Republicans and their punditry have turned on the concept of due process as courts rule on those grounds against President Donald Trump's mass deportations of migrants — but just a few years ago, Republicans were screaming for it for themselves, MSNBC's Ari Melber said on "The Beat" Tuesday evening.
He listed a number of examples, from Republican governors to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito complaining about lack of "due process" for people who were penalized for refusing COVID vaccinations — but one of the starkest examples in his supercut was former Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson.
"How do you have the authority to order something that so clearly contravenes the Bill of Rights of the United States, the U.S. Constitution?" said Carlson in a clip from 2020. Then this year, he said in a separate clip, "I am for due process specifically for me. I'm not that concerned whether someone who broke a law, my law, to get into my country and is taking welfare from my pocket, gets due process."
The due process debate has exploded in recent weeks as immigrants have been deported or detained, with many being denied their Constitutional right to argue their case in court.
"Due process for me, not for them or you," said Melber, himself an attorney by training. "But that's the whole point."
"Remember, due process attaches regardless of what someone's accused of, because that's the whole point," he said. "And there are people who've been convicted of terrible things all the way up, including murder, who under our system are entitled to due process. And murderers, whatever their nationality, obviously, by the end of the process, you feel a lot of judgment of them, but they get the due process along the way, and a lot of reasonable people would say a murderer is worse than an unlawful migrant, even if both broke different rules."
"So there you have the conservatives, who are on record quite recently in a real-world example, saying Bill of Rights, due process, rules COVID objections, and now they're going soft, they're going wobbly, some of them sleeping," said Melber. "Other people's rights to the side, sometimes admitting as a matter of rhetoric, or perhaps confession that they just want to do it selectively. And if you want to do it selectively, then you don't support human rights because they are for all humans."
"That's why what we're hearing ... about deportation, and this will only apply to them, or maybe a few more of them, or even more, but maybe not you, is getting the whole thing backwards," Melber continued. "There's either baseline protections and a Bill of Rights that protects people against government overreach, including the abuse of detention powers that the founders were concerned about from the beginning. Either we have that or we don't."
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