Rachel Maddow

He wrote, quote, antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening.

Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government, masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind, are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process.

The systematic character of this practice and its deliberate elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force place it beyond the reach of ordinary legal description.

It is an assault on the constitutional order.

Judges standing up for themselves, standing up for the court system, standing up for the Constitution.

The Justice Department is not just any other among the many failing parts of the government under Donald Trump's misrule.

The Justice Department, to a large extent, kind of is our legal system.

It has a qualitatively different amount of responsibility, at least, for keeping us going as a constitutional republic.

So one of the things that's gonna be really important for when we come out the other side of this, which we will,

is that the behavior of this agency in particular, of DOJ in particular, it's going to have to be sort of walled off and bracketed as not normal.

The things that happened in the Trump Justice Department are going to need to be labeled as not normal, as something that can't be precedent, as things that we can never do again just because they were done now.

We are not going to evolve in a direction in which this is the kind of stuff that our Justice Department and our government tries to get away with.

Well, right now, federal judges from one end of the country to the other are starting to draw bright lines around this behavior, saying this is not okay, and we're going to punish you for it until you fix it.

As tomorrow's State of the Union gets closer, the list of ways Democrats are going to respond keeps getting longer and more interesting.

This year, a few Democrats say they're going to bring some of the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking and abuse as their guests to the State of the Union address.

Other Democrats say they're bringing people affected by Trump's attacks on immigrants.

Congressman Chuy Garcia has invited Marimar Martinez.

She's the 30-year-old teacher and U.S.

citizen who was shot five times in Chicago by a federal agent who then bragged about it to his colleagues.

This year, also a growing number of Democrats say they're going to skip Trump's speech altogether and hold their own State of the Union event outside the Capitol on the National Mall.