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Ruth King

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As Predicted, San Francisco-Based Obama Judge Blocks Trump Asylum Order By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on November 20th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/san-francisco-based-obama-judge-blocks-trump-asylum-order/

It took a few more days than I expected, but a San Francisco-based federal judge appointed by President Obama issued an order last night barring the administration from enforcing the asylum restrictions President Trump announced on November 9. U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar ruled that the president had unlawfully attempted to rewrite congressional law. (Mind you, these are the same federal judges who are striving to enshrine President Obama’s DACA program, an actual presidential rewrite of congressional law.)

Judge Tigar claims that by temporarily prohibiting illegal aliens from seeking asylum and requiring that asylum be sought at official ports of entry, the president imposed conditions “that Congress has expressly forbidden.” To the contrary, Trump was acting pursuant to a sweeping grant of legislative authority (Section 1182(f) of the immigration laws) which, the Supreme Court held only five months ago, vests the president with power to suspend entry and impose entry conditions when, in his judgment, the national interests require it. It is not a rewrite of congressional law; it is an action pursuant to congressional law, taken in order to respond to a significant security problem at the southern border. Under the terms of Trump’s order, the restrictions lapse after 90 days, at which point the status quo is to be restored (unless conditions on the ground warrant an extension), and illegal aliens can go back to filing fraudulent asylum claims whenever and wherever they please.

Tigar’s predictable judicial usurpation of immigration and border security policymaking authority will no doubt be appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which will no doubt endorse the district judge’s gambit.

To repeat what I wrote ten days ago:

As I write on Friday, the restraining order hasn’t come down yet. But it’s just a matter of time. Some federal district judge, somewhere in the United States, will soon issue an injunction blocking enforcement of the Trump administration’s restrictions on asylum applications.

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The Mad, Mad Meditations of Monsieur Macron By Victor Davis Hanson

By on November 20th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/emmanuel-macron-pan-european-army-crackpot-idea/

His idea of a pan-European army is as crackpot as it is ungracious.

Almost everything French president Emmanuel Macron has said recently on the topic of foreign affairs, the United States, and nationalism and patriotism is silly. He implicitly rebukes Donald Trump for praising the idea of nationalism as a creed in which citizens of sovereign nations expect their leaders to put the interests of their fellow citizens first and those of other nations second. And while critiquing nationalism, Macron nonetheless talks and acts as though he is an insecure French chauvinist of the first order.

The French president suffers from the usual dreams of some sort of European “empire” — Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler . . . Brussels? He probably envisions a new Rome steered by French cultural elites whose wisdom, style, and sophistication would substitute for polluting tanks and bombers, and who would play Greece’s robed philosophers to Europe’s Roman legions: “It’s about Europe having to become a kind of empire, as China is. And how the U.S. is.”

But aside from the fact that the immigration-wary eastern and financially strapped southern Europeans are increasingly skeptical of northern European imperial ecumenicalism, can Macron cite any “empire” in the past — Persian, Roman, Ottoman, British — that was not first and foremost “nationalist”?

Would an envisioned non-nationalist “European empire” put the interests of the United States or China on an equal plane with its own? Would it follow U.N. dictates? Does Macron object to nationalism only because other nationalists are more powerful than he is, with his own brand of nationalism (whether defined as French or Europe Unionist)? And does he therefore seek competitive clout through a nationalist, imperial European project?

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: HOW DOES ONE ENTER THE UNITED STATES LEGALLY?

By on November 20th, 2018

With all the brouhaha about undocumented and illegal immigrants, I wondered what it takes to obtain legal entry now.

The best source I could find was from the official website of the Department of Homeland Security’s Global Entry pages:

https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry/international-arrangements/registered-traveller/citizens-united-kingdom

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High Crimes and Misdemeanors -by Andrew McCarthy- Books reviewed

By on November 20th, 2018

https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/high-crimes-and-misdemeanors/

Collusion! Obstruction! And what about the Emoluments Clause!

Donald J. Trump’s antagonists began talking about impeaching him within days of his 2016 election victory. But on what grounds? Since “collusion with Russia” is not a crime, can the president “obstruct justice” by carrying out an undeniably constitutional act, such as firing the director of the FBI—the agency investigating the, er, collusion? Even if we assume, for argument’s sake, that the president could be criminally charged for such an act, isn’t there some Justice Department rule against indicting a sitting president? If he may not be indicted at all, why is a special prosecutor investigating him? And if he may not be indicted for lawful exercises of his Article II prerogatives—dismissing subordinates, criticizing investigations’ merits and investigators’ motives, pardoning political allies—could he still be impeached over them?

