I am staring at my coffee, watching the steam rise in a lazy, serpentine coil, and I am struck by the profound realization that this beverage has done more for my well-being this morning than the entire apparatus of the United States government has done for the concept of accountability in the last four decades. We are witnessing the final, whimpering death of the system of checks and balances, and frankly, it’s about as exciting as watching paint dry in a humidity chamber.

Here is the latest dispatch from the hellscape of administrative law: A federal judge has officially ruled that the Trump administration—a collection of grifters and ghouls so transparently villainous they make cartoon antagonists look nuanced—is perfectly within its rights to keep federal lawmakers out of Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. Yes, you read that correctly. The people we ostensibly elect to write the laws and oversee the budget are now legally barred from seeing what the Executive branch is doing with the money. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of a teenager locking their bedroom door and screaming “Get out!” at their parents, except the bedroom is full of human misery and the parents are feeble, power-suited narcissists.

Let’s dissect this cadaver of a ruling, shall we? The administration argued, with a straight face, that having Congress members snooping around detention centers was disruptive. Disruptive to what, exactly? The seamless efficiency of the suffering? The carefully calibrated ambiance of despair? They claimed that inspections burden the staff. Heaven forbid we burden the jailers with the gaze of the people paying their salaries. The court, in its infinite, precedent-bound wisdom, nodded along. The judiciary, acting as the rubber stamp it has always secretly yearned to be, decided that the separation of powers means the Executive branch gets a moat, and the Legislative branch gets a pair of binoculars that don’t work.

But let us not save all our venom for the administration and the courts. Oh no, that would be intellectually lazy, and I am nothing if not rigorous in my disdain. Let’s talk about the lawmakers, specifically the performative outrage merchants on the Left. Why do they want to get into these facilities? Do we really believe that a brief walking tour by a Congressional delegation is going to dismantle the prison-industrial complex? Please. I have seen more effective intervention from a substitute teacher in a riot.

These lawmakers want access for the same reason tourists want access to the Louvre: to say they were there. They want the photo op. They want to stand near a chain-link fence, furrow their brows, point an accusatory finger at a fluorescent light fixture, and then rush back to Twitter to post a thread about how "heartbroken" they are. They crave the content. They need the B-roll for their next campaign ad. By blocking their access, the judge hasn’t just struck a blow against transparency; he has inadvertently dismantled the Democrats' content creation strategy for the quarter. Now they’ll have to go back to kneeling in kente cloth or reading poetry on the House floor.

This ruling is the perfect encapsulation of the American condition. We have the Right, obsessed with secrecy and force, treating government facilities like private fiefdoms where the rules of humanity need not apply. They operate on the logic that if you can’t see the cage, the cage doesn’t exist. It is object permanence for fascists. Then we have the Left, obsessed with the aesthetic of resistance but utterly incapable of wielding actual power. They hold the purse strings! They literally fund these facilities! If they truly wanted to stop the abuses, they could defund the operations tomorrow. But they won’t. They prefer the theater of the "inspection," the drama of being denied entry, because it allows them to play the victim rather than the accomplice.

So, the judge allows the policy to stand. The doors remain locked. The windows remain draped. Inside, the machinery of detention grinds on, unbothered by the pesky oversight of democracy. Outside, the politicians wail and gnash their teeth, secretly relieved that they don't actually have to solve the problem, only campaign on it. And here I sit, watching the steam vanish from my coffee, marveling at how we have built a society where the only thing more toxic than the secrets we keep is the incompetence of the people trying to uncover them. We are not a serious country. We are a reality TV show that has run out of writers, directed by a judiciary that has lost the plot, starring a cast of characters who all deserve to be cancelled.