RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals violated both judicial precedent and the Constitution’s separation of powers in its ruling against President Trump’s executive order on immigration. If the ruling stands, it will pose a danger to national security.

Under normal rules of standing, the states of Washington and Minnesota should never have been allowed to bring this suit. All litigants, including states, must meet fundamental standing requirements: an injury to a legally protected interest, caused by the challenged action, that can be remedied by a federal court acting within its constitutional power. This suit fails on every count.

The plaintiff states assert that their public universities are injured because the order affects travel by certain foreign students and faculty. But that claim involved no legally protected interest. The granting of visas and the decision to admit aliens into the country are discretionary powers of the federal government. Unadmitted aliens have no constitutional right to enter the U.S. In hiring or admitting foreigners, universities were essentially gambling that these noncitizens could make it to America and be admitted. Under the theory of standing applied in this case, universities would be able to sponsor any alien, anywhere in the world, then go to court to challenge a decision to exclude him.

It is also settled law that a state can seek to vindicate only its own rights, not those of third parties, against the national government. The U.S. Supreme Court held in Massachusetts v. Mellon (1923) that it is not within a state’s duty or power to protect its citizens’ “rights in respect of their relations with the Federal Government.” Thus the plaintiffs’ claims that the executive order violates various constitutional rights, such as equal protection, due process and religious freedom, are insufficient because these are individual and not states’ rights.

Even if states could articulate a concrete injury, this is not a case in which the courts ultimately can offer redress. The Constitution grants Congress plenary power over immigration, and Congress has vested the president by statute with broad, nonreviewable discretionary authority to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens . . . he may deem to be appropriate” to protect “the interest of the United States.” Numerous presidents have used this authority to suspend entry of aliens from specific countries.

Further, as the Supreme Court explained in Knauff v. Shaughnessy (1950), the authority to exclude aliens “stems not alone from the legislative power but is inherent in the executive power to control the foreign affairs of the nation.” In issuing the order, the president was acting at the apex of his authority. As Justice Robert Jackson noted in Youngstown v. Sawyer (1952): “When the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate.” That point the Ninth Circuit ignored entirely.

The order, frequently mischaracterized as a “Muslim ban,” is actually directed at seven countries that the president believes present a particular threat to U.S. security—a view with which Congress agreed in 2015. All are beset by terrorists and so uncertain and chaotic that proper vetting of potential refugees and immigrants is virtually impossible. CONTINUE AT SITE

‘Do you think Islam needs reform?”

Wouldn’t it be interesting, wouldn’t it get us to the crux of the immigration debate, if our best news anchors — I’m looking at you, Chris Wallace and Bret Baier — would put that question to every major politician in Washington?

Instead, the press is asking not just the wrong question but one that utterly misses the point, namely: “How many terrorist attacks have been committed by immigrants from this handful of Muslim-majority countries?” It is the same wrong question posed by the imperious federal judge in Seattle who suspended President Trump’s temporary travel ban on aliens from those countries — seven of them. It is the same wrong question that animated the incorrigible Ninth Circuit appeals court in upholding this suspension — and intimating along the way that Trump, and by implication all who fear for the future of our country, are anti-Muslim bigots crusading against religious liberty (the Ninth Circuit being notoriously selective when it comes to protecting religious traditions).

Does the Trump administration realize it’s the wrong question? I wonder. Instead of attacking the question’s premise, the administration undertakes to answer it. It seems not to grasp that the security argument is not advanced, much less won, by compiling a list of terrorist plots.

Let’s try this again.

Islam does need reform. This is critical to our national security for two reasons that bear directly on the question of which aliens should, and which should not, be allowed into our country.

First, reform is essential because the broader Islamic religion includes a significant subset of Muslims who adhere to an anti-American totalitarian political ideology that demands implementation of sharia — Islamic law. This ideology and the repressive legal code on which it rests are not religion. We are not talking about the undeniably theological tenets of Islam (e.g., the oneness of Allah, the acceptance of Mohamed as the final prophet, and the Koran as Allah’s revelation). We are talking about a framework for the political organization of the state, and about the implementation of a legal corpus that is blatantly discriminatory, hostile to liberty, and — in its prescriptions of crime and punishment — cruel.

