the wrong font

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
—Humpty Dumpty

“Accepted canons help construe statutes.”
—U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez, Jr. 

Part of the fun (?) of reading court rulings is their close analysis of language, what Mark Twain called the “infinitely divided star-dust.”

Part One of this series looked at how Donald Trump’s DOJ endlessly parsed the meaning of “facilitate” in a judge’s order to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States–an exercise in hair-splitting designed, not to clarify the meaning of a term, but to use pettifoggery to avoid compliance. In another example, Trump has used the opposite strategy, going from “infinitely divided” to “infinitely diffused.”

In March, he issued a Proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 against Tren de Aragua. Borrowing language from 50 U.S. Code § 21, it described TdeA  as a “designated Foreign Terrorist Organization” that is “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.” Unfortunately for Trump, though, the Code includes language that–somehow–got overlooked (emphasis added):

Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event…

Subsequently, U.S. Federal Judge Fernando Rodriguez, Jr., in J.A.V., et al. v. Donald J. Trump, et al. (2025), took a good, hard look at Trump’s use of “invasion” and “predatory incursion” in light of both the statutory and common-sense meanings of those terms. His conclusion?: That dog won’t hunt:

The President cannot summarily declare that a foreign nation or government has threatened or perpetrated an invasion or predatory incursion of the United States, followed by the identification of the alien enemies subject to detention or removal. 

Firstly, “When ascertaining the plain, ordinary meaning of statutory language that harkens back to the nation’s founding era, courts rely on contemporaneous dictionary definitions and historical records that reveal the common usage of the terms at issue.”  After an extensive search through Founders Online, a database of historical records at the National Archives, the court found:

In the significant majority of the records, the use of “invasion” and “predatory incursion” referred to an attack by military forces…In only a few sources did the use of “invasion” or “predatory incursion” reference a non-military action. While the Court does not represent that its review constitutes a vigorous corpus linguistics analysis, the results provide a significant level of confidence that a complete review would generate similar conclusions.  

[snip]

[T]he Court determines whether the factual statements in the Proclamation, taken as true, describe an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” for purposes of the AEA. Based on the plain, ordinary meaning of those terms in the late 1790’s, the Court concludes that the factual statements do not.

But what about the meanings of those terms in common, contemporary parlance? Well, the court ruled that Trump’s definitions fail there, as well, calling them too “expansive” (which is an excellent word for it).

And Trump’s lawyers offer another such “expansive” definition:

For their part, Respondents offer that “government” more broadly references “the power or authority that one person exercises over another.” 

Even the slightest consideration of such a definition exposes its absurdity. Under such a definition, every human relationship that uses power relations—including a workplace, a school, or even a family—constitutes a “government.”

Trump’s lawyers argue that “[w]hether the AEA’s preconditions are satisfied is a political question committed to the President’s discretion.”  Except it’s not a “political” question—it’s a linguistic one. A definition contains two parts: the category that something falls into, and the specific details that make that thing different from all other things in the category. It’s not just grammar: it’s basic human cognition. Any attempt to expand the attributes of one thing in a category to include every other thing in that category does away with the very idea of definitions. The meanings of words become fluid.

Which, of course, is the whole point. When a poet does this, it’s called “metaphor.” When Humpty Dumpty did it, it was madness. When an authoritarian does it, it’s potential tyranny.