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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Trump’s Immigration Guidance: The Rule of Law Returns BY Andrew C. McCarthy

On Tuesday, John Kelly, President Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security, published a six-page, single-spaced memorandum detailing new guidance on immigration enforcement. Thereupon, I spent about 1,500 words summarizing the guidance in a column at National Review. Brevity being the soul of wit, both the memo and my description of it could have been reduced to a single, easy-to-remember sentence:

Henceforth, the United States shall be governed by the laws of the United States.

That it was necessary for Secretary Kelly to say more than this — and, sadly, that such alarm has greeted a memo that merely announces the return of the rule of law in immigration enforcement — owes to the Obama administration abuses of three legal doctrines: prosecutorial discretion, preemption, and separation of powers (specifically, the executive usurpation of legislative power).

To the extent President Obama declined to enforce immigration law (notwithstanding his constitutional obligation to execute the laws faithfully), he did so under the guise of prosecutorial discretion. In the pre-Obama days, prosecutorial discretion was an unremarkable, uncontroversial resource-allocation doctrine. It simply meant that since resources are finite, and since it would be neither possible nor desirable to prosecute every crime, we target law-enforcement resources to get the most crime-fighting bang for the taxpayer buck. That means prioritizing enforcement action against (a) the worst offenders and (b) the unlawful causes of the activity.

This is easily illustrated by federal drug enforcement. There are comparatively few federal narcotics agents, compared, say, to police in a major city. But while both feds and cops have authority to arrest traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs, only federal jurisdiction is interstate and international. Consequently, the best use of finite federal enforcement resources is to limit them to prosecutions of significant felony importation and distribution offenses, leaving it to the states and municipalities to handle street pushers and misdemeanor violations involving the use of drugs.

Significantly, the fact that federal enforcement policy, which is made by the executive branch, does not target lesser felons or users does not mean this policy effectively repeals federal drug laws, which are written by Congress.

The non-targeted crimes are still crimes, and the feds reserve the right to prosecute them in appropriate cases (e.g., if they encounter these offenses in the course of carrying out other criminal enforcement missions).

In the area of immigration enforcement, Obama contorted this resource allocation doctrine into a de facto immunity scheme. That is, the Obama Homeland Security Department announced what it labeled enforcement “priorities.” If an illegal alien did not fit into the priorities, it was as if the alien were insulated against prosecution — effectively, it was as if there was nothing illegal about being an alien unlawfully present in the United States; it was as if Obama’s policies were a legal defense against Congress’s duly enacted laws.

A Muslim Brotherhood Security Breach in Congress There’s a national security risk swamp to drain. Daniel Greenfield

Last year, eight members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued a demand that their staffers be granted access to top secret classified information.

The signatories to the letter were Andre Carson, Luis Guiterez, Jim Himes, Terri Sewell, Jackie Speier, Mike Quigley, Eric Swalwell and Patrick Murphy. All the signatories were Democrats. Some had a history of attempting to undermine national security.

Two of them have been linked to an emerging security breach.

The office of Andre Carson, the second Muslim in Congress, had employed Imran Awan. As did the offices of Jackie Speier and Debbie Wasserman Schultz; to whom the letter had been addressed.

Imran Awan and his two brothers, Jamal and Abid, are at the center of an investigation that deals with, among other things, allegations of illegal access. They have been barred from the House of Representatives network.

A member of Congress expressed concern that, “they may have stolen data from us.”

All three of the Pakistani brothers had been employed by Democrats. The offices that employed them included HPSCI minority members Speier, Carson and Joaquín Castro. Congressman Castro, who also sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, utilized the services of Jamal Moiz Awan. Speier and Carson’s offices utilized Imran Awan.

Abid A. Awan was employed by Lois Frankel and Ted Lieu: members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Also on the committee is Castro. As is Robin Kelly whose office employed Jamal Awan. Lieu also sits on the subcommittees on National Security and Information Technology of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Tammy Duckworth’s office had also employed Abid. Before Duckworth successfully played on the sympathy of voters to become Senator Tammy Duckworth, she had been on the Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces of the Armed Services Committee.

Gwen Graham, who had also been on the Armed Services Committee and on the Tactical Air and Land Forces subcommittee, had employed Jamal Awan. Jamal was also employed by Cedric Richmond’s office. Richmond sits on the Committee on Homeland Security and on its Terrorism and Cybersecurity subcommittee. He is a ranking member of the latter subcommittee. Also employing Jamal was Mark Takano of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Imran had worked for the office of John Sarbanes who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee that oversees, among other things, the nuclear industry. Other members of the Committee employing the brothers included Yvette Clarke, who also sits on the Bipartisan Encryption Working Group, Diana DeGette, Dave Loebsack and Tony Cardenas.