The Ninth Circuit’s decision against President Trump’s immigration order is worse than wrong. It is dangerous.

To review, Trump issued an executive order blocking entry by refugees and aliens from seven Muslim-majority countries. The travel restriction is to be short-lived: a period of months while better vetting procedures are developed. The administration, moreover, did not pluck the seven countries from its allegedly anti-Muslim imagination. They were cited in a statute enacted by Congress and signed by President Obama, based on the richly supported conclusion that these countries — Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan — are riven by anti-American jihadism, besides having governments that are either non-functional or implacably hostile to the U.S., rendering any efforts to screen their citizens uniquely difficult.

A federal judge in Seattle, James Robart, issued a temporary restraining order against the travel ban at the behest of two states, Washington and Minnesota, run by Democratic governors. Now, the Ninth Circuit has upheld this single, unelected jurist’s usurpation of the power to make American national-security policy.

According to the three-judge panel, even illegal aliens, to say nothing of aliens holding non-immigrant visas or permanent-resident status, have due-process rights against government actions to protect Americans from foreign threats. Therefore, the president and Congress (i.e., the branches of government constitutionally responsible for national security) may not take such actions unless and until the judiciary (the branch with no such responsibility) has approved those actions.

That aliens are not citizens and have no constitutional right to come to the United States is apparently superseded by their newfangled “right” to be welcomed into the United States courts. And even if they are not here already, even if they remain in the far reaches of the globe, this alien “right” may be asserted by state governments. The states’ interest in having foreign students and scholars at their public universities, we are told, outweighs the public’s interest in excluding aliens who may be terrorists, law-breakers, public charges, or hostile to our Constitution and culture.

The unanimous ruling is the type of lunacy with which the Ninth Circuit has become synonymous. It is also the inevitable result of a turn-of-the-century judicial power grab in the realm of national security.

Three unelected federal judges in San Francisco yesterday ordered the Trump administration to continue accepting visitors and would-be immigrants from seven dangerous countries that are incubators of Muslim terrorism.

When President Trump learned his temporary ban on the admission of aliens from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen that was put on hold Feb. 3 by Seattle-based Judge James L. Robart would continue in abeyance, he got on Twitter immediately.

At 6:35 p.m. Eastern time he tweeted in all caps: “SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!”

The open-borders crowd doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on. That may be why at a press conference celebrating the outrageous ruling, a member of Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s (D) team deployed the phrase “social justice” to justify the decision. “Social justice” is a magical amulet that nullifies anything the Left doesn’t like, including the president’s executive order. Its very invocation is an admission that a cause is illegitimate and un-American.

The Ninth Circuit’s fairy dust-based decision is “an intellectually dishonest piece of work,” said retired Judge Andrew Napolitano.

Tucker Carlson was in fine form last night as he roughed up the platitude-spouting, Haitian-born District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine (D) on television.

Racine, who supported the lawsuit by filing an amicus brief, absurdly argued EO 13769 was “discriminatory to a certain religion” and therefore violated the Constitution’s Establishment Clause.

Carlson retorted that “there is a precedent for singling out people for special treatment because of religion” and that the U.S. had used “explicit religious tests until pretty recently.” Until September 1988, he said, the U.S. granted refugee status to Soviet Jews because they were persecuted in their home country.

Probably the two most insane legal principles invented in the decision are (1) that everyone, everywhere on the planet enjoys due process rights under the U.S. Constitution, and 2) that courts can second-guess a national security-related executive order based on something other than the actual words in the order.

That a panel of the notoriously left-wing U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit committed this unlawful, unconstitutional atrocity is not surprising but it is still unsettling. In the decision Judges William C. Canby, Richard R. Clifton, and Michelle T. Friedland, substituted their vision of how to conduct foreign affairs for the nation’s elected president. The ruling not only violates separation of powers but also constitutes an attack on the status of the president as Commander-in-Chief charged with protecting the United States.

