Some readers may remember that I was once involved in the New Hampshire judicial process – though not based on any personal experience, of course.

That background is causing me considerable concern these days when I hear opinions expressed that certain laws, judicial decisions and even provisions of the U.S. Constitution aren’t necessary to comply with if there’s a strong feeling that those bedrocks of our democracy are standing in the way of current policies some of our leaders want to implement.

While I’m sure we all have our pet issues about the state of our laws and constitutional provisions, most of us work through the legislative or judicial process to have objectionable requirements amended or repealed, rather than simply ignoring or refusing to comply with the provisions currently in effect. That reliance on legislative and judicial outcomes is important because it enables us to depend on established rights and prohibitions, until they’re changed by the prescribed manner of making those revisions.

Frankly, any other method of organizing society would be unsettling and even frightening, because we’d have no baseline of behavior or protections we could count on. We would simply be at the mercy of those with the power to make their own rules, and we’d have no guarantee that we were acting in compliance with their mercurial or arbitrary requirements at any point in time.

So, let’s drag this political science down out of the clouds and talk about real events now occurring here on the ground.

If someone can bang on our door in the middle of the night and haul us away to who knows where, for who knows what reason, and if we have no way of preventing that from happening and no recourse if it should occur, then I doubt any of us, even as American citizens, are going to sleep very well in the meantime.

And so, as a former member of a coequal branch of our 250-year-old government, I find the current administration’s position that it can proceed as described not only frightening but arrogant and insulting, not to mention in violation of the most-fundamental principles that this country has stood for all that time.

Because that scenario sounds an awful lot like an executive branch that doesn’t have enough confidence in its own judgment to let anyone else review its decision-making, particularly judges whose long-established mandate is to do just that kind of reviewing thing. It’s called “due process” in both the Fifth and 14th Amendments of the Constitution, and those provisions make special points of ensuring we’re all entitled to it – even those among us who may not be citizens when that knock on the door occurs.

However, the thinking is apparently that the judges specifically charged to guard against trampling on individual rights couldn’t possibly be trusted to provide that due process, because it would take too long and they’d undoubtedly let everyone go – or stay, that is – and the wrong people would win. In the meantime, the country would be overwhelmed by and at the mercy of drug-dealing, gang-banging, crime-perpetrating miscreants, who may never have done any of those deeds and may be here under any number of legal authorities, but who need to be dealt with quickly and forcefully because … well, just because.

My last point is this, and you can discuss it among yourselves – if there are no holds barred in this war on people who some of us just don’t want here, then what’s to prevent other unchecked and expedient measures, including searches without warrants, or confessions obtained using threats to family members, or infringement of our free speech and assembly rights based on financial consequences? And if the prescribed safeguards don’t apply under those circumstances, either, then where is the line to be drawn?

For your consideration, I refer you to one of the culminating scenes in the play/movie “A Man for All Seasons,” where Sir Thomas More talks with a rival named Roper about the risks of heading down this convenient-but-treacherous road:

More: “Cut a road through the law to get after the Devil?”

Roper: “Yes. I’d cut down every law in England to do that.”

More: “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned on you... where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted with laws from coast to coast. … Man’s laws, not God’s, and if you cut them down … and you’re just the man to do it … do you really think you could stand upright in the wind that would blow then?”

L. Phillips Runyon III has practiced law in Peterborough for 50 years and was the presiding justice of the 8th Circuit Court for 27 years.