If you thought the federal government couldn’t get any more absurd, allow me to introduce you to the saga of Bill Essayli, acting U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California—until a judge in Honolulu decided that a paperwork expiration was more important than prosecuting actual criminals.
Let’s break this down the way the Framers would have wanted: with clarity, contempt for arbitrary power, and a healthy dose of “are you kidding me?”
Step One: The Prosecutor Who Prosecutes
Essayli has been doing something radical in Los Angeles: his job.
RICO indictments against corrupt city officials? Check.
Lawsuits against LA’s billion-dollar homeless-industrial complex that somehow leaves more people on the streets every year? Check.
Federal charges against cartel smugglers and human traffickers exploiting the wide-open border? Double check.
In a sane world, this is called “law enforcement.” In today’s world, it’s apparently a firing offense.
Step Two: The Judicial Drive-By
Enter U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright—sitting not in California, mind you, but in Hawaii—who rules that Essayli’s temporary appointment expired after 420 days. His solution? Essayli can keep doing 100% of the job… but can’t use the title “U.S. Attorney.”
This is what happens when legal positivism meets bureaucratic surrealism. The same federal courts that invent rights out of thin air suddenly discover that a statutory clock is the hill they’re willing to die on—selectively, of course, when the target is someone actually enforcing immigration law.
Step Three: The Senate’s “Blue Slip” Veto—Now Featuring Bipartisan Tyranny
Even if Essayli survives the judicial ambush, he still has to clear the Senate. And thanks to the “blue slip” tradition—a custom with zero basis in the Constitution—California’s two Democratic senators can block his confirmation with a Post-it note.
Never mind that the Constitution says the president nominates and the Senate advises and consents. Never mind that California voters didn’t elect these senators to be veto-wielding satraps over federal law enforcement. This is custom masquerading as law, and it’s how the swamp protects its own.
The Real Question
Why is the system mobilizing judges, senators, and procedural minutiae to neutralize one prosecutor? Because Essayli represents a threat to the bipartisan consensus:
Open borders are a feature, not a bug.
Municipal corruption is just a “public-private partnership.”
The federal government’s job is to manage decline, not reverse it.
This isn’t about one man or one office. It’s about the centralized state’s intolerance for dissent. When a single U.S. Attorney in one district can be lawfared into oblivion for enforcing statutes Congress itself passed, we’re not living under the rule of law—we’re living under the rule of whoever controls the process.
James Madison warned us about consolidating power in distant hands. He didn’t live to see a Hawaiian judge nullify a California prosecutor because a 420-day clock ticked past midnight, but he’d recognize the disease: the administrative state devouring the constitutional order, one obscure ruling at a time.
What You Can Do
Subscribe to the newsletter. Forward this post to the one friend who still thinks the federal government is “limited.” And the next time someone tells you “that’s just how the system works,” remind them: the system wasn’t designed to work like this.
Because if we don’t laugh at the absurdity, we’ll cry at the tyranny.