MarkWayne's World

L'État, c'est Bubba

All hat, no cattle whatsoever. None.

DHS Secretary MarkyMark is a multi-millionaire plumber and MMA fighter with no college degree, and for sure no law degree or law license. Now he is in charge of over 260,000 federal employees, many of them lawyers, and many others heavily armed. Qualified, right?

Congress has authorized over $518 Billion U.S. Dollars for DHS to work with in FY 2026, and yet, when it comes to equipping DHS goons with body cameras, MarkyMark testified under oath that…

• Sen. Murray, June 2, 2026: “We don’t have the money for all the cameras.”

But there’s a bigger problem than money for body cams. Namely, the rule of law.

• Migrant Insider, June 3, 2026: “Markwayne Mullin walked into a Senate hearing room Tuesday morning as the new secretary of Homeland Security and walked out having refused to say, plainly and on the record, that his department will obey federal court orders. … Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the subcommittee, asked Mullin a simple question: will DHS comply with court orders even when judges rule that the department is acting illegally? Mullin wouldn’t say yes. He offered, instead, that DHS will “never break the Constitution” and “won’t break the law” — formulations careful enough to leave open the door he was being asked to close. When Murphy pressed the point, Mullin turned the attack: if the courts weren’t “politicized,” he said, he could probably answer differently. Some judges, he suggested, use the bench for “political opinion, not just the rule of law.” Murphy called the answers “chilling.”

Bottom line: MarkyMark, not a lawyer, gets to decide which laws, if any, he and his 260,000 federal employees will obey. Fuq the courts, amirite? Again,

(Not sure who MarkyMark is/was? See here.)

CRUELTY VS. CLEMENCY CORNER: MR. JAI VANG

• WCCO, May 27, 2026: “Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has pardoned a man taken into ICE custody during Operation Metro Surge before he could potentially be deported to Laos. Jai Vang was taken into ICE custody earlier this month. He was arrested and convicted of aiding and abetting armed robbery in 1994, while he was 18-years-old, and had served his time. “To preserve and assert Minnesota’s sovereign state interest in enforcing our own criminal laws, and the constitutional rights through the clemency process, I’ve called this meeting to consider the application,” Walz said Wednesday. Walz was joined by Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Natalie Hudson and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison in approving the pardon. “Over the past 30-plus years, Mr. Vang has started a family,” Walz announced. “He’s become a critical member of the community, and he has lived a life without any serious criminal violations since that time.” Vang was to have been deported within days of the pardon. “Immigration status or pending deportation is not a reason in and of itself for the granting of a pardon, but in Mr. Vang’s case, I would state this, that I can find no reason how Minnesota will be safer or better if Mr. Vang is deported to a country he has not been to since he was a child,” Walz added.”

• KMSP, May 27, 2026: “Vang had applied for a pardon to avoid deportation, which was unanimously recommended by the Clemency Review Commission. … "It’s clear that Mr. Vang has become an upstanding citizen, working consistently over the past 27 years, forming his own company as painter and carpenter," [Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice] Hudson said.”

• DHS, June 2, 2026: Not worth quoting, but here’s the link if you want to read their take.

“MIGRATION ISN’T A PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED.”

• Austin Kocher, June 3, 2026: “Anthropologist Amelia Frank-Vitale’s new book “Leave If You Can” explains why deportation doesn’t stop migration, what U.S. immigration policy gets wrong about Honduras, and what we could fix. … The argument that anchors the entire book is her insistence that migration itself is not what policymakers should be trying to solve. As a geographer who studies borders and enforcement, I think about this in terms of what our data is actually measuring. The detention numbers, court backlogs, and deportation flight counts all measure the enforcement response to human movement. The data tell us what the state is doing, but the data doesn’t tell us about the underlying conditions that produce migration in the first place, which are the things that actually need addressing.”

That’s all for now. THANK YOU! to all subscribers, new, free and paid.

Comments always welcome.

Reminder: Most presidents host high-class musicians inside the White House. In contrast, Trump is staging a cage fight on the White House lawn. I repeat, L’État, c’est Bubba.

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