RUTHFULLY YOURS

Several members of a pro-life youth ministry group visiting D.C. for Friday’s March for Life rally were attacked by a group of street thugs yelling racial epithets on Wednesday night near the Metro, Fox 5 DC reported. The violent attack began after the two adult chaperones and 22 teens had gotten off the Metro in SE D.C., and were starting the mile walk back to the church where they were staying.

When one of the adult chaperones in the back of the group was attacked, several of the teens attempted to help him. They were met with fists and racial slurs, threatened with a knife, and told to hand over their belongings. The victims ran to a nearby firehouse, where they received help.

The savage attack only lasted about 20 seconds, but that was enough time for the thugs to seriously hurt several of the pro-lifers.

Injuries included a broken nose and fractured eye socket, according to a member of the group. He told Fox 5 that the adult leader who was attacked had “some type of concussion,” adding that “he just remembers having dinner — details are fuzzy after that.”

The youth group visiting from Fort Worth, Texas says they are familiar with where they are staying in Southeast, D.C., because they have stayed at the Assumption Catholic Church for the past three years. But it wasn’t until Wednesday night that they’ve ever had an issue.

The violent encounter was enough to make the ministry group reconsider their routine while staying at the church.

They won’t be walking from the metro stop back to church past sunset, Fox 5 reported. But despite the violent incident, they said they’d still attend the rally at the National Mall for the March for Life on Friday.

“Nobody’s going to rob us of that joy, the true meaning of why we’re here — to celebrate life,” the group member said. “Even when something horrible like that happens — we’re still going to be joyful,” he said.

There have been no arrests in the case.

‘We are the pro-life generation,” the crowd chanted, voices building to an overwhelming crescendo with each repetition of the line. Packed onto the National Mall across the street from the White House Friday, the revelers deafened one another with their joyful shouts, tens of thousands gathered just across the street from President Donald Trump’s new home, smiling and laughing and breaking into spontaneous cheers.

Such was the scene at the 44th annual March for Life, first held here on January 22, 1974, one year to the day after the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion nationwide. In good weather and in bad — given Washington’s bitter Januaries, it’s usually the latter — crowds swarm the Mall every year to protest against the country’s abortion laws and to advocate for the protection of unborn life.

This year’s March had particular historic significance, as it followed on the heels of a Republican sweep of November’s elections and, with it, the chance to enact pro-life policies at the federal level for the first time in years. The crowd never cheered louder than when Vice President Mike Pence spoke at the morning’s rally, becoming the first member of a presidential administration to ever address the event.

“President Trump actually asked me to be here with you today,” Pence said. “He asked me to thank you for your support — to thank you for your stand for life and for your compassion for the women and children of America. . . . Compassion is overcoming convenience and hope is defeating despair. In a word: Life is winning in America because of all of you.”

Every year the March makes evident just how phenomenally young and vibrant the pro-life movement is, bolstered by students who travel from hundreds of colleges, universities, and high schools all across the country, often sleeping on buses overnight or driving for two days straight to be here. This year was no different.

Take, for example, twelve-year-old Tommy Steines, who was attending his very first March for Life. “I’m here to stand up for life and for support,” he told National Review, smiling from under his knit cap. Steines and his family drove eight hours from Ohio to attend the event. Steines’s mother, Donna, said that there are smaller, satellite marches for life in Ohio, “but none of them have half a million people.”

Even though young faces dominated the crowd, people of all ages and genders and races were well represented at the March, as they always are. The Mall this year held a truly heterogeneous mixture of Americans, united in the belief that this country’s women and children and families deserve better than a regime of abortion-on-demand.

Dozens of pro-life public figures and movement leaders gathered behind the rally stage, speaking most frequently of the hope embodied by the new administration. One of those activists was David Daleiden, founder of the Center for Medical Progress, which recorded and released the undercover videos that exposed the vast fetal-tissue-trafficking industry profiting off of the body parts of aborted babies.

Amid American cheers and a gratuitous swipe at our neighbor to the south, President Trump forged ahead this first dizzying week of his administration with the groundwork for his signature campaign promise: The Wall.

The president continues to insist that he will not only build the wall along the southern border, the very notion of which makes Mexicans seethe, but force Mexico to pay for it. The contretemps induced President Enrique Peña Nieto to cancel a planned trip to Washington for talks with his new American counterpart about trade, immigration, and border security. On the upside, though, it was grist for a great Jonah Goldberg column on national honor and the wages of besmirching it.

I’ve been a skeptic about the wall from the start: I do not believe it is plausible as promised, for reasons not just for financial (it would require cooperation from Congress) but topographical. In his Encounter Broadside, The Case Against Trump, our Kevin D. Williamson explained the terrain challenges:

The idea of a point-to-point wall on the border stretching uninterrupted from Las Palomas Wildlife Management Area on the Gulf of Mexico in Texas to Border Field State Park on the Pacific Ocean in California is a logistical impossibility (it would require, among other things, building a wall atop several substantial bodies of water, including the Rio Grande and the 65,000-acre Amistad Reservoir, to say nothing of steep canyons and other obstacles, and expropriating enormous amount[s] of privately owned land along the border).

