Matthew, you’re celebrating procedural resistance while missing what those procedures are failing to prevent. The swamp is slowing autocracy, not stopping it.
Yes, incompetent DOJ appointments hurt Trump’s legal effectiveness. Yes, smaller law firms are picking up slack. Yes, procedural complexity makes democracy “hard to get rid of.”
But while you’re thanking God for the swamp, ICE is detaining five-year-olds as bait, running secret detention centers where 32 people died in 2025, and operating under a secret memo that subverts the Fourth Amendment.
This isn’t legal system resilience. This is state terror emerging while lawyers file motions.
The parallels with Argentina’s Dirty War are chilling….
Detention centers operating outside judicial oversight. Forced disappearances (detainees transferred to Texas, families can’t locate them). Paramilitary forces (ICE with masks, no badges, no warrants). Deaths in custody ruled homicides with no accountability. Witnesses being deported to silence them.
Argentina’s dictatorship also had courts. Lawyers filed habeas corpus petitions. Judges occasionally ruled against the regime.
None of it stopped 30,000 people from disappearing.
Because when a regime operates paramilitaries outside legal constraints, procedural resistance becomes performative.
Your “bottom of the legal food chain” resistance matters. But it’s happening while the regime builds capacity to ignore courts entirely. Secret ICE memos. NSPM-7 designating protesters as terrorists. DOJ weaponized against political opponents. The swamp is creating friction while authoritarianism establishes parallel structures that don’t require legal process.
Understand what they’re fighting: not a president who respects courts and loses cases, but a regime building the infrastructure to operate outside judicial reach entirely. Argentina had lawyers too. It didn’t save them.
The U.S. has been moving in this direction since at least the Reagan administration, and maybe since the founding (with pushback along the way). Maybe if more of "we the people," especially the Democrats with some clout, had realized it and reacted accordingly, we wouldn't be where we are now.
Too many white people are shocked because this is happening in places like Minneapolis and Maine. Law enforcement acted like this in the U.S. South under Jim Crow, and the policing of major northern cities after that, especially when the mass-carceral state went into overdrive during the Reagan administration, came down hard on people of color. Too many white people cheered for "law and order" without looking too closely at what was being lost in the process.
Short version: "the infrastructure to operate outside judicial reach entirely" has been around from the beginning. Many of us who weren't directly affected barely noticed, and some of us thought that those who *were* directly affected deserved whatever they got.
At this point, all testimony before the Oversight Committee should be public. The Jack Smith questioning by the Republicans was delusional. People should be required to watch this 💩 show. They voted for these clowns.😡
Ironically, Trump's lawyers made good use of the slow movement of courts when he was not president. It works both ways.
We are also benefiting from Biden and Schumer and the Senate Democrats filling as many federal judgeships as possible with a wide range of well-qualified people. Too little attention is paid to the president and Senate's roles in confirming federal judges; the commercial media only comes out of hiding when it is a Supreme Court nominee, yet the majority of cases never reach the Supreme Court. Democratic candidates for senator need to stress that a vote for the Senate is a vote for the kind of courts we will have.
Thank goodness for the courts- it’s only the courts and the American people holding the line for democracy and the rule of law against the Executive and Congressional branches of government - even when they are crippled by four unethical members of SCOTUS.
I feel like this argument picks and chooses aspects of democracy that constitute “The Swamp”, and it doesn’t accurately define or constitute how TS was originally portrayed. TS is not the same as rule-based systems or bureaucracy. TS, broadly, is indeed opposition to the whims of an autocrat, but as Johan points out, procedural opposition is not the entire picture, yet it is the ONLY thing that has put up resistance to Trump’s agenda. But if the legal system (or “the Swamp”, as you call it) was actually working, the Epstein files would have been fully released over a month ago, and there would be repercussions for not following the constitution.
It’s a nice thought, but it’s more wishful thinking than true.
Matthew, you’re celebrating procedural resistance while missing what those procedures are failing to prevent. The swamp is slowing autocracy, not stopping it.
