And it’s not enough to violate the law. You need to violate the law in such a way that nobody feels they are protected from the authority’s arbitrary will, lest they think the sovereign is limited in some way that privileges them, or even that they are part of the truly sovereign group. In the end, Hobbesian logic must leave every individual subject to Leviathan as fearful of random violence as they were in the state of nature, because if they have anything to rely on other than the sovereign’s inherently changeable will, that anything could be understood as a limit on the sovereign’s authority, and an authority with limits is not a sovereign at all.
I can’t know for sure, obviously, but it does feel to me like that’s the precedent the Abrego García case is intended to set. That, to me, is the difference from the Bush-era renditions. Those resulted in all sorts of horrible human rights violations, and set terrible precedents (some of which are now being relied upon). But they were fundamentally driven by policy goals related to fighting the War on Terror; the damage to the constitution was a byproduct. I don’t think that’s the case here. The Abrego García case isn’t terribly important for the government’s stated goals related to immigration, but it is perfectly designed to force the court to either accede to blatant illegality or to risk flagrant and open defiance of its edicts. It’s a constitutional crisis either way—and that’s the point. We’re facing a constitutional crisis becausethe governmentwants a constitutional crisis, because their fundamental objective is the assertion of absolute presidential sovereignty.