Jefferson warned us: “Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so.”
The funniest part of Judge James L. Robart’s cursory, six-and-a-bit-page restraining order against Donald Trump’s executive order — which temporarily suspends travel into the United States from seven notorious sponsors of terrorism — comes at the end:

Fundamental to the work of this court is a vigilant recognition that it is but one of three equal branches of our federal government. The work of the court is not to create policy or judge the wisdom of any particular policy promoted by the other two branches.

Ha! What a card!

The Left goes shopping for a likeminded judge, and finds a Seattle District Court judge who is sympathetic to Black Lives Matter and does pro-bono work for refugees. He has the added advantage of being located in the Ninth Circuit, the wackiest, most reliably left-wing precinct of the U.S. appellate system (though that may change soon). Said judge then intervenes to suspend the implementation of an executive order issued by the president of the United States to help safeguard the country.

The Justice Department quickly asked for an emergency stay of Judge Robart’s order, but, as could have been predicted, the left-leaning Ninth Circuit just as quickly denied the request. Additional legal briefing in the ninth circuit is forthcoming, but most observers believe the case is headed for the Supreme Court. What happens then will depend on many things — including the fate of Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s nominee to fill the seat vacated by Antonin Scalia’s death last year. In the meantime, if another Orlando, San Bernardino, or Boston Marathon slaughter takes place, public sentiment will surely, and rightly, support Donald Trump’s suggestion that Judge Robart is to blame.

Let’s pause to note what just happened.

Although he is but one of hundreds upon hundreds of District Court judges, Judge Robart insists that the “declaratory and injunctive relief” outlined in his order be applied immediately and on a “nationwide basis” (my emphasis). Seattle has spoken, Comrades! Judge Robarts finds (where? how?) that his court has jurisdiction over … well, over just about everything: the president and the head of the Department of Homeland Security, for starters, but also “the United States of America (collectively).”

So all across the fruited plain, “Federal Defendants and all their respective officers, agents, servants, employees, attorneys, and persons acting in concert or participation with them are hereby ENJOINED and RESTRAINED” from enforcing the President’s executive order.

This may be the best place to pause and point out that Donald Trump, acting as the president of the United States, was perfectly within his rights to issue an executive order to suspend travel from particular countries.

As Andrew McCarthy pointed out at National Review, the order was completely legal. Not only does the Constitution vest plenary executive power in the president — “the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations” — but laws governing immigration explicitly recognize that the president has authority to forbid specific foreigners from traveling into the United States for national security reasons.

McCarthy cites federal immigration law Section 1182(f):

Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate (emphasis added).

In other words, Donald Trump did exactly what the law allowed.

Following the determination of the Obama administration, he judged that Yemen, Sudan, Libya, and the other four countries were a forcing bed for jihadist activity, and therefore all travel from those countries should be suspended for a few months while his administration attempted to formulate better vetting procedures.

That’s why Judge Robart’s conclusion was so funny: he intervened to bring a lawfully issued executive order to a screeching halt all across the country, then tells the world about his court’s “vigilant recognition” that it is “but one of three equal branches of our federal government.” You’ll recall that some characters in George Orwell’s Animal Farm also talk about things being “equal,” even if it turned out that they meant some were “more equal than others.”

This is one of those terror attacks that POTUS was talking about going unreported. Source: Jersey City man gets 2 life sentences for gruesome murders, decapitations – Hudson County View

Yusuf Ibrahim, 31, of Jersey City, was sentenced by Hudson County Superior Court Judge Mitzy Galis-Menendez to two consecutive life terms in state prison.

He was sentenced to an additional 48 years, to be served concurrently, on charges including desecration of human remains, theft, unlawful possession of a weapon, and hindering apprehension, officials said. The sentence also includes 127.5 years of parole ineligibility.

Ibrahim was found guilty on June 22 by a Hudson County jury of two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of second-degree desecration of human remains, and other crimes related to the murders and mutilation of the bodies.

He was indicted after a joint investigation by the New Jersey State Police, Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office and New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice.

Ibrahim murdered Hany Tawadros, 25, and Amgad Konds, 27, in the early morning hours of February 5, 2013. Tawadros and Konds were Egyptian nationals who were living in Jersey City.