But finally there’s Andre Carson.

Carson is the second Muslim in Congress and the first Muslim on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and, more critically, is the ranking member on its Emerging Threats Subcommittee. He is also a member of the Department of Defense Intelligence and Overhead Architecture Subcommittee.

The Muslim Congress IT Staffers Case Gets Weirder Daniel Greenfield

I wrote about this strange case in early February.

Imran Awan and his two brothers, Jamal and Abid, are at the center of an investigation that deals with, among other things, allegations of illegal access. They have been barred from the House of Representatives network.

A member of Congress expressed concern that, “they may have stolen data from us.”

All three of the Pakistani brothers had been employed by Democrats. The offices that employed them included HPSCI minority members Speier, Carson and Joaquín Castro. Congressman Castro, who also sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, utilized the services of Jamal Moiz Awan. Speier and Carson’s offices utilized Imran Awan.

Why were the Awan brothers, one of whom had a criminal record, even allowed to work in such a sensitive position? How did the personnel suspected in this case pass background checks? And was any classified information compromised as a result of these alleged breaches?

These questions and more must be asked and answered. But they are only the first of many questions.

The Awans were employed by Democrats on very sensitive committees. There is a fuller listing at the link above. But suffice it to say some of these are very sensitive committees.

Now Luke Rosiak at the Daily Caller has an update of the strange developments in this investigation.

The Doughboys Go to Hell The soldiers of the 79th were forced to fight for over three days and nights on a single meal and two canteens of water. In “With Their Bare Hands: General Pershing, the 79th Division, and the Battle for Montfaucon” Gene Fax masterfully recounts their nightmarish struggle. By Matthew J. Davenport

Lt. Miller Johnson hugged the dirt of a shell crater in no man’s land, driven down by German machine-gun fire. He lifted his head just enough to orient himself in the thick morning fog, “and behold I was looking into the muzzle of a German gun two feet in front of me.” Johnson thought he had been deserted by his platoon, but then he heard a familiar voice: “Keep down, Lieutenant. There she comes,” followed by a blinding explosion. He came to, shaken, and saw that one of his men had taken out the enemy machine-gun nest with a grenade. Before pressing on, as the fog began to lift, Johnson gathered his troops and took a head count: Of the 50 soldiers he had led from the trench just an hour before, only 10 remained.

With Their Bare Hands
Product Details

With Their Bare Hands: General Pershing, the 79th Division, and the battle for Montfaucon
Feb 21, 2017
by Gene Fax

By Gene Fax

Osprey, 495 pages, $32

The human cost of ending rubella; Europe at the crossroads; the doughboys go to hell; when America opened its doors; Stalin in your living room; the heroism of old age; the death of an all-American town; rebooting the Big Bang; and much more.

It was the morning of Sept. 26, 1918, the first day of a massive Allied offensive against the entrenched German army in northeastern France, one that would soon become—and to this day remains—the largest and deadliest battle in which American troops ever fought. Johnson’s platoon was just one of the nearly 200 infantry platoons of the U.S. 79th Division, each facing its own fight to conquer the German-occupied fortified village of Montfaucon. In “With Their Bare Hands: General Pershing, the 79th Division, and the Battle for Montfaucon” Gene Fax masterfully recounts, studies and dissects their nightmarish struggle.

From the time the U.S. had entered the war the year before, Gen. John Pershing, commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Forces, had fought inflexibly for American autonomy against overwhelming Allied pressure to split up his divisions and amalgamate them with veteran French and British units. But in the face of a series of devastating German offensives in the spring of 1918, he acquiesced temporarily, turning some of his few AEF divisions then in France over to Allied command. And after American success in combat at Cantigny, Belleau Wood and Soissons, Pershing won the approval of Gen. Ferdinand Foch, the supreme Allied commander, to launch an all-American offensive at St. Mihiel. But it came with a cost: Foch would only green-light the American offensive if Pershing would in turn furnish AEF divisions for a larger Allied offensive just days later between the Meuse River and the Argonne Forest. It was a decision from which dangled tens of thousands of American lives, forcing Pershing—whose best combat-tested, veteran divisions were committed to St. Mihiel—to send fresh, inexperienced divisions to the Meuse-Argonne front, among them the 79th. CONTINUE AT SITE

Yale Students Are Offended — Calhoun College’s Name Was Changed to Honor a White Woman Apparently that’s racist. By Katherine Timpf

People were complaining that Yale University’s John Calhoun College was named after a slave owner, so they changed it to “Grace Hopper College,” in honor of the female computer scientist and rear admiral — but some people are still upset, because Grace Hopper was white.

