Liberals are curiously less than rapturous about a political victory only they could have accomplished: the election of Donald Trump, a living caricature straight from the pages of a satirical novel, to the country’s highest office. Liberals do count as a victory, and have for a long time, laws that authorize the wholesale removal of citizens from their homes by armed agents of the state based on what may amount to nothing more substantive than finger-pointing.

In this writer’s opinion, they’re the same victory.

Since the advent of the restraining order in the 1970s, and particularly since the enactment of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994—under the auspices of which billions of federal tax dollars have been poured into state courts and police precincts to condition how judges and law enforcement officials respond to complaints of abuse—the priority in the U.S. has been to curtail evidentiary requirements and…