News, April 16
“This Land Is Your Land”
To the Editor:
I read your article "This Land is Your Land" with interest. I found that the article ignores an 800-pound gorilla in the room: the Spanish and Mexican land grant lands. The land grants were operated by the grantees as a sort of hybrid between private and public lands with a great deal of the land being held as common lands by the grantees and their heirs. After the United States became the sovereign, much of the acreage of the common lands was taken both by crooked adjudication, legal robber barons, and unfavorable state legislation. Much of the last of the land has ended up in the hands of the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. In 2004, the legislature attempted to address land grant issues by designating them as political subdivisions of the state, similar to a city or county. Any remedies or actions proposed need to take these realities into account.
Georgia Roybal, Santa Fe
There are no accidents with the Trump dictatorship
While legal experts perseverate over whether the United States is in a constitutional crisis, and Democratic leaders incessantly champion their strategy of litigation, negotiation and legislation as the means of reining in the Trump regime, the pro-democracy electorate increasingly accepts the reality that the country is ruled by a dictator. This might be called cognitive dissonance in the aggregate, with prominent Democrats prominently leading from behind.
To flip the question, where is the evidence that we still live in a functioning constitutional democracy?
More than anything else, Americans need critical thinking skills to deal with the ruling party of authoritarianism and the minority party of denialism. Two cases underscore our current political situation. The president, by usurping the constitutional role assigned to Congress in regulating tariffs, initiated a unilateral trade war with the world. Donald Trump, like a great white shark, is a perfect predator; he has an intuitive genius for understanding the inherent vulnerabilities of any system. Lost amid the distractions of Mr. Trump rolling back extreme tariffs for less extreme tariffs—with notable exceptions, is the fact that the president was demonstrating to the world that he has virtually eliminated the power of the legislative branch to constrain or check him.
In the second instance, the extralegal abduction and rendition of Maryland resident, Mr. Kilmer Abrego Garcia, to a notorious U.S. facility in El Salvador was anything but “accidental.” His arrest and deportation without due process may have been incidental to the Trump administration’s pattern of arbitrarily depriving legal residents of their civil liberties, but the message sent by the president is unmistakable: We will ignore adverse court decisions as we move to intimidate and terrorize migrant, minority, LGBTQ+, dissident and academic communities. The capricious treatment of Mr. Garcia, despite a 9-0 SCOTUS decision, establishes the fact that Donald Trump embodies the state and the law.
President Trump must move rapidly to further consolidate his power before the midterms. His objective is the establishment of a durable authoritarian imperium intended to long outlast his own political lifespan. It is the ultimate vanity project, like the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
The global tariff war and the kidnapping of Mr. Garcia are assertions of his extra-constitutional abilities, and they are preparatory to much worse Despite the appearance of chaos, in the world of Donald Trump there are no accidents, only victims.
Eric Radack, Santa Fe
