Without The Rule of Law, There Is No Law Enforcement

Anti-law enforcement rhetoric and violence against law enforcement rise as the rule of law collapses

The House Committee on Homeland Security today held a hearing entitled, “When Badges Become Targets: How Anti-Law Enforcement Rhetoric Fuels Violence Against Officers.” The Republicans who organized the hearing point to an almost 700% increase in attacks against ICE and immigration agents from 2024 to 2025 as the reason for calling the hearing. Their goal, they say, is to investigate the role of heated political rhetoric in causing the uptick in violence.

But the hearing immediately took a turn that the Trumpist representatives likely did not see coming. Officer Daniel Hodges of the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, who was assaulted defending the Capitol during the January 6, 2021 insurrection, provided opening testimony that contained a brilliant bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu along with a lesson in basic American political principles. Take a moment to listen and/or read what Officer Hodges had to say:

I was invited today to speak in my personal capacity.

I suspect because ranking member Thompson is familiar with my history.

As I’ve been on the receiving ends of threats and violence due to the work I’ve done in the name of the law.

I experienced intense violence during the insurrection of January 6, and because I have the temerity to describe it publicly, threats against my life, bomb threats at events I attend, people trying to find out where I live, whether I have a wife or children they can use against me.

I have a feeling I will be asked about how the lionization of the insurrectionists solely enhanced their zealotry, about how the mass pardoning of every criminal who assaulted my colleagues and I encourages further lawlessness and violence. About how in the intervening years many pardoned insurrectionists have been re-rested for crimes such as reckless homicide, child sexual assault, threats to blow up government buildings and a kill list of FBI agents.

These are all salient points and I’m happy to address them.

However, the tenor of the press release announced this hearing made it sound like certain participants were going to spend a few hours scratching their heads and pretending not to understand why threats against law enforcement have risen so sharply this year and I cannot abide such a farce.

Law enforcement is predicated on the notion that we are a nation of laws, that anyone who is detained by law enforcement officials will be afforded all the rights and protections that are guaranteed to them by the Constitution.

It is this exemplary standard of civil society that compels individuals to cooperate when faced with arrest. Flawed as it is, our justice system aspires to and works toward the goal of truth and equal protection under the law.

Unfortunately this year, broad swathes of federal law enforcement have proven this is no longer the case.

Perjury and contempt of court used to be prohibitive of work in law enforcement, but now it appears to be a prerequisite of leadership. Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, had already been found not credible as a witness in the court of law prior to his appointment and Greg Bovino, the so-called commander at large at border control, was found to have lied while under oath in order to justify his use of force against Americans.

Even the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, intentionally defied a judge’s order to halt the trafficking of prisoners to foreign countries and then bragged about them on national television.

I should add here that one of the hallmarks of secret police forces throughout history is operating outside the law, using violence and intimidation to achieve their objectives.

Every day I wake up and I’m confronted with more heinous acts by some federal law enforcement, pointing their lethal weapons at protesters and journalists, needlessly assaulting citizens on their own property, threatening to shoot and arrest EMTs for doing their job, holding children hostage to coerce their parents out of their house.

One shot a woman who committed no crime several times and bragged about it, saying he fired five rounds and she had seven holes.

Many of these absolute embarrassments to the badge keep their face obscured to try and evade any possibility of accountability and their leadership condones it.

If the inhabitants of our country can no longer believe in the rule of law, then they can no longer believe in law enforcement.

If they believe they will be denied their basic rights, what motivation do they have to cooperate with investigations to support law enforcement as an institution?

The fact of the matter is that right now, in the United States of America, there is a semi-secret police force abducting people based on the color of their skin and sending many of them via state-sponsored human trafficking to extraterritorial concentration camps.

There are still plenty of good officers I work with them, federal and local.

But before we go around the room clutching our pearls, wondering how people could possibly compare law enforcement in this country to Gestapo, maybe we should take a moment and ask ourselves if there isn’t some recent behavior on the government’s part that could encourage such a juxtaposition.

Thank you.

Let’s break this down. Officer Hodges’ statement helps to defang the Trumpists’ disingenuous search for causes of anti-law enforcement rhetoric in a number of ways. First, of course, he points to the hypocrisy of the support that they and their dear leader have heaped onto the January 6 insurrectionists who attacked law enforcement, including Hodges himself. The Trumpist lawmakers are not concerned about all violence against law enforcement, but only that which is directed against federal officers carrying out Trump’s lawless agenda.

