Legal News

He explicitly argues that “Qatanani is not part of ‘the people’ the First Amendment protects” and that non-citizens cannot “claim its protection.”

His reasoning? A convoluted “originalist” argument claiming that because the First Amendment refers to “the people,” it only applies to those who are “part of a national community” with sufficient “allegiance” to the sovereign. Non-citizens, he argues, owe only “temporary allegiance” and therefore get only “temporary protection”—protection that can be withdrawn whenever the government decides they’ve become “dangerous.”

This sounds like the judge fell out of a parallel universe. Is it typical to make up so many new, complex semantic constructs in a single opinion? A "national community" and some notion of membership in it. "Allegiance" to "the sovereign"? Sovereign what? Like the head of state, or a platonic ideal of the USA? And once "allegiance" is defined, there's now "temporary allegiance" that begets "temporary protection"?

My understanding of legal matters is that judges typically pour over not just the wording and meaning of law, but also the wording and meaning of other judges' opinions and verdicts, and concepts like these are developed over many cases spanning decades or more. I'm really not usually one for conspiracy theories, but either this judge has the wrong job and should be writing tabletop RPG modules, or this has all been planned out, and he's been fed a path his verdicts are supposed to slowly trod, and he skipped ahead a few chapters.