Concerning the immigration ban, acting attorney general Sally Q. Yates (pictured)
issued this statement: "My responsibility is to ensure that the position of the Department of Justice is not only legally defensible, but is informed by our best view of what the law is after consideration of all the facts," she wrote. "At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with these responsibilities nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful."
She instructed the Justice Department not to defend the immigration ban against the multitude of law suits on their way, and apprentice emperor promptly fired her. It took Nixon years to start firing attorneys-general for political reasons but this regime hasn't even been in power a fortnight.
This followed Homegrown Hitler's mouthpiece suggesting that people at the State Department who disagreed with the efficacy of the immigration order should leave their jobs.The NY Times:
"Career officials at the State Department are circulating a so-called dissent cable, which says that Mr. Trump’s executive order closing the nation’s doors to more than 200 million people with the intention of weeding out a handful of would-be terrorists will not make the nation safer, and might instead deepen the threat."
This is just some of what is apparent. There's chaos even in the Republican party and within its donor class. But truly dangerous civil war is suggested by another story in the Guardian, of border guards refusing to obey court orders halting deportations, and instead adhering to their leader Homegrown Hitler :
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents defied the orders of federal judges regarding Donald Trump’s travel bans on Sunday, according to members of Congress and attorneys who rallied protests around the country in support of detained refugees and travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries.
On Sunday afternoon, four Democratic members of the House of Representatives arrived at Dulles airport in Virginia on word that people had been detained and denied access to lawyers.“We have a constitutional crisis today,” representative Don Beyer wrote on Twitter. “Four members of Congress asked CBP officials to enforce a federal court order and were turned away.”
"Late on Saturday night, federal judges in New York, Virginia and Massachusetts ordered a temporary halt to the president’s deportation of people who had arrived in the US with valid visas.
“Rogue customs and Border Patrol agents continue to try to get people on to planes,” Becca Heller, director of the International Refugee Assistance Project, told reporters on Sunday morning at JFK airport in New York. “A lot of people have been handcuffed, a lot of people who don’t speak English are being coerced into taking involuntary departures.”
Apart from constitutional crisis, this indicates the nature of the civil war. Just as FBI agents deeply opposed to Hilary Clinton were reportedly behind efforts to undermine her candidacy, there are likely far right authoritarian elements embedded in the government now emboldened to aggressive action, opposing and opposed by others more devoted to constitutional law and values.
Perhaps the most dangerous place is the U.S. military. With the leadership very much undermined with what one publication called a "palace coup," replacing the Joint Chiefs of Staff with an alt.right conspiracy theory zealot as national security advisers, previously rogue elements will be emboldened.
Through the 50s, 60s and well into the 70s, top military leadership was dominated by warmongers, that gloried in the wealth spent on suicidal nuclear weapons (Dr. Strangelove's General Jack D. Ripper was not all that satirical), counselled President Kennedy to nuke the Soviet Union at the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis and got America into the national nightmare of Vietnam and kept us there.
But that leadership changed dramatically over the decades, so that for all its many faults, it became more sober, measured and professional. After much struggle against the including of blacks, women and homosexuals as equal members, it has led in these efforts, causing internal strife.
The military not so incidentally is at the forefront of both clean energy conversion and in taking the climate crisis seriously. Then there's the question of The Button.
We may never know the extent of the civil war now likely brewing in the military because of Homegrown Hitler, and then again, we may know it very soon.
And a P.S. to my "Digital Resistance" post: Someone is already calling for a general strike.
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