RUTHFULLY YOURS

If the Left is going to twist every bit of Trump administration news into fiction, who is going to believe them when, inevitably, there actually is something worth raising hell about? The question is worth asking — for about the tenth time this week . . . and it’s only Tuesday! — in light of the fuss Democrats and their media friends are making over a discussion between just-fired acting attorney general Sally Yates and Senator Jeff Sessions, President Trump’s attorney-general nominee, at a 2015 Judiciary Committee hearing.

Yates, of course, has just made the leap from obscurity to the pantheon of progressive victim-heroes. Knowing she was soon going to be out of her very temporary job as acting AG, she seized the opportunity to go out in a blaze of glory with an act of insubordination against Trump’s executive order (EO) blocking the admission of various aliens into the U.S.

Yates is an Obama appointee. Trump’s EO is anathema to the Left, but regardless of what one thinks of the policy it advances, it is lawful. Moreover, even when orders are not lawful, everyone in the Justice Department knows that one’s choice, upon being given a directive from a superior about which one has misgivings, is to carry out the order or resign. Yates instead chose sabotage. She was rightfully canned, and the only question really worth pondering is why President Trump had maintained her in such an important position in the first place.

Naturally, that will not impede the frenetic campaign to fashion The Legend of Sally Yates — before the clock strikes 8:01 this evening, when Trump’s announcement of a Supreme Court pick turns her back into Sally Who?

Toward both that end and the simultaneous Democratic rope-a-dope to derail or at least delay the confirmation of Senator Sessions and other Trump nominees, the Left has leaped on a portion of Yates’s 2015 confirmation hearing (to become Obama’s deputy attorney general) in which she was questioned by Sessions.

Sessions asked Yates, “Do you think the attorney general has a responsibility to say ‘no’ to the president if he asks for something improper?” Elaborating, he pointed out that, before being confirmed as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, attorney general Loretta Lynch had said that she supported President Obama’s lawless immigration policies. Sessions added, “A lot of people have defended the Lynch nomination . . . by saying: ‘Well, [the president] appoints somebody who’s going to execute his views. What’s wrong with that?’ But if the views the president wants to execute are unlawful, should the attorney general or the deputy attorney general say ‘no’?”

Yates responded, “Senator, I believe that the attorney general or the deputy attorney general has an obligation to follow the law and the Constitution, and to give their independent legal advice to the president.”

On the Saturday afternoon last February when he received word of Justice Scalia’s death, Neil M. Gorsuch “immediately lost [his] breath” and “couldn’t see . . . for the tears.”

In his grief over the death of a justice he deeply admired and emulated, Judge Gorsuch could hardly have imagined the series of events that would lead to his being selected today to fill the Scalia vacancy. And while he has rightly recognized that no one could ever replace Justice Scalia, there are strong reasons to expect Justice Gorsuch to be an eminently worthy successor to the great justice.

Gorsuch is a brilliant jurist and dedicated originalist and textualist. He thinks through issues deeply. He writes with clarity, force, and verve. And his many talents promise to give him an outsized influence on future generations of lawyers.

Gorsuch’s judicial outlook is reflected in his beautiful speech (text and video) celebrating — and embracing — Justice Scalia’s traditional understanding of the judicial role and his originalist methodology:

Perhaps the great project of Justice Scalia’s career was to remind us of the differences between judges and legislators. To remind us that 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. But that judges should do none of these things in a democratic society. That judges should instead strive (if humanly and so imperfectly) to apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be—not to decide cases based on their own moral convictions or the policy consequences they believe might serve society best.

In that speech, Gorsuch acknowledges that Justice Scalia’s project had its critics, from the secular moralist Ronald Dworkin to the pragmatist Richard Posner. He explains why he rejects those critics and instead sides with Justice Scalia in believing that “an assiduous focus on text, structure, and history is essential to the proper exercise of the judicial function.” The Constitution itself carefully separates the legislative and judicial powers. Whereas the legislative power is the “power to prescribe new rules of general applicability for the future,” the judicial power is a “means for resolving disputes about what existing law is and how it applies to discrete cases and controversies.” This separation of powers is “among the most important liberty-protecting devices of the constitutional design.” Among other things, if judges were to act as legislators by imposing their preferences as constitutional dictates, “how hard it would be to revise this so-easily-made judicial legislation to account for changes in the world or to fix mistakes.” Indeed, the “very idea of self-government would seem to wither to the point of pointlessness.”

If progressives were to become empiricists, they would look at the symptoms of the last election and come up with disinterested diagnoses, therapies, and prognoses.

