I had come for Fleet Week, but the first thing that caught my attention was a sticker on the railing along the Esplanade:

Fleet Week is a Portland tradition during our annual Rose Festival that also sports a fun fair, a parade with floats and bands, a number of entertainment events. Ships arrive and stay for a few days, with the Navy or the Cost Guard inviting people to look at them and come on board for guided tours.

Well, that’s how it used to be. Nowadays they are fenced off, and you have to present a passport or a realID to gain admission even into the perimeter, much less boarding a ship.

Sailors roam the town, as they always did, much to the delight of some out for a nightly adventure.

Sailors with machine guns or holstered handguns roam the Esplanade, the pathway along the river.

Small boats with manned machine guns roam the river. It is a pathetic and infuriating display of fire power for what end?

I could not help but wonder what the naval personnel were thinking, given the latest news about troubles at that branch of the military. Secretary of Defense Hegseth had just blocked the promotions to one-star admirals of several senior Navy officers who had already been selected for promotion by a board of senior Navy admirals. African Americans, women and a sprinkling of White men who had participated in DEI associated events. Also during his tenure, 19 senior generals or flag officers have been fired or sidelined, with several of them being women or minorities. Just yesterday the entire leadership of the ship repair facility located in Japan was fired.

The National Security Journal reports that the US Navy is broken in term of meeting ship repair and replacement requirements or additional vessel construction. Alternatively, the National Interest Organization claims that battle ships are obsolete and should never come back. (26 vessels will be decommissioned this year alone. Given what we have learned from the Ukraine defense teams using David vs Goliath tactics against Russian battle ships, we might take heed.) Defense expert Isaac Seitz notes how the U.S. Navy faces a critical 2026 “maintenance crunch” as the USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74) refueling and complex overhaul (RCOH) slips 14 months behind schedule to October 2026. Labor shortages and a degraded steam turbine have pushed costs up by $483.1 million, creating a dangerous overlap with the USS Harry S. Truman(CVN-75), which begins its five-year overhaul in June 2026. The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier is moving away from operations tied to the Iran war and sailing to the US Navy’s base in Crete for repairs after a fire broke out in the ship’s laundry area.

Many families claim that the deployed sailors face food shortages and low quality food during ever longer stationing, and that the mailed food packages from home had never been delivered. Hegsth fiercely rebutted it as “fake news.” Reports are, however, that morale is at an all time low. All that while we are at war.

War seems to be the term everyone has settled on, given the realities of the ongoing hostilities. Of course a war would require congressional approval, which was never requested. What do you do, when your own administration breaks the law? When you have someone like Congressman Mullins refusing to meet his obligation to follow court orders for DHS? when you have by now over 300 (!) Habeas cases in which the government has defied court orders?

In immigration cases alone, the defiant violations range widely. Commonly there is no filing of briefs, justification for a petitioner’s detention, or updates and status reports to courts that had ordered them. Often during these periods of silence, prisoners are clandestinely transferred, and so a new Habeas case needs to be opened.

Then there is the failure to release the detainees in a court-ordered timely fashion. Or conditions are added, that were not allowed by the court (including wearing of ankle monitors or frequent check-ins with ICE.) Worse, some detainees are deported to third party countries, despite explicit court orders not to deport them. Often property is not returned to released detainees – important things like work permits or drivers licenses. Often the government lies to the courts, and often many of these violations are simultaneously present in any given case.

It is hard to find a case where there was any further action against violators, once they had reluctantly complied with the court orders. Impunity, in other words, for crime days, plural.

If you are interested in what courts CAN do if the Trump Administration continues to defy court orders, here is an informative listing by the Brennan Center for Justice. Not much reason to be optimistic, alas, when the buck stops with a Supreme Courts as our present one. Even the street posters know that….

Music hopes for Calm Seas.