The state presented testimony and evidence at trial that Ibrahim shot each man once in the chest with a .38-caliber handgun inside Konds’ white Mercedes C280 before driving the bodies of the deceased victims to Buena Vista in the Mercedes.

There he disposed of their remains in a wooded area behind the unoccupied home of a relative, after stealing the victims’ money and jewelry.

Before burying the victims, in order to hinder their identification, he cut off their heads and hands using a small drywall saw and scissors, and knocked out their teeth with a tire iron.

After staying overnight at the relative’s house on Harding Highway in Buena Vista, Ibrahim drove the Mercedes to Philadelphia, where he abandoned it at a secluded location after setting it on fire to destroy evidence of the murders.

“Justice for the victims and the safety of our citizens required that Ibrahim face a true life sentence without parole for the sickening murders he committed,” Porrino said in a statement. “This sentence delivers that justice by ensuring that Ibrahim will spend the rest of his days behind bars.”

Back in January 2015, Ibrahim was sentenced to 18 years in prison for two armed robberies he committed in 2011 and 2012, respectively.

Last Friday, President Trump signed an executive order listing “Core Principles” for reforming financial regulation, including the Democrats’ 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau it created. Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren could hardly object to some of the principles — for example, “prevent taxpayer-funded bailouts” or “empower Americans to make independent financial decisions and informed choices in the marketplace” — because she herself had previously expressed similar sentiments. So instead, she quickly accused Republicans of “rushing to unleash the big banks” and “gut the consumer agency that has forced banks to give $12 billion back to customers they cheated.”

It’s time to retire these slurs, which Democrats have used for five years to attack any Republican who criticizes the CFPB or suggests ways to fix it. The vast majority of Republicans are not billionaires, or even millionaires, but they are all consumers, and they don’t enjoy being defrauded any more than Democrats do. Understanding economics and opposing policies that harm rather than protect consumers do not make one a bank worshipper.

Democrats’ latest talking point, that the CFPB has forced banks to give $12 billion back to their customers, is incorrect for the same reasons as the myth that the bureau forced Wells Fargo to return $185 million to its victims. The bank actually paid less than $5 million to the millions of customers who had unauthorized accounts opened in their names; the remaining fines disappeared into various government black holes.

It’s no surprise that Democrats and the liberal media shamelessly perpetuate such obvious lies about the CFPB, since its leadership by an ostensibly irremovable director, funding outside the congressional appropriations process, and ideological hiring turned the bureau into a political rather than professional organization. Just this week, Paul Krugman wrote in his New York Times column that the Wells Fargo “scandal only came to light thanks to the bureau.” In fact, a Los Angeles Times article exposed the fraud in 2013, and the CFPB allowed it to continue for three years while the Los Angeles City Attorney and Comptroller of the Currency led investigations that produced the $185 million settlement.

Those who defend the CFPB status quo by extolling the bureau’s “mission” are almost as dishonest as Krugman. Their straw-man argument implies that Republicans are calling for the bureau’s elimination, a goal all but its most strident critics abandoned years ago. Furthermore, the bureau almost immediately strayed from its official mission of consumer protection into consumer advocacy. The 20th century taught us that advocates most of all should never be given absolute power.

CFPB supporters are outraged that President Trump might remove Director Richard Cordray before he completes his five-year term. But Cordray has been director since January 4, 2012. He remains in office only because his illegal recess appointment was followed by confirmation 18 months later as Democrats threatened to change Senate filibuster rules. The Supreme Court subsequently held the three other recess appointments President Obama made on January 4, 2012, unconstitutional. However one feels about Cordray, he’s served a full term.

How would Republicans “gut” the CFPB? Exclusive jurisdiction over debt-collection laws could be returned to the Federal Trade Commission, and non-discriminatory–lending laws to the Department of Justice. Arbitration regulations could be limited to ensuring clear and meaningful waiver disclosures. The CFPB’s mission could be restricted to “establishing guidelines for consumer disclosure” and “evaluating financial products to eliminate the hidden tricks and traps that make some of them far more dangerous than others.”