The Case for Prudence over Principle, Then and Now

F ew political fights are more impassioned than those over sovereignty. The authority to exercise power is every government’s most prized possession. It is always contentious, then, when two overlapping polities assert conflicting claims on a particular matter of law. Same as it ever was.

Almost no one living in the American colonies before 1765 denied the principle that Parliament held indivisible sovereignty, defined by William Blackstone as the absolute power to make law, across the British Empire. But when Parliament attempted to use that sovereignty to tax the colonists in service of war debts, Americans cried foul. They came to believe that only their local legislatures, not a distant body in which they had no representation, could legitimately bind them.

Parliament fervently disagreed. As its taxes inflamed colonial resistance and violence, culminating in the Boston Tea Party, Britain enacted the so-called Coercive Acts in 1774 to punish Massachusetts for its disobedience — closing its port, dissolving its government, and bringing the colony under royal control. The aim of the laws was to reassert sovereignty. Their effect was to foment revolution.

At the peak of the imperial crisis, Edmund Burke — a leading opposition member in the House of Commons, now considered the father of the conservative temperament — rose to offer nine resolutions for conciliation with the colonies. Despite agreeing with the principle of English supremacy over the colonies, Burke proposed that Parliament back down regardless and once again respect American self-governance. Americans would never submit to British rule, he assessed, and the use of coercive force only worsened the turmoil.

Two hundred fifty years later, another dispute over sovereignty is unfolding in Minnesota. Obvious differences in context notwithstanding, Burke’s warning against elevating absolute principle over the limits of practice should resonate here, too.

The nation’s president insists that he has full authority to execute federal immigration laws, including those that authorize the deportation of illegal aliens, anywhere in the country. He is correct. The president has decided to use that authority to concentrate thousands of immigration enforcement agents in the Minneapolis area, tasked with sweeping the city for detainable migrants.

The deployment has been something of a success, as the Department of Homeland Security has arrested 3,000 migrants in six weeks. It has also gone terribly. Agents have embraced a militaristic mindset in pursuing suspects, pairing aggressive tactics with a willfully menacing wardrobe. They are met on the streets by mobs of protesters, many of whom are organized to disrupt and impede their enforcement operations.

Confrontations between emboldened immigration police and adrenalized protesters have made Minneapolis look like a war zone. The casualties are two Americans, Reneé Good and Alex Pretti, who were shot and killed while resisting officers. Agents have escalated clashes with physical force and have fired pepper spray into demonstrators’ faces at short range. Children have been caught in tear gas while on their way home.

What is it all for? The administration decided to target Minnesota for deportations following news of a $9 billion fraud scandal in the state, perpetrated by Somalis who were virtually all legal residents or U.S. citizens. That scandal’s connection to illegal immigrants is nonexistent — but the president has the authority to capture them, anyway. The question is whether it’s wise to do so in the manner he has.

Dan McLaughlin writes that the Minneapolis contest is a test of national sovereignty dressed up in criticisms of tactics. Yet, it is mostly irresponsible Democratic politicians — namely, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey — who have pressed the issue of sovereignty by casting doubt on ICE’s authority to operate in Minneapolis whatsoever. Most of the Americans who recoil from the imagery pouring out of the Twin Cities, however, give no thought to sovereignty. The relevant questions, to them, are whether they like what they are seeing and whether they wish it to continue.

President Trump could maintain the current enforcement policy in Minneapolis. He could order ICE to keep sniffing out illegal aliens and to arrest any disruptor who interferes. But we know what would continue happening. Demonstrators would keep showing up in ever-larger numbers and putting themselves in harm’s way. More would probably be killed in hectic encounters.

This is an unfortunate reality, but a reality nonetheless. Does anyone believe that ICE Watch will disband if the government breaks up just a few more crowds or arrests just a few thousand more illegal aliens? If not, the administration must accept dangerous local resistance as a given. Overcoming that resistance with force, as we have seen, is extremely fraught.

As Burke counseled Parliament during its sovereignty crisis, “The question with me is, not whether you have a right to render your people miserable; but whether it is not your interest to make them happy?” In other words, will more good or bad come from the path you are currently on? Will pressing your principle to its fullest application end well? Or, will you “impair the object by your very endeavours to preserve it. The thing you fought for, is not the thing which you recover; but depreciated, sunk, wasted, and consumed in the contest.”

The prudent option in Minneapolis, as for the British Empire, is, at worst, the restoration of the pre-standoff status quo. The ICE agents working there before the surge of the last two months would remain. Minneapolis would be treated by immigration enforcement like every other blue city in America. There was no crisis of sovereignty in Minnesota before the administration funneled in 2,000 ICE and 1,000 Border Patrol agents. Nor is there a crisis of sovereignty in Denver or Albuquerque, which host a far smaller immigration enforcement presence. That is because — as every executive in history learns — the maximal enforcement of the law is not synonymous with the law itself.

The risk of retreating from principle is its partial nullification. The risk of charging forward is that you push the principle to its breaking point, and lose much else in the process, including the democratic respect that undergirds sovereignty in the first place.

Parliament refused to give an inch in 1775; the principle of indivisible sovereignty was simply too important to climb down from. Its members rejected Burke’s resolutions for conciliation, 270 noes to 78 ayes. We all know how things turned out from there.