It was no surprise, then, to find President Trump tempering his extravagant campaign promise. This week’s executive order on border security proclaims the policy of constructing “a physical wall on the southern border” but takes pains to define “wall” as “a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassible barrier.” That gives the administration wiggle room to secure by other means (no doubt involving surveillance technology) areas where wall-building is neither practical nor necessary.

We can certainly use the kind of barrier outlined in the executive order. If the president wants to call it a “wall,” great. He can call it “Matilda” for all I care if it improves border security, which it obviously would. Nor, in this regard, am I the least bit concerned about Mexican national honor. When we have a situation in which kids in the southwest get sent home from school for wearing American-flag T-shirts but Cinco de Mayo is observed like a national holiday, I’m more worried about American national honor.

But like Jonah, I also draw the line at making Mexico pay for the wall. If it improves our national security against illegal immigration (not nearly all of which is Mexican) as well as jihadist networks and drug traffickers, then we should pay for it. Why would a superpower make its comparatively poor but amicable neighbor pay for our security while our government, with the nation $20 trillion in the red, diverts taxpayer funds to boondoggles like an oceanographic study that plopped mudskippers on a treadmill to see how long they can exercise?

Extorting Mexico to pay for the wall would be like Michael Corleone squeezing Senator Geary to pay for the gaming license. And there is not a prayer it will happen.

When James O’Neill first put on the blue uniform and gold badge of law enforcement, it was 1983, and he was a rookie with the New York City Transit Police, riding the subways from 8 p.m. until 4 a.m. Those were the bad old days of buildings encrusted in grime and graffiti, parks and public places overrun by the homeless, and a murder rate rising relentlessly.

“In the 1980s and 1990s,” Mr. O’Neill recalls, “the police were just holding on.”
New York is different today. In 1983 there were 1,622 murders in the city—and the peak was still years away. In 2016 the city reported only 335 murders, and Mr. O’Neill says total shootings were below 1,000 for the first time in the city’s modern history.

As the journal City & State noted, New York now has “one-fifth the crime of 1990 with a million more people.” It’s not the only thing that’s changed. That rookie transit officer is now Gotham’s top cop.

On its own, the success of New York’s Finest in bringing down murder and other violent crime is a remarkable achievement. What makes it more extraordinary is how hard it seems to be for other big cities to replicate. A month ago The Wall Street Journal released a survey that found 16 of the nation’s 20 largest police departments reported more murders in 2016 than the year before.

The city grabbing the most attention is Chicago. Other, smaller towns (Detroit, New Orleans, St. Louis) have even higher levels of murder relative to population, but there’s good reason to focus on the Windy City. The liberal Brennan Center for Justice reports that Chicago’s skyrocketing murder count—762 in 2016, up from 480 in 2015—accounts for nearly half the homicide increase in the nation’s 30 largest cities. This week President Trump focused attention on Chicago when he threatened on Twitter to “send in the Feds” if local officials fail to address the “horrible ‘carnage.’ ”

In a meeting Tuesday with Wall Street Journal editors, Commissioner O’Neill declined to comment on the Chicago police. But the Windy City’s troubles go beyond the cops. For example, while in New York someone convicted of carrying a loaded firearm faces a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 3½ years, in Chicago the law gives judges more discretion, which they use to give gun offenders lighter sentences.

In 2011 Mayor Rahm Emanuel brought in an NYPD vet, Garry McCarthy, as police superintendent. For 2014 Chicago police reported the lowest number of homicides in almost 50 years, though the total remained over 400 throughout Mr. McCarthy’s tenure and in 2012 had swelled to more than 500. In any case, Mr. McCarthy was sacked in 2015 after a horrendous video emerged showing a Chicago police officer firing 16 shots into a man who did not appear a threat.

The video set off a perfect storm that has contributed to the current mayhem. The officer faces charges of first-degree murder. On its way out the door, President Obama’s Justice Department dropped a report accusing Chicago cops of a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional force.

President Trump says he’ll make his first Supreme Court nomination next week, and it will be a telling moment. The power to fill the High Court seat left vacant by the death of Antonin Scalia is a major reason Mr. Trump won the election, and the right choice is vital to keeping faith with conservative voters.

Mr. Trump understands this, as he showed with his campaign list of 21 talented potential nominees. The White House appears to have whittled the list down to three appellate court judges. All three look distinguished before close inspection and would face a rough confirmation assault from the left. But it’s a particular shame that Judge William Pryor is taking abuse from some on the right for the sin of acting like a good conservative judge.