These are difficult, important questions. In deliberating over the Constitution, nothing bedeviled the framers more than the new office they were creating, the presidency of the United States. If the nation were to survive and thrive, the chief executive would have to possess powers so awesome they could, if abused, destroy the nation, eviscerating its founding ideals of liberty and self-determination. With Americans having just thrown off one monarch, an essential objective of the Constitution was to forestall the rise of another. The president would have to be checked by powers commensurate with his own. Today, we metaphorically refer to the ultimate check, impeachment, as a “nuclear option.” To James Madison it was, in a word, “indispensable.”

* * *

No American president has ever been removed from office by the Constitution’s impeachment process, though Richard Nixon surely would have been convicted by the Senate and evicted from the White House had he not resigned. Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were impeached by the House, but the Senate could not muster the two-thirds supermajority to convict and remove them. Since Clinton kept his job in 1998, the prospect of impeaching presidents hangs more heavily than before in a coarsened culture, a fractious body politic, and a 24/7 media age that conflates news reporting with opinion journalism and fiery partisanship.

Yet, like fascism and the infield-fly rule, impeachment is a concept often invoked but poorly understood. There is excellent scholarship on the subject, Raoul Berger’s Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems (1973) being the modern standard. Still, there remains enough misinformation that a popular guide, attuned to modern conditions, would be welcome.

My own modest effort, Faithless Execution, was published in 2014. Alas, if the year does not explain why I was too early to the party, the subtitle will: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment. It was verboten to speak of impeaching President Barack Obama—which is why a political case for doing so was needed. (I’ll come back to that.) In today’s terrain, of course, even a well-reasoned polemical book is destined to be rejected out of hand by at least half the intended audience.

We still need that popular guide in the contentious circumstances of 2018. Some eminent scholars have produced a pair of books that attempt to answer the call: Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide by Cass R. Sunstein, and To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment, a collaboration by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz.

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Caravan of ‘Migrants’ – a Crisis Decades in the Making America is on the edge of forfeiting its sovereignty and security. Michael Cutler

By on November 20th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271978/caravan-migrants-crisis-decades-making-michael-cutler
Thousands of aspiring illegal aliens have marched their way up through Central America and Mexico and are closing in on the U.S./Mexican border. Some of these individuals have reportedly split off from the caravan and have managed to enter the United States without inspection.

They have been encouraged to participate in this massive caravan by our own political “leaders” from both parties. Think about how frequently politicians from both particles have stated that since we cannot deport the millions of illegal aliens who are present in the United States, all we can do is to find a way to “get them out of the shadows” and provide them with lawful status. The Democrats insist on providing millions of illegal aliens with U.S. citizenship while the supposedly “tough” Republicans state that they will “only” provide them with lawful status and permission to work.

So now the debate is over whether or not to provide illegal aliens with citizenship! That is one hell of an example of “bait and switch” foisted on America by the Democrats and the Republicans who are colluding with each other.

Meanwhile a growing list of “Sanctuary Cities” and “Sanctuary States” promise to harbor and shield them from detection by ICE and even permit them to get driver’s licenses while illegal alien students are being offered incentives such as in-state tuition.

Furthermore, as President Trump has stated, not all of them are citizens of Central American countries.

Caravans of trucks and other vehicles have been brought in to facilitate the movement of thousands of people heading towards the United States, yet precious little information appears available to determine who is actually behind any of this. But clearly this is a carefully organized and orchestrated effort and the list of potential co-conspirators has to include the drug cartels and, as I have noted in recent articles, Iran and its client terrorist organization, Hezbollah that now works hand-in-glove with those cartels.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Essay from Essex “Growing up in the 1940-50s” Sydney Williams

By on November 20th, 2018

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“Anyway, the consequence of all this is that kids were left pretty much to decide for themselves what games they would play – indeed even to invent their own games.”

Antonin Scalia (1936-2016)

Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived, 2017

My wife and I spent a few days, recently, at the home of four grandchildren, while their parents went to New York for a well-deserved weekend. While they were at a casino charity gala at the Yale Club, sitting in the bleachers at a Dartmouth-Columbia football game and attending Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, with the German tenor Jonas Kaufman, at the Met, we were in our cars. In the roughly forty hours we were at their house, I made fifteen four-mile trips into town. (My wife made a few of her own.) Two of the trips were for my own purposes – buying newspapers – but the rest involved the grandchildren: visits to friends, sporting events, shopping, restaurants, etc. Heading out on the 15th trip to somewhere, I thought of the gap between their growing up and mine. Mine were the post-Depression and post-War years. My parents, being artists, worked from home. Both of them had traveled abroad when young, but once settled in Peterborough, NH – apart from the War, visiting parents in East River, CT and Wellesley, MA, attending horseshows and going skiing – they rarely left home. The decades since my childhood have seen vast changes.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s there were, at least in our house, no electronic gadgets, apart from a radio on which we listened to WBZ broadcasts of Red Sox games and shows like “The Lone Ranger,” Fibber McGee and Molly” and “The Shadow.” There were no electric appliances – no stove, refrigerator, washer-dryer or dishwasher; no blender, TV or toaster. A wood stove served the house until after I was married – and an electric refrigerator only arrived in 1953. Before that, we made weekly trips to the ice-man. (In my earliest memories ice was delivered, but that service was suspended not long after the War.) Ice was stored in a wooden, tin-lined ice chest and had to be replaced every four or five days. Dishes were washed by hand, and my mother, at least initially, used a laundromat. After my father died in 1968, she got a television and an electric stove. In terms of news, and apart from the radio, my parents subscribed to The New York Herald Tribune. Life, allowed us to imagine ourselves in foreign and exotic places. We read The Saturday Evening Post for its serialized stories and glanced through The New Yorker and Punch for their cartoons. We read a lot, as there were hundreds of books in the house.

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Turkey and US: Conflict Contained, Not Resolved by Burak Bekdil

By on November 20th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13328/turkey-us-conflict-contained

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that Turkey will not abide by the renewed U.S. sanctions on Iran’s oil and shipping industries, claiming that they are “steps aimed at unbalancing the world.”

U.S. President Donald Trump, in the same speech in which he hailed Erdoğan as a “friend and a tough, smart man,” ruled out the possibility of Gülen’s extradition.

The future actually looks potentially gloomier as the future of Syria shapes up and Erdoğan might well switch back to more radical anti-Western rhetoric ahead of critical local elections in March.

Only three months ago Turkey and its NATO ally the United States had too many issues about which to disagree: They had major divergences over Syria; they had different views on Turkey’s plans to deploy the Russian-made S-400 air defense system on NATO soil; they had mutual sanctions on top government officials due to Turkey’s refusal to free Andrew Brunson, an American evangelical Christian pastor living in Turkey who faced bogus charges of terrorism and espionage; they had a potential U.S. decision to block delivery to Turkey of arms systems, including the F-35 stealth fighter; they had potential U.S. sanctions on a Turkish public bank; the U.S. had doubled tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminium; a Turkish boycott on U.S. electronics; major differences over Syrian Kurds; and Turkey’s persistent demands for the extradition of Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim cleric who is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s political nemesis, living in self-exile in Pennsylvania.

Three months later, there is not much left of the anti-American euphoria in Turkey. Erdoğan has already stopped accusing the U.S. of waging economic warfare against Turkey. For his part, President Donald Trump has said, “We’re having a very good moment with Turkey … He [Erdoğan] is a friend of mine. He’s a strong man, he’s tough man, and he’s a smart man.”

What has changed so radically in three months to lift up the relationship from its worst tensions in decades to such warmth? Not much.

Under U.S. pressure, Turkey released Pastor Andrew Brunson; Turkey’s currency, the lira, has since steadied, and there is no more Turkish talk of an American “economic warfare.” Yet Ankara and Washington still have a rich menu of problems to be resolved. Washington has not had an ambassador in Ankara for more than a year now, a first in the modern history of U.S.-Turkish relations. But there is more.

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The EU’s Dangerous New Confidence Game by Douglas Murray

By on November 20th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13262/eu-confidence-game

The first problem of the European Court of Human Rights decision against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff is that it means that, at least in cases of blasphemy, truth is not a defence.

Such a judgement hands over the decision on what is or is not allowed to be said not to a European or national court, but to whoever can claim, plausibly or otherwise, that another individual has risked “the peace.”

There have been similar mobster tricks tried for some years now. They all run on the old claim, “I’m not mad with you myself; I’m just holding my friend back here.”

At the start of this decade, a minor story occurred that set the scene for the years that have followed. In 2010, a Saudi lawyer named Faisal Yamani wrote to the Danish newspapers that had published cartoons of Islam’s prophet, Mohammed. Claiming to act on behalf of 95,000 descendants of Mohammed, the Saudi lawyer said that the cartoons were defamatory and that legal proceedings would thereby begin.

However, everything about the supposed legal claim reeked. How had Mr Yamani located all these descendants? How had he come up with exactly 95,000 of them? And how could you claim that a statement about somebody who died 1,400 years ago was “defamatory”? Legally, one cannot “defame” the dead.

