Kristi Noem habeas flub exposes Trump’s Cabinet of the ignorant | Opinion
I have to admit, my Latin is a little rusty. When news about Kristi Noem’s congressional testimony flub first broke, I couldn’t remember the literal Latin translation of “habeas corpus.” But I have known what it means since I was a kid: that anyone arrested by the government has the right to know the charges and evidence against them and contest that before a judge.
It was such a fundamental right to the framers of our Constitution that habeas corpus comes before the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment. It is such an ancient right, so fundamental to personal liberty, that its first emergence is lost to the mists of time. As a right in a common law country like the United States, it can be traced to the English Magna Carta in the 13th Century.
Noem’s claim before Congress that “habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country” turns the law on its head. Not only is the right yours and mine, not the president’s, the right to suspend it and let the president “remove people from this country” belongs to Congress, not the president. In the U.S. Constitution, habeas corpus comes up literally in the section of the document that creates Congress and enumerates its powers.
To make such an error is unforgivable for someone who, like Noem, has at their command the thousands of law enforcement officers in the Department of Homeland Security. There, habeas corpus isn’t some froufrou Latin phrase; it is core to doing the job.
Trump has mass produced ignorance at the Cabinet level. The Homeland Security secretary doesn’t know about habeas corpus. The Health and Human Services secretary doesn’t know why vaccines are important. The Defense secretary doesn’t practice operational security. This gang don’t even know the basics.
But before Democrats get any further in lathering themselves up in a righteous fury, they might consider the fact that even before Donald Trump, ignorance played a pretty big role in politics. You could even argue that in a closely divided democracy, it is the decisive factor.
The University of Michigan used to do extensive interviews with voters, tracking their issue preferences and their ultimate votes, buried deep in the data was something that most Americans don’t want to hear: For the most uninformed quarter of the electorate, their issue preferences were totally disconnected from their voting decisions. Those against abortion were just as likely to vote for an abortion supporter as they were an abortion opponent.
Essentially, they vote randomly. And the difference between the winner and the loser in many elections is smaller than the uninformed vote. That’s especially true, as in recent years, in our razor-thin national elections.
Back during the 2016 presidential primary elections, one such poll of political ignorance caught my eye in a national paper. Liberals all had a good laugh because nearly 20% of Trump voters were opposed to the Emancipation Proclamation that President Abe Lincoln used to free the slaves during the Civil War.
I laughed, too, but then I called the researcher and asked for her data. You see, looking at the poll results she saw racist white Republicans. So she released her surprising data on the views of white people and Republicans.
Knowing what the University of Michigan had repeatedly found, I suspected ignorance was more likely than malice. I told her to look at the results for Democrats and other racial groups, which she hadn’t shared with reporters.
Sure enough, it turned out that Bernie Sanders supporters were more likely to look askance at Lincoln’s noble handiwork than Marco Rubio supporters. About 30% of Black voters were not sure whether the act that gave their ancestors freedom was right or wrong. But 32% of Black voters did think Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to round up Japanese Americans and put them in camps during World War II was a fine idea.
Those are the things you find when you are asking voters about things they only vaguely remember from history class or from snatches of “World News Tonight” at dinner a week before the election.
The fact is well-documented that among registered voters, 20%, 30% and even more fail at questions of basic knowledge of how our government works and what is going on today, Can you name a Supreme Court justice? In what century did the Civil War happen? Besides free speech, name a right protected by the First Amendment.
Surely, it is a shock to see Kristi Noem’s cabinet level ignorance unmasked. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves: Ignorance and apathy are fundamental features of democracy, the very worst system of government except all the rest.
This story was originally published May 21, 2025 at 4:41 PM with the headline "Kristi Noem habeas flub exposes Trump’s Cabinet of the ignorant | Opinion."