“We are skeptical of the administration’s intentions in renaming the college after a white woman, regardless of Grace Hopper’s GRD ’34 accomplishments as a woman in STEM and in the military,” Yale Women’s Center officials Nicole Chavez and Rita Wang co-wrote in a piece for thecYale Daily News.

Yep, that’s right: Rear Admiral Grace Hopper may have made significant contributions to male-dominated fields like computer science and the military, and she may have earned her Ph.D. in mathematics at Yale during a time when it was very rare for a woman to do so, but . . . she was also white, which apparently means she does not deserve this honor.

Why? Because it’s like, kind of racist, duh.

“We recognize that white femininity has often been used as a tool to enforce racist and colonialist structures,” the piece continues. “As such, we hope to explain how this decision constitutes ‘whitewashing’ to the wider Yale community.”

No doubt, what Yale was trying to do was honor not just a woman but specifically a woman with achievements in science and math. Feminists commonly complain that our society doesn’t do enough to encourage women to pursue careers in STEM, and so Yale’s decision to honor a woman for her historical success in this area would seem like something that would please Women’s Center officials like Chavez and Wang.

But nope. No, instead Chavez and Wang accused Yale of making “an attempt to corrode and erase the long history of activism by students of color — particularly black women — on this campus” by giving “no recognition of the countless hours black students and students of color have put into the fight against the honoring of a white supremacist in their home.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. Last year, Southwestern University in Texas canceled its production of The Vagina Monologues because a white lady wrote it, and students at Scripps College got upset about Madeleine Albright’s being chosen as their commencement speaker because she’s a “white feminist.”

This story was previously reported on in an article on Heat Street.

Trump’s New Guidance Calls for Vigorous Immigration Enforcement In a fundamental shift from Obama, the Trump position is that simply being an illegal alien is unlawful and serious; thus, any additional indication of outlaw behavior is sufficient to warrant deportation. By Andrew C. McCarthy

The immigration-enforcement guidance issued by President Trump Tuesday morning patently aims to shift the presumption against deportation created by President Obama’s guidance.

In 2014, under the guise of setting out “immigration enforcement priorities,” Obama’s Department of Homeland Security established a three-tier system for deportation. This was quite advisedly done under the rubric of “prosecutorial discretion.” Federal agents were instructed to apply prosecutorial discretion as early in the evaluation process as possible, mindful of how sparse were resources to arrest, detain, and deport removable aliens.

The message was clear: If an alien does not fit into the top tier, do not even bother to stop and question him, much less to arrest and commence deportation proceedings. While Obama’s two lower tiers were referred to, in an Orwellian way, as “priorities” (i.e., enforcement “Priority 2” and “Priority 3”), the reality was more like immunity.

Obama’s “Priority 1” was generally labeled “threats to national security, border security, and public safety.” It included aliens engaged in terrorism, espionage, or otherwise posing a national-security threat; involved in gang violence; convicted of serious felonies; or apprehended in the act of entering the country.

Notice the effort to undermine illegal immigration as a basis for taking action. Priority 1 involved offenders who either (a) would be sought by police and national-security agents for reasons having nothing to do with their immigration status, or (b) were not illegal aliens residing in the U.S. because they never (or barely) made it into the country. The underlying (though unstated) principle is that illegally entering or remaining in the United States is not a serious matter per se; rather, it is egregious criminal activity that warrants enforcement action.

Of course, the nature of criminal activity addressed in “Priority 1” was so heinous that law-enforcement would naturally take action without regard to whether the perpetrator was an American or a non-American (legal or illegal). The subliminal point was to eradicate illegal-alien status as a salient consideration — yet to be able to say that enforcement against it was considered a “priority.”

Obama’s second tier addressed the “priority” of “misdemeanants and new immigration violators.” The thrust of this tier, however, was to give the illegal alien a defense against enforcement action. For example, an alien convicted of two misdemeanors, far from being an enforcement priority, was given immunity — agents were told that, for action to be taken, there should be three or more misdemeanors — and that these crimes had to (a) be unrelated to the alien’s illegal status, and (b) involve three separate incidents (i.e., multiple misdemeanors arising out of the same criminal transaction would count as only one conviction). Here, it is important to note that many felony arrests are reduced to misdemeanors in plea bargaining. Thus, this system was designed to insulate from deportation habitual criminals who had managed to avoid felony convictions.

Supreme Court Shots Fired Does a foreigner on foreign soil have Fourth Amendment rights?

