RUTHFULLY YOURS

Conservatives are torn these days. We wake up happy and excited to read the headlines and see what great new thing Trump has done. Then we’re hit with images of thugs in black masks beating up Trump supporters. It is very disturbing.

Democrats are scared stiff that Trump’s sensible, practical polices will make our country safer, boost our economy, and deliver jobs to blacks and millennials. That’s why they are running around in pink hats and black masks, beating dissenters up literally or verbally.

Democrats are rejecting the heart of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power via the ballot box.

Democrat leaders says Trump has no right to enact the conservative policies we voted for, that our election victory is illegitimate. They have embraced violence and violent rhetoric. In Congress, senators boycotted committee meetings, forcing an emergency rule to move nominations forward. Progressives are training government employees in passive resistance. That will create another confrontation. There is talk of impeachment before Trump is in office two weeks.

This is not the 1960s. This is not a mass movement protesting an unpopular war or supporting civil rights legislation. We have Obama’s community agitation, not Martin Luther King’s nonviolent resistance.

It is hard to claim the moral high ground when men in black masks beat a Trump supporter unconscious, sending him to the hospital with a concussion. They are “protesting” Americans’ right to vet Syrian refugees.

Early this morning a US Appeals Court rejected President Trump’s appeal to immediately reinstate the travel ban executed by the administration.

A US appeals court has rejected a request by the White House to immediately reinstate its travel ban, just hours after a defiant Donald Trump promised to win the court battle.

The Department of Justice had filed notice of its intention to challenge Friday night’s order by Judge James Robart which put the ban on immigration from seven Muslim majority countries on hold.

On Sunday morning, news broke that the challenge had been rejected.

The judges making the decision were appointed by Obama and Carter.

Appeals Court that denied DOJ’s appeal on Trump’s EO was 2/3 liberal who are now acting as activists instead of judges upholding the law pic.twitter.com/JEkI32jv5P

In this new special edition of The Glazov Gang we host a debate between Alex Mohajer, a Huffington Post Writer and Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Bros For America and Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the Freedom Center and editor of The Point atFrontpagemag.com.

Alex and Daniel went toe-to-toe on President Trump’s Executive Order on Immigration, in which they tackled the issue of how to best fight terror, if Trump is legitimate in his approach, the nature of Islam, and much more.

Don’t miss it!

By 2008, America was politically split nearly 50/50 as it had been in 2000 and 2004. The Democrats took a gamble and nominated Barack Obama, who became the first young, Northern, liberal president since John F. Kennedy narrowly won in 1960.

Democrats had believed that the unique racial heritage, youth, and rhetorical skills of Obama would help him avoid the fate of previous failed Northern liberal candidates Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry. Given 21st-century demography, Democrats rejected the conventional wisdom that only a conservative Democrat with a Southern accent could win the popular vote (e.g., Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore).

Moreover, Obama mostly ran on pretty normal Democratic policies rather than a hard-left agenda. His platform included opposition to gay marriage, promises to balance the budget, and a bipartisan foreign policy.

Instead, what followed was a veritable “hope and change” revolution not seen since the 1930s. Obama pursued a staunchly progressive agenda — one that went well beyond the relatively centrist policies upon which he had campaigned. The media cheered and signed on.

Soon, the border effectively was left open. Pen-and-phone executive orders offered immigrant amnesties. The Senate was bypassed on a treaty with Iran and an intervention in Libya.

Political correctness under the Obama administration led to euphemisms that no longer reflected reality.

Poorly conceived reset policy with Russia and a pivot to Asia both failed. The Middle East was aflame.

The Iran deal was sold through an echo chamber of deliberate misrepresentations.

The national debt nearly doubled during Obama’s two terms. Overregulation, higher taxes, near-zero interest rates, and the scapegoating of big businesses slowed economic recovery. Economic growth never reached 3 percent in any year of the Obama presidency — the first time that had happened since Herbert Hoover’s presidency.

