Noem Can’t Define “Habeas Corpus”
That's a problem, given her job and all.
The indifferent ignorance of it all is something to behold.
I mean, it’s a concept central to her job, and it has been in the news. Maybe, I dunno, Google it?
Worse than performing like a mediocre undergraduate who failed to do the reading, or even listening in class, is her assumption of the authoritarian powers of the president.
Further, this is a woman who went to a torture prison in El Salvador for a photo op (see the headline photo for this post, source: UPI). A torture prison where people were sent without due process of law, I would underscore.
The Trump administration is populated with ignorant, unserious, and, indeed, evil people.
It is upsetting and utterly ridiculous. And yet, here we are.
See PBS: What is habeas corpus, and what has the Trump administration said about suspending it?
The Latin term means, literally, “you have the body.” Federal courts use a writ of habeas corpus to bring a prisoner before a neutral judge to determine if imprisonment is legal.
Habeas corpus was included in the Constitution as an import from English common law. Parliament enacted the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which was meant to ensure that the king released prisoners when the law did not justify confining them.
So, you know, it’s one of those new-fangled rights.
These people are authoritarians. Full stop.
She probably thinks the Gettysburg Address is a location for horse racing.
What a dipshit.
This is like complaining that WWE wrestlers don’t know the rules of wrestling. It’s not that she doesn’t know, it’s that she realizes the hearing is a performance, and the point is not to answer, but to hype up her side
One weird thing to learn about myself at a somewhat advanced age is that I am, for some psychologically troubling reason, less irritated with the pure evil of the Trump regime than with the blanket incompetence they display in every way imaginable. Someone this idiotic holding a cabinet position should be a once-in-a-lifetime error, but in this cabinet? She doesn’t even stand out. Pete Hegseth? Pam Bondi? Sean Duffy? Linda McMahon? RFK Jr (he may have had a decent mind at some point, but the drugs and the worms haven’t left much behind)?? I find it infuriating.
@Stormy Dragon: I understand where you are coming from, but I think that lets her off the hook to some degree.
I think she is both ignorant and mouthing administration propaganda.
@Crusty Dem: It’s a murderer’s row of incompetent bufoons.
“The Latin term means, literally, “you have the body.””
As the old joke goes, it was a pickup line in ancient Rome.
Noem lacks the instinctive bullshit skills displayed by MAGA colleagues like Patel and Hegseth. The answer to “What is habeas corpus?” should have been something like “How typical that Democrats want to talk about obscure Latin expressions to distract Americans’ attention from President Trump’s success in closing the border and deporting the illegals Joe Biden let into the country.”
My only surprises:
(1) that anyone thought she would know what Habeas Corpus is,
(2) that if she knew, that she would care,
(3) she openly admitted that she knew nothing about Habeas Corpus.
Trump’s Cabinet is overwhelmingly populated with people who were hired because ⏺️ they appeared regularly on conservative media, and ⏺️ because they agreed with President’s plan to both weaponize and deconstruct the agencies they lead. The law is not on their radar.
Couldn’t spell cat if you spotted her the c and the a. (Apologies to Hollywood.)
Steve
Sarah Palin remade for 2025.
By not knowing what habeas corpus is, Noem has shut down whatever line of inquiry the Senator was trying to get to. I think this was performative weaponized incompetence, unskillfully deployed to avoid doing something she doesn’t want to do — answer questions about this administration’s actions.
I don’t believe someone who has a four year degree in political science — often one of the feeder degrees for law school — who has been around lawyers from her time in Congress and then Governor of Some Dakota and is now the Secretary of Homeland Security where the biggest criticisms are about due process and habeas corpus, and who has been prepped by staff for her congressional testimony … I don’t believe that person can plausibly not know about habeas corpus.
She’s fucking lying, to use the technical phrase. She is just wasting the time of the Senators, since they each only have five minutes.
And, by playing stupid, she avoids questions about this:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/20/trump-administration-deported-migrants-south-sudan
The truth has died, just like the puppy she shot.
@Crusty Dem:
I hear ya!!
@Ken_L: I’m relieved that this administration doesn’t have people of your quality working for it. Seriously!
The unseriousness is part of the point. If no one can speak sensibly, then nothing can be spoken about critically. We will be unable to form a coherent sense of reality. The performance is working.
So, the utterly vacant and dead look in her eyes is real and not an act.
I do appreciate my US Senator, Maggie Hassan!
PS–A reminder that those nutty leftists at the Cato Institute have, so far, determined that at least 50 of the prisoners rounded up and sent away were in the US legally and had followed all applicable laws.
On the one hand you get Noem’s display of belligerent ignorance, while on the other you have Trump calling anyone and everyone from the Biden and Obama administrations stupid, sick or evil. More projection? Calling Dr. Freud!
@Charley in Cleveland: If Freud had seen Trump, Noem, Hegseth, RFK Jr., and McMahon sitting in his waiting room in Vienna back in the day, he’d have rubbed his hands with glee.
Frankly, this is a great example of why impact matters so much more than intent. Maybe Noem knows what Habeus Corpus is and she is being intentionally wrong here. Maybe she doesn’t and this really is what she thinks it means. Those are questions of intent.
However the impact of this statement is that a senior government official has taken one of the most important individual rights in Western culture and flipped it into a governmental right. That is fundamentally scary in an authoritarian, new-speak way.
I’m also old enough to remember when Right Wing media lost its mind when a 2001 interview where Barack Obama referred to the Constitution as a collection of negative liberties. That was a completely correct interpretation of the document (inasmuch as the original Bill of Rights was about limiting what the government could do).
There’s no question that this sort of statement, if it had been made by a Democrat, would have been on constant repeat of Fox News for weeks.
I have seen a few clips of Noem testifying before Congress where she just keeps going on – over the questioner and on some opposite tangent – like she needs to get voices out of her head. She reminds me of Renfield.
@Matt Bernius:
Along that theme:
https://open.substack.com/pub/jefftiedrich/p/because-fuck-you-thats-why-helpfully?r=2jh99&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
What’s that expression? The stupidity, it hurts? How she was elected governor is befuddling but it does not speak well of the local party or the denizens of the state. And yes, the senator interrupted her far to early.
@charontwo: Frankly, I put the greatest weight on possibility three.
50-50 chance Marge Greene could’ve done better with that question.
@Matt Bernius:
President Reagan at one point declared that “The Constitution is a tough-on-crime document”–which is a ridiculously stupid and incorrect thing to say. (Especially from the standpoint of its time, the Constitution was the first to place important limits on a government’s ability to punish criminals.) What’s even more amazing is that it wasn’t one of his off-the-cuff remarks, it was part of a speech.
@Jay L Gischer:
Thinking about it some more, there is possibility 4, this:
Kristi Noem knows that to stay in Trump’s good graces, it is necessary to constantly suck up, so:
4: Krist Noem just answered with the same answer Trump would give if asked.