Second, Hodges is one of the very “brave men and women of law enforcement, who risk their lives daily to secure the homeland and protect the public,” who has faced, and is still “facing targeted violence,” as Committee Chairman Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) said was his main concern. The fact of Hodges’ very identity allows him to speak more candidly than others, to deliver a message that Trumpists would no doubt scream is “anti-law enforcement rhetoric” were it to come from anyone else.

Third, and finally, is Officer Hodges’ message, which boils down to this:

When there is no rule of law, which there is not with respect to current federal immigration enforcement, there is no legitimate law enforcement that citizens are obliged to obey.

This does, indeed, sound radical. And it is! But it is also a core tenet of the founding American political principles. Those principles were, and still are, radical. In the comfort and safety of modern life that so many, but certainly not all, of us enjoy, we have forgotten how radical an idea the rule of law was and how even more radical its implementation was as the foundation of the American experiment.

In Officer Hodges’ message today we hear the voice of John Locke, the 17th century political philosopher whose work had an immense influence on the American founders and their design of the U.S. Constitution. It is worth reminding ourselves what Locke had to say that so caught the imaginations of America’s founders.

In his Second Treatise of Government, he writes that freedom and liberty are not, as often believed, the ability to do whatever we want. Rather, freedom and liberty are tied to the legitimate rule of law carried out through a government based on the consent of the governed “and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man […] This freedom from absolute, arbitrary power, is so necessary to, and closely joined with a man’s preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his preservation and life together” (Sections 22-23). And how should we describe Trump’s current rule by executive decree, changing from day to day as his addled mind drifts on the winds of dementia, swaying this way or that only by force of bribes or base flattery, but as inconstant, uncertain, unknown, absolute, and arbitrary?

Well, it turns out that Locke had an answer to that question too. It is, he says, “a state of war.” He writes, “he that, in the state of society, would take away the freedom belonging to those of that society or commonwealth, must be supposed to design to take away from them every thing else, and so be looked on as in a state of war” (Section 17). It is through the fair and equal application of law that humans can live together, peacefully in a society “because then there lies open the remedy of appeal for the past injury, and to prevent future harm: but where no such appeal is, as in the state of nature, for want of positive laws, and judges with authority to appeal to, the state of war once begun, continues” (Section 20).

One might say, well, in our case we still do have laws and judges to whom to appeal. This is true and we have seen many state courts and lower level federal judges pushing back against Trump regime lawlessness. But the rule of law is, nonetheless, teetering on the edge of a cliff—if it has not already fallen—as regime officials defy court orders and the Supreme Court rubber stamps clearly unconstitutional regime actions without so much as a hearing. The mere existence of state employees wearing badges or robes is not equal to law, and certainly not to justice. They are mere political technologies whose goal is to enforce and interpret law and, thereby, hope to achieve an approximation of justice, which is always beyond what mere law can deliver.

What happens, then, when the rule of law fails because those whose job it is to administer it have abdicated their responsibility or turned the law into a weapon in service to the would-be tyrant? Locke is absolutely clear that rebellion, even armed rebellion, is warranted. It is what he calls, “an appeal to heaven.”

[W]here an appeal to the law, and constituted judges, lies open, but the remedy is denied by a manifest perverting of justice, and a barefaced wresting of the laws to protect or indemnify the violence or injuries of some men, or party of men, there it is hard to imagine any thing but a state of war: for wherever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer justice, it is still violence and injury, however coloured with the name, pretences, or forms of law, the end whereof being to protect and redress the innocent, by an unbiassed application of it, to all who are under it; wherever that is not bona fide done, war is made upon the sufferers, who having no appeal on earth to right them, they are left to the only remedy in such cases, an appeal to heaven. (Section 20)

If that isn’t “anti-law enforcement rhetoric,” I don’t know what is! When those whose job it is to enforce the law and deliver justice instead act on behalf of a would-be tyrant and his “party of men,” who seek to put the rest of society under the whims of one man’s absolute and arbitrary control, they are in a state of war with the rest of society, leaving their countrymen no choice but to fight back. That they wear a badge or a robe makes no difference. They have abandoned their posts as civil servants and donned the uniform of political insurgents and usurpers.

It is precisely this kind of political philosophy that helped to fuel the American revolution and, subsequently, the formation of a Constitution meant to prevent the very situation we find ourselves in now. Clearly, the experiment has hit a significant setback. However, the core principles underlying it are as apt today as they were in 1776. When one man attempts to overthrow the rule of law and, instead, assert himself as absolute ruler, the rest of us are under no legitimate obligation to obey him or his “party of men,” no matter the clothes they wear.