Yes, incompetent DOJ appointments hurt Trump’s legal effectiveness. Yes, smaller law firms are picking up slack. Yes, procedural complexity makes democracy “hard to get rid of.”
But while you’re thanking God for the swamp, ICE is detaining five-year-olds as bait, running secret detention centers where 32 people died in 2025, and operating under a secret memo that subverts the Fourth Amendment.
This isn’t legal system resilience. This is state terror emerging while lawyers file motions.
The parallels with Argentina’s Dirty War are chilling….
Detention centers operating outside judicial oversight. Forced disappearances (detainees transferred to Texas, families can’t locate them). Paramilitary forces (ICE with masks, no badges, no warrants). Deaths in custody ruled homicides with no accountability. Witnesses being deported to silence them.
Argentina’s dictatorship also had courts. Lawyers filed habeas corpus petitions. Judges occasionally ruled against the regime.
None of it stopped 30,000 people from disappearing.
Because when a regime operates paramilitaries outside legal constraints, procedural resistance becomes performative.
Your “bottom of the legal food chain” resistance matters. But it’s happening while the regime builds capacity to ignore courts entirely. Secret ICE memos. NSPM-7 designating protesters as terrorists. DOJ weaponized against political opponents. The swamp is creating friction while authoritarianism establishes parallel structures that don’t require legal process.
Understand what they’re fighting: not a president who respects courts and loses cases, but a regime building the infrastructure to operate outside judicial reach entirely. Argentina had lawyers too. It didn’t save them.
— Johan
Former foreign service officer
The U.S. has been moving in this direction since at least the Reagan administration, and maybe since the founding (with pushback along the way). Maybe if more of "we the people," especially the Democrats with some clout, had realized it and reacted accordingly, we wouldn't be where we are now.
Too many white people are shocked because this is happening in places like Minneapolis and Maine. Law enforcement acted like this in the U.S. South under Jim Crow, and the policing of major northern cities after that, especially when the mass-carceral state went into overdrive during the Reagan administration, came down hard on people of color. Too many white people cheered for "law and order" without looking too closely at what was being lost in the process.
Short version: "the infrastructure to operate outside judicial reach entirely" has been around from the beginning. Many of us who weren't directly affected barely noticed, and some of us thought that those who *were* directly affected deserved whatever they got.
At this point, all testimony before the Oversight Committee should be public. The Jack Smith questioning by the Republicans was delusional. People should be required to watch this 💩 show. They voted for these clowns.😡
Ironically, Trump's lawyers made good use of the slow movement of courts when he was not president. It works both ways.
We are also benefiting from Biden and Schumer and the Senate Democrats filling as many federal judgeships as possible with a wide range of well-qualified people. Too little attention is paid to the president and Senate's roles in confirming federal judges; the commercial media only comes out of hiding when it is a Supreme Court nominee, yet the majority of cases never reach the Supreme Court. Democratic candidates for senator need to stress that a vote for the Senate is a vote for the kind of courts we will have.
Thanks. Question: Congress? Not Republican-controlled Congress?
Thank you for the point-counter point with both the essay and responses to a non-lawyer reader.
Thank goodness for the courts- it’s only the courts and the American people holding the line for democracy and the rule of law against the Executive and Congressional branches of government - even when they are crippled by four unethical members of SCOTUS.
I feel like this argument picks and chooses aspects of democracy that constitute “The Swamp”, and it doesn’t accurately define or constitute how TS was originally portrayed. TS is not the same as rule-based systems or bureaucracy. TS, broadly, is indeed opposition to the whims of an autocrat, but as Johan points out, procedural opposition is not the entire picture, yet it is the ONLY thing that has put up resistance to Trump’s agenda. But if the legal system (or “the Swamp”, as you call it) was actually working, the Epstein files would have been fully released over a month ago, and there would be repercussions for not following the constitution.
It’s a nice thought, but it’s more wishful thinking than true.