstitutional by the Court), it abandons our Constitution. Why not allow President Trump the space to retreat to Constitutional order rather than so much space to fling himself headlong toward tyranny with denials and distractions? When he flouts our Rule of Law as second nature and finds so little resistance, and such puny demands for accountability, he need never retreat from despotism back to the bulwarks of our Constitution.

The president has before him today a very easy choice: restore Constitutional order by appointing competent new leadership atop the Department of Homeland Security who will restore public faith by ensuring transparency and accountability in DHS' legitimate law enforcement mission or continue to fail to reopen the shuttered DHS. Kristi Noem was fired, but her misconduct deserves criminal investigation and likely prosecution. The incompetent Markwayne Mullin, though reminded he is somehow an elected senator, restores no one's faith in DHS' accountability as a law enforcement agency, rather than the quasi-criminal organization it became under Noem.

When federal officers' criminal misconduct is not prosecuted, it tarnishes all federal officers who take the same oath of office to defend our Constitution. If we had a competent Attorney General, a Pattern and Practice Investigation would have been initiated last year into CBP and ICE for its rampant criminal conduct toward immigrants and Americans alike. By not investigating overtly criminal misconduct of federal officers, the Department of Justice becomes a Department of Injustice. Federal officers’ only choice cannot be to be quiet or leave. When our whole system of governance is under attack, we must stay and speak up for there to be any accountability.

If, instead of an inescapable choice to restore Constitutional order, Congress caves yet again to provide the president with an additional way out towards expanded tyranny, do not be surprised when he takes it. Sacrificing a pawn like Bovino after Minneapolis, replacing a gnome with a madman, and adding body cameras do not stop the violent state terror unleashed on our states by the will of a would-be despot and his “Goebbels,” Stephen Miller, as he was reportedly introduced to him by Steve Bannon, saying, “Now this is a real fascist.” President Trump may call him “Crazy Stephen,” but Miller acts with impunity as though he is the Shadow President really pulling all the strings inside the White House, especially regarding all the assaults on Lady Liberty.

A United States president is not elected to carry out a program of racial scapegoating and ethnic cleansing, but to preside over the formation and faithful execution of the laws of the land. He is not entitled to choose to act in opposition to the Constitution no matter how many times Congress looks the other way. He is not even free to commit crime, regardless of what he might think after the unprecedented verdict in Trump v. The United States by the Supreme Court. Crimes are difficult to define as official acts when a president’s oath of office is to protect and defend the Constitution and crimes are defined as against the laws of the land. Crimes are also committed within our fifty states and territories, so state prosecutions not subject to federal pardons will prove abundantly fruitful inevitably toward criminal accountability.

Today is Day 36 of the partial government shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security for failure of the Republican majority in both houses of Congress to pass its yearly budget or secure a Continuing Resolution to keep it open. Such a failure of governance is on top of the failures of leadership at the helm by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whom the president finally fired on March 5th from her high flying, blockbuster-movie-budget-shattering photo-op and grifting job. Transportation Security Agents are suffering without paychecks, paying for her $172 million jets she falsely claimed would be used for deportations with its luxury accommodations, bed, and of course, her heated blanket that cannot get left behind or the Coast Guard pilot could get fired.

One would think that having fired DHS Secretary Noem, any president would act decisively to restore public faith in the legitimate national security and law enforcement mission of DHS. However, the President is being shielded from taking any decisive action to correct such blatant criminality by the Shadow President pulling his strings, Stephen Miller. White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Stephen Miller is the one running his diabolical ethnic cleansing program with DHS’ extra-legal tools, like a kid playing Call of Duty with real lives in our streets.

The president can and should immediately restore federal officers' unpaid salaries simply by restraining CBP and ICE to operate solely within the bounds of our Constitution. Of course any real president would fire Miller, not be distracted with an East Wing Ballroom and getting his golden name up on buildings he seizes by force contrary to our laws. Miller, however, feeds President Trump his steady diet of xenophobia, hate, and anger - the amygdala-seizing dark projection of “American Carnage” that Miller wrote for Trump’s first inaugural speech. The president’s hatreds would not be potent without Miller’s hard work keeping the planes moving on time, delivering scapegoats to hastily constructed warehouses outside due process and even though over 50,000 of the current detainees have committed no criminal misconduct throughout their entire lives. The rampant criminality committed is actually heavily on Miller’s side of the ledger. He is the one actually responsible for plotting, urging, and ensuring ICE and CBP’s recent lawlessness, carried out with impunity by the rotten few federal officers who mar the reputations of all federal officers by association. Moving a garden gnome to a new location was clearly insufficient to reopen DHS with accountability. Americans are now saying “It’s Miller Time!”

Congress, please do not block the path back to Constitutional order by providing the president endless ways out. Let him give up his most sadistic pleasure of tormenting our immigrants and their children. Let him fire his puppeteer, Miller.