Although their hard-left candidate won the popular vote, even that benchmark was somewhat deceiving — given the outlier role of California and the overwhelming odds in their favor. The Republicans ran a candidate who caused a veritable civil war in their ranks and who was condemned by many of the flagship conservative media outlets. Trump essentially ran against a united Democratic party, the Republican establishment, the mainstream media (both liberal and conservative) — and won.

He was outspent. He was out-organized. He was outpolled and demonized daily as much by Republicans as Democrats. Yet he not only destroyed three political dynasties (the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas) but also has seemingly rendered the Obama election matrix nontransferable to anyone other than Obama himself.

Not that Hillary did not try to copy Obama’s formula. She brought on Obama politicos to staff her campaign. She supported all the Obama initiatives, from Obamacare and record debt to a collapsed foreign policy. She spoke in a faux-inner city accent the same way Obama had to get out the African-American vote. She outdid Obama’s clinger speech by her own twist of “deplorables” and “irredeemables.” She returned to her own hard-left phase of the 1990s. Yet she was trounced in the electoral college and saw the fabled “blue wall” crumble.

DIAGNOSIS

Any reasonable post-election autopsy for a party would identify certain inconvenient truths.

1) The African-American vote is vital to the Democratic party, but it is dubious to suppose that blacks will register, turn out, and vote in a bloc (as they did in 2008 and 2012) for a Democratic candidate other than Barack Obama. The very efforts to ensure that 95 percent of blacks will vote for other Democratic nominees might only polarize other groups in an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic America. Trump, of course, knows all this and will make the necessary adjustments.

2) Asians and Hispanics are less a monolithic voting bloc. Supposedly discredited melting-pot assimilation, integration, and intermarriage are still the norm and can temper tribal solidarities and peel away from Democrats a third of their assumed constituents — in an electoral landscape where there is already only a thin margin of error, given that Democrats have written off the white working classes. In the case of Latinos, red states such as Texas and Arizona are unlikely to be flipped soon by Latino bloc voting, especially if Trump closes down the border and ends illegal immigration as a demographic electoral tool of the Democratic party. And Latino electoral-college strength is dissipated in states that are likely to be blue anyway (California, Nevada, New Mexico).

3) The race/class/gender agenda so favored by coastal elites and promulgated by media, Hollywood, and popular culture is an anathema to Middle America, especially its strange disconnect between affluence and the mandate for purportedly progressive equality. Moralistic lectures from wealthy people are not a way to win over the working classes. Rants by Hollywood celebrities and racialist sermons by would-be DNC chairs will not win over 51 percent of the voters in swing states. The twin agents of progressive dogma, the media and the university, are themselves under financial duress, must recalibrate, and have lost support from half the country.

President Trump’s temporary ban on entry into the U.S. by various categories of aliens has caused a firestorm. That owes in part to the rash implementation of perfectly legal restrictions, but the hysteria is out of proportion to the minimal harm actually done.

One of the most dismaying parts of the debate has been the banter over whether Trump has imposed a “Muslim Ban.”

It is no surprise, of course, that Islamists — along with their friends and stooges on both sides of the political aisle — have used the opportunity to agitate and hand-wring over the specter of America “at war with Islam.” That, after all, has been page-one of their playbook for a generation.

There has also, however, been indignation on the other side, from Trump defenders denying that the executive order (EO) is in any way a “Muslim ban.” Time after time this weekend, right-of-center news outlets and commentators could be found defying their guests and counterparts to find the word “Muslim” or “Islam” in the EO. I sympathize with the frustration. The EO is clearly not a ban on all Muslims, or even of any specific Muslim. Since the other side is slanderously suggesting otherwise, there is an irresistible urge to seize on anything that proves them wrong.

Yet the only reason there is an EO is the threat posed by sharia-supremacism, which we inexactly refer to as “radical Islam.” You can’t have radical Islam without Islam. Therefore, the people the EO seeks to exclude are, of necessity, Muslims — not all Muslims, of course, but a significant subset of them nonetheless.

Trump got to the EO (which is a temporary stop on the way to a more refined policy) by starting — during his campaign — with the proposal of a temporary categorical ban on all Muslims. I highlight temporary because it is important. Trump never took the position that all Muslims outside the U.S. should be banned from our country for all time. He recognized the need to separate our Muslim friends from our radical Islamic enemies. He was groping for a way to do that while protecting the country.

For decades, Washington has been suicidally unwilling to target our radical Islamic enemies for fear of offending Muslims in general. Trump’s more security-minded approach — which many Americans outside Washington regard as common sense — was to call a temporary halt to the admission of Muslim aliens until the government could figure out an effective way to screen out Islamists from pro-constitutional Muslims who would be an asset to our country.