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a case that could decide whether foreign nationals outside the U.S. are entitled to constitutional protections. Such a ruling would unleash fresh opportunities for lawsuits against everything from drone strikes to interrogation, and the good news is that the Justices seemed skeptical of upending decades of settled law.

Hernandez v. Mesa started with a 2010 fatal shooting: A U.S. federal agent fired on Mexican teenager Sergio Hernandez-Guereca from across the border. The boy’s parents say their son was playing with friends, though Justice Department records revealed that Hernandez had twice been arrested for smuggling aliens into the U.S. Prosecutors concluded there was insufficient evidence to indict the agent.

Yet the parents filed a lawsuit, and one question before the High Court is whether Hernandez, a Mexican citizen shot on Mexican soil, is entitled to Fourth Amendment protection against the unjustified use of lethal force. The plaintiffs say the Court should consider the “totality” of the circumstances, including that Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas are one metropolitan community.

The plaintiffs rely on Boumediene v. Bush, the 2008 case in which a 5-4 majority ruled that enemy combatants detained at Guantanamo Bay have the constitutional right of habeas corpus. The plaintiffs know that Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that opinion, and they are hoping he will expand the logic of Boumediene to open a new area of rights for foreigners. Thus they embrace the “functionalist” approach in that ruling in which the Justices look at more than merely where the conduct occurred.

But Boumediene turned on the reality that the U.S. has “complete and total control” over Guantanamo. In “every practical sense,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “Guantanamo is not abroad.” That’s not true of the sovereign nation of Mexico, and it’s hard to find a clearer dividing line of jurisdiction than the U.S.-Mexico border.

The better precedent is U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez, which held in 1990 that Fourth Amendment protections don’t apply to searches and seizures of aliens in foreign countries without a “significant voluntary connection” to the U.S. Applying the Fourth Amendment across the globe, the Court said in Verdugo, would “significantly disrupt the ability of the political branches to respond to foreign situations involving our national interest.”

Politics in a Democracy Is War by Other Means Republicans may not be interested in war, but war is interested in them. Bruce Thornton

Since the election of Donald Trump the “partisan divide” has escalated into a “Civil War,” according to many commentators. “The Fight for Washington” headlines a PJ Media column. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman says Trump’s election was a political “Pearl Harbor.” The intelligence community is rumored to be at “war” with Trump. Progressive Democrats have organized a “Resistance,” as though their party is occupied France during World War II.

Apart from the hyperbole, such descriptions are essentially right. The problem is, too many Republicans don’t know they’re in a war.

That’s because many establishment politicians and pundits still cling to fantasies of “bipartisanship,” “civility,” “decorum,” “good manners,” and the “rules of good behavior.” Senators obsess over upholding “Senate tradition” and its sacred “rules,” and they miss their cloakroom bonhomie and gym-locker joviality with their Democrat counterparts. They bemoan the “partisan divide” and the failure to “reach across the aisle.” They agree with Obama minion Cass Sunstein, who has a new book out decrying what he calls “partyism,” a psychological disorder almost as bad as “racism.”

They all should be made to read the history of democracy starting with ancient Athens, and then write out Madison’s Federalist 10 a hundred times on the blackboard. A country as diverse as America has always been divided into “factions” whose “passions and interests” conflict with those of other factions, often creating a zero-sum conflict. To paraphrase Plato, every faction is by nature at war with every other faction, and peace is just a word.

Moreover, empowering the common people whatever their levels of education or social mores means free political speech will be anything but decorous or good-mannered. As Aeschylus said, “Free men have free tongues.” More typical of traditional democratic political speech is the vile description of Thomas Jefferson by a disgruntled writer Jefferson had hired to smear his rival John Adams as a “hideous hermaphroditical character.” The vengeful journo called Jefferson a “mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”

The “decorum” and “civility” ritually praised by Republicans are the political version of the disastrous ROE’s that have cost the lives of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve watched for years as the Republicans fought by Marquess of Queensbury rules while the Dems donned brass knuckles and swung blackjacks. While some of our Senators fretted over “traditions of the Senate” and lost “bipartisanship,” Don Obama and his Luca Brasi Harry Reid filled the Senate chamber with legislative IEDs––Obamacare, now circling the drain; an $800 billion “stimulus” that spent from half a million to four million dollars on each job it created; the job-killing Dodd-Frank regulatory hydra that so far has cost $36 billion, and record-setting deficits and debts. All the while our country’s economy stagnates and our enemies and rivals flourish at the expense of our security and interests. And these Republicans still wonder how Donald Trump bested 14 Republican primary rivals and defeated the Democrats’ off-brand Eva Peron?

