Judge Rules Pentagon Restrictions on Press Are Unconstitutional

Neither do unenforced pieces of paper. The point being made here is that we are in a constitutional crisis. Waiting for the rules and procedures to sort it all out is not going to work, because the problem is having reached the point that the rules and procedures have broken down. Somebody telling these ridiculous monsters, "you can't do that," for the umpteenth time is not useful if they can just shrug and answer, "or else what?" This isn't a win. A win entails that something actually change about the abuses being perpetrated. Otherwise, it's just noise. We have grown extremely complacent with the idea that the words in the laws define what will or will not happen. They don't. The monopoly on violence does. It merely looks the same when the people with control over the monopoly on violence have some respect for, or at least desire the legitimating optics of, the law. Trump and his cronies lack any respect and have steadily learned that they don't really need the optics. Unless someone actually, forcibly makes them stop, they will not stop, and if they have not stopped, then we have not won anything. Symbolic victories that don't translate into substantial ones are an opiate. They let people feel a little more at ease by saying, "see, the rules are still there in the rule book where we left them," while those same rules fail to meaningfully affect the board state. A judge calling the blatantly unconstitutional thing blatantly unconstitutional is at this point the equivalent of performing temple rituals in order to make rain come, self-soothing behavior unconnected to the lever that actually makes things get any better. We should not be comforted by this absent any effect on the real world. Until the abuse stops, we need to stay angry about it. If the courts want to be relevant to that, they need to figure out some mechanism to make their dissent matter to the regime and *use it*.