It felt like déjà vu, with a judge in Seattle knocking down a new president’s royal order. But it demonstrated something crucial: that democracy ain’t dead yet.
It felt like déjà vu, with a judge in Seattle knocking down a new president’s royal order. But it demonstrated something crucial: that democracy ain’t dead yet.
If it feels like we’ve been here before, it’s because we have.
A brash new president storms in, spouting bombast and issuing royal proclamations. The bombast is fact-checked before a half-listening public, while the proclamations, at least the first of them, are dispatched as clearly unconstitutional by a Republican-appointed federal judge.
In Seattle.
“They put it before a certain judge in Seattle, I guess, right?” the new president, same as the old president, said Thursday. “There’s no surprises with that judge.”
Even he’s having déjà vu, or maybe seeing double. It wasn’t actually the same Seattle judge.
When then-President Donald Trump back in 2017 tried to ban many Muslims from traveling here, the judge who put a nationwide halt to it was a George W. Bush appointee, U.S. District Judge James Robart of Seattle.
When now-President Donald Trump tried to end the right of birth citizenship by executive order, the judge who put a nationwide halt to it was a Ronald Reagan appointee, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour of Seattle.
It is a bit confusing, though, as both judges are known around the federal courthouse downtown as being absolute sticklers for something Trump seems not to care a whit about: the rule of law.
“This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” Coughenour told Trump’s attorneys this past week. “Frankly, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.”
I got déjà vu at that last part. It’s been one mind-boggling surreal moment after another, going on 10 years now, hasn’t it?
Coughenour is famed in the Western Washington branch of U.S. District Court for not suffering fools. He once had a sign up at the dais, made by an aide, reminding him to try not to rip lawyers to shreds. It read: “CHILL OUT.”
He was hardly chill when confronted with a president trying to unilaterally rewrite the Constitution to drive entire categories of people from the country.
“Where were the lawyers when this decision was being made?” he asked about Trump’s signing of the order.
“There are other times in world history where we look back and people of goodwill can say, ‘Where were the judges, where were the lawyers?’ ”
That sure seems like a nod to how the Germans acquiesced their way into a dictatorship prior to World War II. He’s bringing that up and we’re only in Week 1 of the new Trump presidency.
Trump also brought up Seattle in another context. It was as part of a lie he used to justify his decision to pardon more than 1,500 Capitol rioters from January 6, 2021.
He claimed nobody got prosecuted during the Black Lives Matter protests in Seattle or Portland. So why should any of the January 6ers be in prison?
“What happened in Seattle where they took over a big portion of the city?” he said after signing the clemency. “What happened in Portland where they burned down the city every day and people die? Nothing happened to anybody.”
This has been repeated so many times by Trump and by the right that it has become its own alternate reality. It just isn’t true.
More than 60 cases were filed against Seattle protesters, in federal and state courts. As Trump was freeing J6ers who beat police officers with flagpoles, a number of Black Lives Matter protesters from the summer of 2020 remain in prison.
For example, Margaret Channon is in federal prison until 2027 for torching some Seattle police cars downtown. A 23-year-old named Jacob Greenberg is in Coyote Ridge prison out near the Tri-Cities for throwing Molotov cocktails at the East Precinct and for hitting an officer with a bat. Devinare Parker is still under federal supervision at a halfway house after a two-year sentence for bringing a homemade gun, though not using it, to a protest.
Or take Justin Moore. He was caught with a dozen homemade Molotov cocktails, which he never set off, at a Seattle protest in 2020. He got 40 months, and is currently in a federal prison in Oregon.
These people aren’t going to be pardoned — nor should they be. The whole pardon business is despicable, with Joe Biden shielding his family and Trump now using clemency to whitewash the stain of his last presidency. It shows zero respect for the justice system — and in Trump’s case is itself based on a Big Lie, that he somehow really won the 2020 election. (He did not.)
I’m a believer in democracy, and voters did reelect Trump in 2024. As he keeps pointing out, he told the public beforehand that he would free the J6ers, and voters picked him — he even won the popular vote. So he gets to do it. He gets to lie about it if he wishes, too. Democracy ain’t pure.
But democracy also doesn’t end at the ballot box. It doesn’t make the winner a king. Opposition politicians can oppose, the press can critique, attorneys can object. Judges can still judge.
That’s what makes the Big Tech leaders bowing and scraping on Inauguration Day so embarrassing. As former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon said, seeing Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and more than a trillion dollars worth of tech titans sycophantically lined up in the front row was “like walking into Teddy Roosevelt’s lodge and seeing the mounted heads of all the big game he shot.”
Ouch. Bannon just got out of prison, one of many casualties from Trump’s first corrupt term. If even he’s saying you have the dignity of a taxidermy mount …
But this is why what just happened in Seattle is so significant. Somebody resisted. New state Attorney General Nick Brown challenged the ludicrous Trumpian notion that the 14th Amendment could be altered with a stroke of a pen, or that any president can single-handedly redefine what makes an American. A judge then properly called it out for the royal overreach it obviously is.
Who knows what’s coming down the road? No one should be shocked if the U.S. Supreme Court eventually twists itself into knots to side with Trump.
But you don’t have to. You don’t have to bend the knee, or cave like the craven tech oligarchs. That’s the big news out of Seattle, once again, as if an echo sounding from eight years back. Resistance isn’t futile.
Democracy’s on the ropes. But it isn’t knocked down and out, not yet.
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