Leader of Groups Linked to Hamas Featured at U of Miami Commencement Ceremony Graduating students forced to listen to CAIR operative Wilfredo Amr Ruiz. Joe Kaufman

Wilfredo Amr Ruiz is fervently involved with groups that incite terror and bigotry. So why would the University of Miami allow him to participate in a commencement ceremony for its students and subject them to prejudice and propaganda in the name of interfaith representation? School officials have much to answer for.

On December 15, 2016, the University of Miami (UM) held its 2016 Commencement Ceremony at UM’s Convocation Center. The commencement ceremony is meaningful recognition for the years of hard work students put in during their time at the university. It would have been a special day for all in the graduating class had it not been for one controversial speaker who, in this author’s opinion, marred the event by giving the opening invocation for the ceremony.

That speaker was radical Muslim activist Wilfredo Ruiz, who shared the stage with a rabbi and a priest. In one photo from the event – a ‘selfie’ – the three of them are smiling alongside the President of UM and former Secretary of Health of Mexico, Julio Jose Frenk Mora. The rabbi, Lyle Rothman, has used an Israeli flag as the ‘cover photo’ for his Facebook page at least five times. Rothman will probably not be thrilled to find out that Ruiz is associated with Hamas and anti-Semitism and labels the Jewish state “the Apartheid beast.”

Ruiz is the Communications Director for the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). For the commencement ceremony, CAIR referred to him as “CAIR-Florida Chaplain.

CAIR was created in June 1994 as part of an umbrella group led by then-global head of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. CAIR has been named by the US government a co-conspirator for two federal trials dealing with the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas. In November 2014, along with ISIS and al-Qaeda, CAIR was designated a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government. Many CAIR representatives have served prison time and/or have been deported from the US for terrorist-related activity.

CAIR-Florida reflects the same violent extremism as its parent group. In August 2014, CAIR-Florida Executive Director Hassan Shibly, who has denied Hezbollah is a terrorist group, wrote, “Israel and its supporters are enemies of God…” In July 2014, CAIR-Florida co-sponsored a pro-Hamas rally in Downtown Miami, where rally goers shouted, “We are Hamas” and “Let’s go Hamas.” Following the rally, the event organizer, Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, wrote, “Thank God, every day we conquer the American Jews like our conquests over the Jews of Israel!”

Sofian Zakkout is the President of the American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA), one of the other co-sponsors of the 2014 pro-Hamas rally. Zakkout is a known supporter of Hamas, stating in August 2015, “Hamas is in my heart and on my head.” Wilfredo Ruiz is the legal advisor for AMANA and founded the Puerto Rico and Connecticut chapters of the group. Ruiz is additionally a Corporate Director for AMANA’s sister organization, American Muslims for Emergency and Relief (AMER), another co-sponsor of the pro-Hamas rally.

McMaster for National Security Advisor Trump’s pick of warrior-scholar gains wide praise. Matthew Vadum

President Trump has selected independent-minded U.S. Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster to replace National Security Advisor Mike Flynn who vacated the key White House post last week under a cloud.

The Independent Journal Review said McMaster, who will retain his active military status, would appeal to conservatives, describing him as someone who is “six different kinds of badass.”

McMaster “is highly respected by everyone in the military, and we’re very honored to have him,” Trump said yesterday afternoon in Palm Beach, Fla. The president acknowledged Vice President Mike Pence played a role in the selection process.

Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who had replaced Flynn on an interim basis, will become McMaster’s chief of staff, according to Trump. Former UN Ambassador John Bolton, who had been in the running to succeed Flynn, was reportedly asked to play an unspecified role in the Trump administration.

Fresh from his overseas tour apologizing for Trump’s presidency, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), said McMaster was an “outstanding choice” and “a man of genuine intellect, character and ability.”

“He knows how to succeed,” the curmudgeonly failed presidential candidate said in a statement. “I give President Trump great credit for this decision.”

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman the House Intelligence Committee, hailed McMaster for his “history of questioning the status quo and infusing fresh thinking and new approaches into military affairs.”

Iraq war veteran Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), also lauded the choice, describing McMaster as “one of the finest combat leaders of our generation … a true warrior-scholar.”

A career officer and strategist, McMaster holds a doctoral degree in American history and is considered to be a serious intellectual and strategist. He lacks Flynn’s background in the intelligence community but commanded forces in both Iraq wars.

Surprisingly, the Los Angeles Times, a fairly reliable barometer of current left-wing thinking, failed to experience a grand mal seizure while reporting on McMaster yesterday, which may suggest the Left won’t spend a lot of time laying land mines for the new presidential appointee. The paper’s report didn’t go particularly hard on the general.