Everything about the claim was laughable Yet it had its desired effect. At least one Danish paper — Politiken — swiftly issued an apology for republishing the cartoons. So Mr Yamani got what he wanted. He had (one might suggest) conjured up a set of alleged victims and cobbled together an alleged offence, but no matter, because he also got a European newspaper to fold in no seconds flat. It was an interesting probe of the European system of justice — and a good example of submission. And a fine scene-setting precedent for the decade that has followed.

Now, eight years later, an even greater act of submission has come along. This one not imposed from some dodgy Saudi lawyer, but from the highest court in Europe.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Identity Politics Shape Dem Fight for House Leadership Pick one and you’re sexist, pick the other and you’re racist. Daniel Greenfield

By on November 20th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271949/identity-politics-shape-dem-fight-house-leadership-daniel-greenfield

Democrats who question Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s leadership are sexist. And Democrats who question Rep. Jim Clyburn’s qualifications for the No. 3 spot in the Democrat leadership are racist.

Even before the midterms, Pelosi was accusing critics of sexism.

“I think some of is it a little bit on the sexist side,” Pelosi had complained about those who suggested that she might want to step back from her leadership position.

“Nobody ever went up to Harry Reid and said that. Nobody ever says that to anybody except a woman.”

Unless they’re saying it to a black man.

Rep. Jim Clyburn made his case for the No. 3 Dem position by accusing fellow Democrats of racism.

“But someone came to me over the weekend and told me that, when I was whip before, I was a figurehead,” he whined, and suggested that they were “the little dog whistles that have been floating around this side for a long time.”

“Pelosi is swiftly moving to ensure that the diversity of voices that make up the majority are empowered on Capitol Hill,” Valerie Jarett gushed in a CNN op-ed.” It is imperative that women not only have a seat at a table but also lead the table.”

Unless it’s more imperative that black people lead the table.

Pick one and you’re sexist. Pick the other and you’re racist.

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Americans Turned to Trump to Roll Back the Progressive Tide To understand his appeal, look at the excesses of liberals in recent years. He’s a wall against the wave. By Joseph Epstein

By on November 20th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-turned-to-trump-to-roll-back-the-progressive-tide-1542672973

At lunch the other day, a friend and strong anti-Trumper wondered aloud what brought all those thousands of people out to Donald Trump’s rallies. “After all,” he said “they’re pretty much the same show.” Mr. Trump on stage, in his usual bragging mode, attacking the press, settling scores with people he feels have betrayed him, while the audience in their red hats applaud uproariously, yelling approval for 90 or so minutes. “What’s the attraction? I don’t get it.”

Not a bad question, really. As I thought it over, it occurred to me that what genuinely excites Mr. Trump’s crowds and draws them to him is their shared antiliberalism. By liberalism I do not mean liberalism of the kind that was at the center of our fathers’ Democratic Party—which supported labor unions, civil liberties, racial integration, involvement in international affairs. I refer to the liberalism now metamorphisized into progressivism, at the heart of the thinking of such Democrats as Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others.

This is the progressivism that edges into socialism, that is said to attract the young, that promises a newer, kinder America—the progressivism that exalts identity politics and has no argument with political correctness. As one looks upon the people who attend Mr. Trump’s rallies, one sees the faces not of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” but of the proletariat out of which Karl Marx’s dictatorship was supposed to derive. Yet these people, despite the progressives’ promises to them of free Medicare, free college tuition, and the rest, want nothing to do with Sens. Warren, Sanders, Booker & Co. Quite the reverse: They loathe them.

The man who attends a Trump rally turns on his television set and that night’s news leads off with a Black Lives Matter protest in his city. If that city is Chicago, he might recall that this year some 2,619 people have been shot, 475 shot and killed, the preponderance of these being black people shot by black youth gangs. If it is another city, there is a distinct possibility, as fairly often in the past, that the protest will lead to looting of nearby shops. Al Sharpton, nattily turned out, is likely to have flown in for the festivities to remind everyone about the world’s injustice.

Our man changes channels and is greeted by a story of a long and happy lesbian marriage. He reads in the papers that people are fired from jobs for remarks that, under the reign of political correctness, are interpreted as racist, sexist, you name it; that students feel unsafe at Yale; that a year’s tuition, room and board at Dartmouth is $74,000. Doubtless before long he will read a story about an 11-year-old who is suing his parents for not allowing him to transgender himself.

Oh God, he thinks, make America great again, make America straight again, make America anything but what it is becoming. What elected Donald Trump, and what sustains him, is not his rather dubious charisma, his ideas, his obvious jolt to the country’s earlier slow economic growth, and no, not even the wretched campaign run by Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump was chosen as a rebuke to the progressivism that has made life in America seem chaotic, if not a touch mad, and that now threatens to take over the Democratic Party. CONTINUE AT SITE

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