President Trump’s promise to investigate voter fraud has drawn predictable responses from Democrats and the media, who insist there is no such thing and have been fighting for years to prevent any inquiry into the matter. But an investigation in Mr. Trump’s hometown shows that the problem is real.

In 2013 the New York City Department of Investigation—the storied law-enforcement arm of city government, which houses and manages all the city’s inspectors general and investigators—decided to test the system. City investigators posed as 63 ineligible individuals still on the city voter rolls. Each ineligible voter had died, moved out of the jurisdiction, or been convicted of a felony at least two years earlier.

The investigators didn’t go to great lengths to hide their attempted fraudulent votes. In five instances investigators in their 20s or 30s posed as voters age 82 to 94. In some cases the investigators were of different ethnic backgrounds from the voters they were impersonating. Yet each was given a ballot and allowed to cast a vote without question.

In other instances the investigators informed the poll worker that they had moved but didn’t have time to get to their new home on Election Day; all but one was allowed to vote. Only one investigator was flat-out rejected. He had the misfortune of trying to vote at a polling place where the clerk was the mother of the ineligible felon he was impersonating.

Ninety-seven percent of the barely disguised phony voters were allowed to vote unimpeded, and none was referred for criminal charges or officially reported to the Board of Elections. One can only imagine what a sharp operator trying to fix an election could do by flooding polling places with ineligible voters.

The opposition, namely the media and the “street theater” have no alternative….they are more aw shucks, then anything else….rsk

“Shock and awe,” a term of art from U.S. war doctrine, has been deployed by advocates of Donald Trump to describe the pace of executive actions the past two weeks.

The military originators of this concept, which is famously associated with the Iraq invasion in 2003, said shock and awe was a “doctrine of rapid dominance” whose goal was to affect the will of an adversary “to fight or respond to our strategic policy.”

That is the theory, and it fits the Trump strategic model: Put political actions in motion and force the world to adjust.

The Trump White House believed it was important for the president to fulfill his campaign commitments immediately, whether the border wall or the immigrant ban. Problems or objections could be dealt with later as the details got worked out.

So far, the White House’s shock and awe of executive orders mainly has effected a popular uprising, and not just in the streets.

To be sure, the political system, especially the bureaucracies, needed to be challenged and shaken up. Almost certainly one reason Team Trump didn’t pass the travel order through normal interagency vetting review is they believed—and experience bears them out—that agency lawyers might have tried to dilute or kill it. Instead, the Trump template will dominate their post-order implementation.

But the aftershocks from Mexico and now the executive order on travelers from seven mostly Muslim countries reveal the liabilities in transferring war-fighting doctrine to politics.

A well-understood law of political motion holds that every political act by a U.S. president puts other significant political forces in motion.

Mr. Trump’s partisan opposition, notably the organized squads of street people, was already on hair trigger. But the fallout from the Trump order on immigrant and refugee restrictions may be bringing to life too many disparate forces against him and his young presidency.

Like the two prior months, January’s news was dominated by Mr. Trump. While the liberal media is obsessed with his habit of tweeting amid claims of “fake news,” what has been newsworthy is how much has accomplished in the twelve days since inauguration. The new President signed five executive orders in the first five days, nine memorandums, and began to unravel regulatory burdens. He met with the British PM, and corporate and union leaders. It has all been in keeping with his campaign promises.

He froze the hiring of federal employees. He removed the United States from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was not supported by Mrs. Clinton and which was not expected to receive Senate approval. He signed a go-ahead for the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines, projects that had been approved by the State Department, before Mr. Obama, bowing to pressure from rail investors like Warren Buffett and environmental groups, put a stop to them. He canceled federal funding to sanctuary cities. He began to undo some of the mandates required of the Affordable Care Act. And, remembering his promise to “drain the Swamp,” he signed a five-year ban on White House officials becoming lobbyists. He ordered the removal of criminal illegal immigrants. On the last day of the month he nominated Neil Gorsuch of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Colorado to the Supreme Court.