During the campaign, then, Trump asked Rudy Giuliani — the former New York City mayor and renowned federal prosecutor — to help him develop a policy that would solve this dilemma. Rudy then put together a team of advisers, of which I was a member, to work the problem. Trump’s proposals consequently evolved away from a coarse categorical ban, adopting instead a threat-based approach that would rely on vetting rather than banning, and that would target the places where the threat is most prevalent.

When all the campaign booze was downed and the last “I’m With Her” balloons were popped, bleary Democrat hacks rose from stained couches to try and explain the election to the rest of their party.

Two explanations made the rounds like the last champagne bottle for a victory that never came.

Hillary was a bad candidate. Her shady financial dealings made her untrustworthy. The more she tried to appeal to everyone, the less she appealed to anyone. She was better at hitting up big donors at glitzy parties than at interacting with working class voters. And the huge campaign machine they financed was no substitute for voter excitement.

Hillary was a historic candidate who would be sitting in the Oval Office right now if it hadn’t been for the FBI and the Russians. President Trump is illegitimate and must be impeached. Hillary was not defeated by her flaws. Instead she was a wonderful leader who was stymied by a rigged election.

The first explanation was championed by the Sandernistas of the far left. Their case was straightforward. Hillary lost because she was a bad candidate. Bernie would have won. The Democrats needed to move forward by burying Hillary’s machine and replacing it with the even more radical Bernie left.

But the Clinton machine had no interest in being buried.

The Clintons are not just two greedy politicians. They’re a brand and an industry. The huge sums of money they raised went to subsidize a whole network of loyalists. And then there were the many friends who had gotten jobs based on the strength of their connections to Clintonworld.

It wasn’t just about the S.S. Hillary sinking into the cold waters of Chesapeake Bay. Hillary’s defeat endangered the positions of all her friends who had schemed, plotted and broken the rules to get her this far; the leaders of Democrat outfits in states across the country, bundlers who threw a lot of other people’s money into a giant hole and lobbyists who got by on the strength of their Clinton connections.

That $1.2 billion campaign cost was the tip of the iceberg. Billions had been plowed into Clintonworld.

They couldn’t and wouldn’t accept the blame for backing a bad candidate. So they lied. They insisted that she hadn’t lost. Hillary had been illegitimately denied the White House by a vast conspiracy.

President Trump last night fired the insubordinate acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she ordered federal prosecutors to ignore Trump’s lawful emergency executive order restricting travel and immigration from Islamic terrorist-infested nations.

The Yates termination may foreshadow a major house-cleaning at the U.S. Department of Justice. That agency is overrun by left-wing careerists who have no respect for the rule of law and who operate under the legally and morally grotesque assumption that aliens, including suspected terrorists, ought to enjoy all the same rights as U.S. citizens.

Yates “has betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States,” Trump said in a press release. “This order was approved as to form and legality by the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel.”

He called Yates “an Obama Administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.”

“It is time to get serious about protecting our country,” Trump continued. “Calling for tougher vetting for individuals travelling from seven dangerous places is not extreme. It is reasonable and necessary to protect our country.”

Last night President Trump also relieved acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Daniel Ragsdale of his duties. No reason for the decision had been reported at press time. The new acting ICE director is Thomas D. Homan who has been executive associate director of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) since 2013.

When the U.S. Senate was considering Yates’s nomination for deputy attorney general in 2015, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama), whose nomination as attorney general is pending in the Senate, made his opposition known. According to Politico, Sessions “urged his colleagues to defeat Yates” objecting “to what he said was her involvement in defending the federal government against a lawsuit 26 states have filed challenging unilateral actions Obama took in November to grant millions of illegal immigrants quasi-legal status and work permits.” Sessions described the Obama actions as “presidential overreach.”

Hours before Trump ended Yates’s employment, Yates took the extraordinary step of directing Justice Department attorneys to refuse to defend Trump’s executive order in court.

“I am responsible for ensuring that the positions we take in court remain consistent with this institution’s solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right,” she wrote in a letter to lawyers at the Department of Justice. “At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with these responsibilities nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful.”

Crowds, crowds, crowds! Or, in some cases, are they a mob of useful idiots? As Ed Lasky noted, the hysterical reaction of the anti-Trump crowd, erroneously called civil and human rights defenders, to President Trump (R)’s executive order temporarily banning visitors and immigrants from a few Muslim-majority terrorist countries (not a ban on Muslims) is hypocritical. (The Women’s March and the airport mobbers all look alike – all sound and fury, signifying nothing but moral narcissism.)

Below is a photo from the massive crowds in Chicago protesting former (thank goodness!) President Barack Hussein Obama (D)’s 2011 order banning Iraqi refugees for six months.

