If you missed Colorado congressman Jason Crow’s appearance on CNN’s “Inside Politics” Sunday, here’s a link. It’s definitely worth watching.
Crow was invited on the show to talk about the politics of how strongly Democrats should stand up against the illegal rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a notorious prison in El Salvador despite a complete lack of due process. What Crow had to say may not have been exactly profound, but it was exactly right:
That now is not the time for hand-wringing caution by Democrats, but for taking a stand on what is right and what is wrong.
This should be an easy call. But amazingly, this is now a debate within the Democratic Party. It has been rumbling for a while, but the stakes became clear when California Gov. Gavin Newsom — considered a frontrunner in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary — called the Abrego Garcia situation a “distraction.” Yes, he really did.
When talking to reporters about a lawsuit California is bringing against the Trump administration on tariffs, Newsom pulled no punches:
“This is the distraction of the day. The art of distraction. It’s exactly the debate they want, because they don’t want this debate on the tariffs. They don’t want to be accountable to the markets today. They want to have this conversation. Don’t get distracted by distractions.”
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SUBSCRIBENewsom would later say — in the face of significant counterpunching — that he meant the argument about whether Abrego Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang is the distraction. And whether or not that’s what Newsom meant, it hardly matters. Just as it hardly matters that Newsom, along with nearly every Democratic politician, has said that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was wrong.
Trump’s increasingly mad-king behavior, including taking down the world economy and your 401(k) plan simultaneously with his mad tariffs, is definitely an issue to take to the people. So, for that matter, are Pete Hegseth’s careless incompetence. And RFK Jr.’s fight against vaccines even during a deadly measles outbreak. And Elon Musk’s blitzkrieg through the guardrails that were meant to protect American democracy.
There are so many issues. So much chaos. Can the Dems — who are so deep in the hole that they’ve lost not once, but twice, to a lying, corrupt malignant narcissist like Trump — afford to be cautious?
Should you really be cautious when Trump invokes the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 —a rarely used but oft-discredited law that, in any case, can’t be used in peacetime — to justify rounding up alleged Tren de Aragua gang members as an invading force? (Note to Trump: Nobody is saying that Abrego Garcia has anything to do with Tren de Aragua.)
The fact is that Newsom, and many other Democrats, are wary of taking on Trump and the whole immigration issue, which was, after the cost of eggs, Trump’s most effective campaign issue. Especially now, when the economic issue has swung so suddenly in their favor.
Are they right? Data analyst Nate Silver seems to think so, although he says it’s a close call.
What they seem to be missing, though, is that the Trump administration’s snatching and grabbing of people off the street, of sending off migrants — many of them with no record — to a notorious prison in the dark of night, is a serious overreach. And that may have changed the rules of the political game. It’s definitely worth the risk.
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3:05 AM MDT on Apr 13, 20257:39 PM MDT on Apr 12, 2025Yes, Trump always overreaches. But this sky-high overreach leads to Trump telling the world’s “coolest dictator” that he hopes to send actual U.S. citizens, not just residents, to El Salvador’s CECOT prison next. How weak would a party have to be not to make that a central issue?
The Abrego Garcia story is about so many things, starting with the rule of law. As highly respected conservative federal appeals court judge Harvie Wilkinson wrote in his blistering opinion on one aspect of the case, the administration is “asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.”
As Wilkinson and others have pointed out, it’s also about the Trump administration’s open defiance of the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court.
And it’s about wrong and right, as Crow told CNN’s Manu Raju.
“Do you know what I think the right thing politically to do is, is actually just do the right thing, right?” Crow said. “If we do the right thing and we defend people, if we defend the innocent, if we defend our democracy, the politics tend to take care of themselves.”
He would add: “And frankly, I think that’s one of the reasons why the Democrats have lost elections in the past is because we’re always thinking about what are the politics of it, right?”
It’s a pretty damning assessment of Democratic politicians, but a fair one. Just do the right thing here. Show that you’re ready to fight. Show that you’re not all about polls.
Because as Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen said after his trip to see Abrego Garcia in El Salvador — which resulted in Abrego Garcia apparently being moved, at least temporarily, to a more humane prison site — “I don’t think it’s ever wrong to stand up for the Constitution. And this is not about one man. If you deny the constitutional rights of one man, you threaten the constitutional rights for everybody.”
We’ve seen what Trump is doing in response to the fact that Abrego Garcia has no record, is married to a U.S. citizen, is the “Maryland man” you see in headlines and has never been proved to be a violent gang member who can be renditioned without so much as a trial.
He has pretended that the Supreme Court, in ruling against him, ruled in his favor. He says federal district judges are not the boss of him. He has sent out his pit bulls — JD Vance and Stephen Miller — to blacken the name of Abrego Garcia on the slimmest of evidence.
Trump is also doing his part in character bashing. He posted a photo of Abrego Garcia’s tattoos across his knuckles that supposedly show he is a member of MS-13. But the tattoos in the photo, as Washington Post columnist Philip Bump points out, include a marijuana leaf, a smiling face, a cross and a skull. Bump quotes experts as saying they’ve never seen an MS-13 member with this set of tattoos.
But what does truth matter when insinuation will do? What does due process matter when you can smear a U.S. resident instead of offering him a chance to make his case in court? What does a court order matter when you can falsely accuse Democrats, and judges of all stripes, of siding with terrorists?
Listen to Crow and Van Hollen and the four House members who just went to El Salvador and, mostly, to the people in the streets. Even the polling on this is pretty good for Democrats.
Look, we don’t know if any Trump charges against Abrego Garcia are valid. But what we do know — because we must know — is that the president doesn’t get to decide who’s guilty.
It doesn’t get much plainer than that. And if Democrats don’t understand that this is a hill worth dying on, we may be in even bigger trouble than anyone knew.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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