In a controversial move, toward the end of the month, he temporarily suspended immigration from seven terror-prone countries. This aroused resistance, much of it feigned; keep in mind, in 2011 Mr. Obama placed a six-month ban on immigration from Iraq, with no opposition and no crocodile tears. Of the roughly 100,000 people entering the U.S. from overseas every day, 109 were detained during the three days ending last Sunday. All had been released by Monday. The ban, which is for 90 days, applies to seven predominantly Muslim nations – nations cited by the Obama Administration as incubators of terrorism. To put the number of seven countries in perspective, there are fifty-six UN member states who are also members of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation. The decision was not Islamophobiac, theophobic or xenophobic. It was aimed at preventing terrorists from entering the United States – protecting Americans is every President’s primary responsibility. Could the ban have been announced and implemented more effectively? Probably. He could have alerted our partners both at home and abroad, but we should not alert our enemies as to our intentions. Regardless of what he did, Mr. Trump would have been criticized.

President Trump has nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch, 49, to fill the Supreme Court seat held by Justice Antonin Scalia until he passed away last February. In announcing the nomination, President Trump said, “Judge Gorsuch has outstanding legal skills, a brilliant mind, tremendous discipline and has earned bipartisan support.” President Trump added that Judge Gorsuch was “the man our country needs and needs badly to ensure the rule of law and the rule of justice.”

Judge Gorsuch was a Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford, a Harvard Law School graduate, and a clerk for Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. He served in a high-ranking position in the Justice Department before he was nominated by former President George W. Bush and confirmed by voice vote in the Senate for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in 2006.

Judge Gorsuch shares Justice Scalia’s originalist legal philosophy. Like Justice Scalia did throughout his judicial career, Judge Gorsuch seeks to interpret the Constitution through strict construction of its text and an understanding of the Founding Fathers’ original intent.

“The great project of Justice Scalia’s career was to remind us of the differences between judges and legislators,” Judge Gorsuch remarked at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland. He said that judges should refrain from imposing their own moral predilections in their decisions. Instead, they should use “text, structure and history” in their interpretations of the law. Legislators “may appeal to their own moral convictions and to claims about social utility to reshape the law as they think it should be in the future,” Judge Gorsuch said. However, “judges should do none of these things in a democratic society.”

As Judge Gorsuch put it in one of his opinions, judges should “apply the law as it is, not as they wish it to be.”

It is this approach, as reflected in his opinions, which explains Judge Gorsuch’s ranking near the top of the so-called “Scalia Index,” created by some legal academics, to analyze who would be likely to best follow in Justice Scalia’s footsteps.

Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia, is a native Coloradan and avid outdoorsman. He clerked for a federal appellate judge and two Supreme Court justices and spent a decade practicing law before his appointment in 2006, at age 39, to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In the decade since, he has written some 850 opinions.

The way to take a judge’s measure is to read his opinions, and so we set out to review Judge Gorsuch’s. It was not an arduous task, for his prose is unusually engaging—think Scalia, with none of the abrasiveness. Justice Elena Kagan has declared herself a fan of his writing style. The only difficulty in summarizing Judge Gorsuch’s output is the compulsion to quote, at length, from so many of his opinions.

One opens this way: “Haunted houses may be full of ghosts, goblins, and guillotines, but it’s their more prosaic features that pose the real danger. Tyler Hodges found that out when an evening shift working the ticket booth ended with him plummeting down an elevator shaft.” The case, by the way, was a prosaic dispute between insurers. Another opinion starts: “What began as a fight at a strip club finds its way here as a clash over hearsay.”

Judge Gorsuch shows a concern for the people whose disputes are before the court. Each opinion typically begins with the name of the person seeking relief and why. A recent example: “After a bale of hay hit and injured Miriam White while she was operating her tractor, she sued the manufacturer, Deere & Company.” Ms. White’s appeal was summarily denied, but even the brief, three-page opinion reflects a serious engagement with her arguments and the facts—in contrast with the boilerplate language judges often use in such decisions. Win or lose, parties appearing before Judge Gorsuch surely know that they have been treated with fairness, consideration and respect.