Treason actually isn’t a crime under Tennessee law anymore. It was repealed in 2023.
Forget it, Smapti, this is Trumptown.
Forget it Smapti,
Senators and representatives shall, in all cases, except treason, felony, or breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest
prescribe removal from office
because nothing you’ve posted addresses what’s at issue.
You conveniently decided not to quote the part that specifically addresses what’s at issue.
Which means the exact same thing as it does in the federal constitution - legislators are immune from being prosecuted because of how they vote or what they say in session.
Otherwise, Republicans could simply pass a law making it illegal for Democrats to be in Congress.
It says speech or debate not vote. Now if you’d like to cite a relevant bit of case law I’m all ears eyes.
Smapti is right. A plain reading of Tennessee’s and the Federal Constitution’s Speech And Debate Clause isn’t clear on this, but the 1881 SCotUS case Kilbourn v. Thompson is. The person in Tennessee, who’s title I’m drawing a blank on, that’s responsible for checking that a law about to be passed hasn’t already been ruled unconstitutional needs to be replaced.
The parliamentarian?
I could try speaking German in public in hopes that ICE would deport me to my ancestral homeland, but somehow I doubt I’d get the desired response.
No,
The Office of the Parliamentarian provides the House with nonpartisan guidance on parliamentary rules and procedures.
this is closest
The Office of the Legislative Counsel provides legislative drafting services to the committees and Members of the House of Representatives
and, of course, Tennessee doesn’t seem to have a Legislative Counsel.
“Do it or we’ll slap tariffs on your imports! Oh, wait.”
So we got a text from our housecleaner, a Brazilian woman here legally. She’s not able to send a crew this week for our scheduled cleaning because too many of her workers are here without authorization and are therefore not working, because they are scared of getting rounded up.
Frankly, since we’re just outside Boston, I think it’s a little bit of an overreaction (none of the police around here are pulling people over for running red lights, much less immigration status).
So there we are. It’s having its desired effect.
Trump’s Border Czar supposedly hates that migrants know their rights
Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan is complaining that mass deportation is harder than he thought it would be.
In an interview on CNN, Homan whined that undocumented migrants living in sanctuary cities are too “educated” about their rights, and that makes them “very difficult” to arrest. Homans statements are another example of the Republican habit of saying the quiet part out loud, implying that the Trump administration blatantly and criminally intends to violate the rights of migrants, and would rather keep those migrants uninformed of their rights in order to facilitate unlawful deportations.
Homan’s statement is pretty reprehensible, but imputing those intentions is a bit of an overreach.
Even if law enforcement officers are following all the rules and not violating any rights, it still helps them when the people they are dealing with don’t understand their rights. If I don’t understand that I have the right to remain silent or the right to refuse a search (absent probably cause), I may end up choosing to speak or consent to a search when I don’t have to, all without my rights having been violated. If I don’t understand that cops can lie to me about what evidence they already have, or what someone else has said about my guilt, I may end up voluntarily confessing to a crime, again without my rights having been violated. If I don’t understand that I have the right to legal representation/counsel, it may never occur to me to ask for it.
A quickly mumbled Miranda notice to someone who may or may not understand English very well, delivered while they are being arrested and distracted with an overload of adrenalin and fear, isn’t going to educate them of their rights in a meaningful way. Proper education to really communicate to people what their rights are, prior to contact with law enforcement, is a good thing for an ostensibly free people.
Which is what they’re doing. And which is what Homan is pissed about.
Realistic estimates of the total number of undocumented immigrants is about 14 million. That means he intends to deport a minimum of 6 million with every legal right to be in the country.
Of course, this MIT/Yale study was conducted prior to the Biden Administration taking control of the borders.
My guess is that some of the undocumented immigrants are in families with some legal residents or US citizens. (Most obviously, a child born in the United States to an undocumented parent.) Perhaps they’re counting on the likelihood that legal residents or US citizens will voluntarily leave to be with undocumented deportees?
You can’t assume with Trump that his saying he wants to do something means he actually intends to do it.
Plus, deporting millions of people is going to require additional resources (people and detention sites). A recent New York Times article about the plan to house 30,000 in the Guantanamo Bay base said, “In recent weeks, about 40,000 immigrants have been held in private detention centers and local jails around the country as funding constraints have limited the number of detention sites.”