Judge Pryor, who is 54 years old, is a star on the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit and may be the closest of the three to Justice Clarence Thomas in philosophy. He has a long record of conservative jurisprudence, and he has displayed the kind of judicial modesty and respect for precedent that the Constitution intends for appellate judges.

This seems to have upset some on the right who prefer their judges to act like liberals and rule by policy preferences, not the law. They’ve criticized Judge Pryor for concurring in 2011 in Glenn v. Brumby in which a transgender male was fired when he began his transition to a woman. The employee sued claiming sex discrimination in violation of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the 11th Circuit panel upheld the lower-court decision in favor of him who became a her.

Whatever one thinks of the LGBT agenda, Judge Pryor’s decision showed appropriate deference to Supreme Court precedent. The 11th Circuit’s decision faithfully followed the Supreme Court’s 1989 ruling in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins that sex discrimination can also exist in the form of hostile sex stereotyping. Conservatives should want circuit-court judges to follow Supreme Court precedent—and it’s a sign of how a judge will treat the law if he’s elevated to the Supremes.

You would think Democrats have enough to fight President Trump on that they wouldn’t have to resort to stupid, easily dismissed talking points. But again and again, on cable news and social media, the refrain is repeated: Trump is “ruling by executive order” and Republicans are hypocrites for cheering him on when they condemned Obama for – purportedly – doing the same thing.

It is thus necessary to repeat an elementary point that we’ve made over the years: The number of executive orders issued by the president is irrelevant; the issue is the substance of executive orders – specifically, whether they stray beyond the president’s authority.

Since the Left is not big on logical consistency, I will give the Dems this much: The specious argument they are making now is the same one they made during the Obama years. Then, the contention was that Obama could not have been overstepping his constitutional authority – as conservatives and a few honest progressives contended he was – because he had issued fewer executive orders than some of his predecessors. It’s a nonsequitur: The number of EOs has nothing to do with their constitutional validity.

EOs are patently necessary and theoretically unremarkable. The president is the head of the vast executive branch. He must give directions to his subordinates in order for the executive branch to carry out its work. A proper executive order is simply that: the president ordering subordinate executive officials to carry out lawful policies and actions – lawful because they are consistent with the Constitution and statutory law.

Let’s take the president out of the equation for a moment. In the military, a commanding officer may give a hundred orders a day to his subordinates. These are “executive orders” in the sense that the armed forces are part of the executive branch. But as long as they are within the bounds of the law, the fact that there are thousands of such orders causes us no concern. Similarly, when the attorney general gives instructions to Justice Department lawyers, or the secretary of state directs our diplomats, these are “executive orders” and standard fare.

As I listened to Trump’s Inaugural Address, I thought of Aesop’s fable about the mice who were being devastated by a ferocious cat. As they debated what to do, a brash young mouse proposed putting a bell around the cat’s neck. That way the mice would hear its approach and scurry to safety. All applauded until one greybeard mouse posed the question: “Who’s going to put the bell around the cat’s neck?”

Especially in politics, it’s easy to propose simple, if not impossible, solutions to complex problems.

Trump’s speech was a rousing catalogue of promises to “make America great again.” Infrastructure development, rebuilding the inner cities, bringing back jobs to America, securing the borders, returning the power usurped by the feds back to the people, making “America first,” and eradicating Islamic jihad “from the face of the earth” comprise an ambitious agenda, to say the least. Perhaps these are mere negotiating positions to be adjusted later, but politics isn’t business. What a candidate thinks is typical campaign hyperbole, the voting public often considers promises to be taken seriously.

Ask George H.W. Bush, who broke his promise “Read my lips: no new taxes,” and lost his reelection bid. And that was just one costly broken promise. Trump has named a whole pack of cats he has promised to bell.

Just consider Trump’s promise about “transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.” Sounds good, but he said nothing specific about reducing the size of the feds, or restoring citizen self-rule. Yes, on Monday he imposed a hiring freeze on federal workers. So did Ronald Reagan in 1981, but that didn’t slow down much the fed expansion in the long term. And Trump’s claim that he will reduce regulations by 75% is a consummation devoutly to be wished, but highly unlikely without a lot of help from Congress.

Trump needs to be more specific, and realistic, about how he will restore power to the citizenry by undoing the un-Constitutional concentration of powers in the executive and its metastasizing agencies, enabled over the years by compliant Congresses and activist Supreme Courts. The result is our country’s feral cat, the bloated federal government spawned and nourished by progressives for nearly a century, with significant help from Republicans. As the fed has waxed ever fatter, the intrusive reach of its agencies, councils, and bureaus into all aspects of our lives––corporations, small businesses, churches, schools, private organizations, state and local governments––subjects them to the coercive power of federal agencies to regulate, investigate, and punish anything that challenges their technocratic pretensions to greater intelligence and efficiency than the sovereign citizenry possesses.