Or maybe this is the large, angry crowd reacting to Obama’s decision in the final weeks of his administration banning desperate Cubans fleeing failing Communist Cuba from entering the U.S. without a visa.

President Barack Obama is ending the longstanding “wet foot, dry foot” policy that allows Cubans who arrive in the United States without a visa to become permanent residents, the administration announced Thursday.

The move, which wasn’t previously outlined and is likely one of the final foreign policy decisions of Obama’s term, terminates a decades-long policy that many argued amounted to preferential treatment for a single group of migrants.

Perhaps if a large crowd greeted Syed Rizwan Farook as he brought his mail-order bride, Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistani national raised in Saudi Arabia, into America breezing through Chicago’s O’Hare airport over two years ago, they could have convinced them to love the USA instead of plotting to slaughter innocent Americans.

This twisted, evil Muslim (yes, a coincidence I know) couple bonded over their hatred of America, its people and their freedoms, and their religions, going on to gun down many in San Bernardino, California in December 2015.

If Malik had already radicalized years ago, how did she get the go-ahead to immigrate to the United States in 2014?

A senior State Department official told CNN on Wednesday that Malik was not asked about jihadist leanings when a U.S. consular official interviewed her in Pakistan for her fiancée visa application last year. That’s because no red flags were found in the Department of Homeland Security application that was submitted and checked before the interview, the official said.

The consular officer who did the interview reported that Malik was able to answer enough questions about Farook to prove that she knew him well and that they had a personal relationship, a main focus of the consular interview process, according to two senior State Department officials.

After the interview, Malik passed two other security database checks before her visa was adjudicated. Records show that the visa was decided on the day after the interview: May 23, 2014. Malik came to the United States on July 27 of that year. According to California marriage records, she married Farook just one month later.

As we were taught in kindergarten, safety first! Oh, how their victims, not to mention those of September 11, the Boston Marathon, the Orlando nightclub, and other innocents slaughtered in this country by those who entered into America’s welcoming doors, wish America had followed this basic rule.

And most Americans agree with President Trump’s order.

Most voters approve of President Trump’s temporary halt to refugees and visitors from several Middle Eastern and African countries until the government can do a better job of keeping out individuals who are terrorist threats.

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., writes frequently about real estate development, public/private partnerships, constitutional law, social policy, higher education, and the Middle East and is past President fo Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME)

Now that Dr. Ben Carson has moved closer to being confirmed as President-Elect Trump’s candidate for secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the new administration can begin planning to fulfill promises outlined in a 10-point “plan for urban renewal,” which promised “tax holidays for inner-city investment and new tax incentives to get foreign companies to relocate in blighted American neighborhoods.” It also pledges to “empower cities and states to seek a federal disaster designation for blighted communities in order to initiate the rebuilding of vital infrastructure, the demolition of abandoned properties, and the increased presence of law enforcement.”

This language sounds like a resurrection of Jack Kemp’s “enterprise zone” model, an idea that reappeared in the Clinton years as “empowerment zones” and with George W. Bush as “Go-Zones,” and can now provide a model for President Trump’s campaign promise to jump-start the rebuilding of inner cities and enlist the private sector in helping to complete this task.

The key to the empowerment zone concept is that it attempts to solve the problems of inner-city unemployment and poverty without direct, substantial government expenditure. It also uses a number of incentives – investment and employment tax credits, regulatory relief, capital gains exclusions, employee training, business incubators, low-interest loans, and other tools – to draw investment into areas that, absent the incentives, would be unlikely to have materialized.

Dr. Carson himself articulated an interesting twist on finding tax revenue to fund the administration’s ambitious plans. He has said that Trump will “be working on empowering people in empowerment zones throughout cities, using a lot of the money from overseas that is stuck over there because of our tax situation,” meaning they hope to convince U.S. companies, many of whose profits are currently offshore, to bring the corporate taxes due on those monies back to America, necessarily with the incentive of a reduced tax rate.

The beauty of deriving a new stream of revenue from repatriated corporate profits, of course, is that it does not cannibalize existing tax revenues and instead provides a new source of taxes which, absent the incentives, would otherwise not be realized. Given that an estimated $2.4 trillion of profits from Fortune 500 companies has been “permanently reinvested” offshore to avoid onerous U.S. federal income taxes, even a reduced, irresistible corporate tax rate of, say, 10% (less than one third current rates) could theoretically yield $200 billion, some or all of which could be earmarked for investing in the rehabilitation and improvement of distressed urban centers. In fact, corporations could be further incentivized by slashing the tax rates even more if companies agree to either relocate some of the business units into the new zones or, if they cannot relocate, pay into a managed fund that would be used specifically in the zones.