I have been offering the president a positive way out of this partial government shutdown since before it began. My requests since January to restore Constitutional order after the illegal assaults and killings of immigrants and Americans by ICE and CBP in Minnesota and across our states long exceeded those of the president's political opposition. As a United States diplomat, I am a federal officer sworn to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It is in fulfillment of that oath that I speak up for our Constitution. Without criminal accountability for federal officers who commit crimes under the color of law enforcement, all federal officers become associated with acquiescence to atrocities and we are effectively robbed of our Constitutional order. Miller has proven himself abundantly a domestic enemy of our Constitution. The president knows I am not a “Yes Man” and will ignore Miller. But that was when I was asking for just Noem’s firing and my appointment as Homeland Security Secretary. Now I demand Miller’s firing.

Criminal prosecutions are inevitable, but I would not entrust them to the temporarily play-acting attorney general who has yet to discover her job as America’s chief law enforcement officer, rather than the president’s personal defense attorney. Her bungled mismanagement of the Epstein Files cover-up for child sex abusers will go down in history as unparalleled criminal misconduct, making President Nixon’s crimes look like child’s play. I have a long history of fighting against exactly such abuses of children, specifically empowering multiple countries to catch child sex traffickers, torture camp perpetrators, and those overwhelmingly male predators who exploit and then silence women. When some child molester is freed from the nets I painstakingly laid, I take it personally. Trafficking in persons must be fought, not enabled.

From my personal and professional experiences, I urge Congress to pass a law amending the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act to make it a reportable offense if federal officers do not speak up when they see atrocities, just as other laws require many professionals like teachers and doctors to report if they hear anything about harm to others, self harm, or child abuse. Preventing atrocities is defined by that law as our national interest. Quashing the reporting of atrocities, whether at home or abroad as I have repeatedly witnessed, must be the punishable offense. There are a limited number of us federal officers who take the oath of office and serve in the military, as diplomats, in law enforcement agencies within DHS, and in other Cabinet agencies. All federal officers should be required to say something when they see something, producing wide-angle reporting that enables accountability rather than the currently widespread acquiescing fears of sticking one’s head above the parapet lest certain retaliation come from above. United States federal officers should never acquiesce to the brutal forces of despotism that invariably cause atrocities.

Our Constitutional order is under threat.

We do not have a First Amendment if speaking up, assembling, and petitioning for a redress of grievances get you assaulted and killed by federal officers, and only the fourth bullet through your side window to your temple kills you.

We do not have a Second Amendment if legally carrying a firearm gets you shot ten times at point-blank range in broad daylight by masked secret police (which is not the meaning of undercover and is not our law enforcement or military practice, but is that of white nationalists).

We do not have a Fourth Amendment if the federal government ignores its plain text: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable search and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Unidentified federal officers cannot simply pass out tort claim phone numbers after violently breaking down doors, smashing windows, and causing bodily harm with impunity simply because Bivens lawsuits have no teeth and the unknown officers do not care how much money the government ever pays out.

We do not have a Fifth Amendment if we are deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

We do not have a Sixth Amendment if criminals are not prosecuted according to the law, but instead kidnapped and disappeared into extra-judicial detention centers in other states and countries (and overstaying visas issued by consular officers like me twenty three years ago is not criminal until a judge issues an order for removal according to evidence brought to a judge in the legal process and only then the crime amounts to a mere misdemeanor offense, similar to a traffic violation).

We do not have an Eighth Amendment if cruel or unusual punishments are meted out to racially profiled scapegoats hastily housed in ill-suited detention centers that amount to inhumane racially targeted concentration camps and a morally depraved program of ethnic cleansing in our own country.

We do not have a Ninth Amendment if federal officers have assumed rights while the people do not.

We do not have a Tenth Amendment if remaining powers are not reserved to the states and to the people, but assumed by the federal government.

We do not have a Fourteenth Amendment if all persons born or naturalized are not citizens of the U.S, if people are denied equal protection of the law, and if officeholders who take the oath engage in insurrection or give aid or comfort to enemies of the Constitution.

We do not have a Fifteenth Amendment if voting rights are denied or abridged on account of race or color (and yes, this includes the long and unfortunately revived racist history of voter intimidation, discouragement, and complicating access to the polls to participate in our democracy’s elections as fully five/fifths individual citizens.)

We do not have a Nineteenth Amendment if voting rights are denied or abridged on account of sex (and obviously the Constitution allows women to vote and to marry and take their spouse’s last names without losing their ability to exercise their right to vote unless they show us their papers).

We do not have a Twenty-Second Amendment if the president can be elected more than twice or otherwise entertained in exceeding his term in office like his esteemed mentor, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, did by switching governmental seats for a term while still retaining power (it is not just “too cute” - stop thinking and talking about it).

If every time the president flouts our Constitutional order, he is rewarded with acquiescence by Congress, he will not retreat back into its confines.

Our Founding Fathers’ primary concern when they drafted the Constitution was: Was it sufficient to outlast the crucible of every state? Despotism. Three delegates refused to sign, including to hold out for a Bill of Rights to be added. Benjamin Franklin urged them by addressing Washington at the Constitutional Convention: “In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government, but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered; and believe further, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government.” Did our course of years just total 238? Americans I meet are privately shouting “No!” Why is Congress not hearing us and demanding Constitutional order be restored?

As Benjamin Franklin in 1787 answered Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question:

“Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
Franklin: "A Republic - if you can keep it."

Let's keep it! Let's put DHS back onto Constitutional rails.

It is high time we restore our Republic!

Tim Nelson
United States Diplomat