RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of the less understood criticisms of progressivism is that it is totalitarian, not in the sense that kale-eating Brooklynites want to build prison camps for political nonconformists (except for the ones who want to lock up global-warming skeptics) but in the sense that it assumes that there is no life outside of politics, that there is no separate sphere of private life, and that church, family, art, and much else properly resides within that sphere.

Earlier this week, I expressed what seemed to me an unobjectionable opinion: that politics has a place, that politics should be kept in its place, and that happy and healthy people and societies have lives that are separate from politics. The response was dispiriting but also illuminating.

Among those who directed tut-tuts in my direction was Patti Bacchus, who writes about education for the Vancouver Observer. “That’s one of the most privileged things I’ve ever heard,” she sniffed. Patti Bacchus is the daughter of Charles Balfour, a Vancouver real-estate entrepreneur, and attended school at Crofton House, a private girls’ school whose alumni include Pat (Mrs. William F.) Buckley. It is one of the most expensive private schools in Canada. I do enjoy disquisitions on “privilege” from such people. But of course her criticism is upside-down: It is exactly we privileged people with education, comfortable lives, and spare time who expend the most energy on politics. But there are other pressing priorities, like paying the rent, for poor people. If Ms. Bacchus would like to pay a visit to West Texas, I’ll introduce her to some.

Another objection came from a correspondent who demanded: “What if politics greatly impacts every facet of your life?” That would be an excellent question if it came from some poor serf living in one of the states our American progressives so admire, such as Cuba or Venezuela, where almost every aspect of life is under political discipline, where government controls whether you eat — and, indeed, whether you breathe. But if you live in the United States and politics greatly impacts every facet of your life, you have mental problems, or you are a politician.

(But I repeat myself.)

Esar’s Comic Dictionary (1943) contains two definitions of the word “fanatic,” often wrongly attributed (by me, among others) to Winston Churchill: First, “A person who redoubles his efforts after having forgotten his aims.” Second (my favorite), “One who can’t change his opinion and won’t change the subject.”

If you want to see fanaticism at work, try looking for a roommate in Washington or New York City.

From the New York Times we learn of the emergence of the “no-Trump clause” in housing ads in our liberal (which is to say, illiberal) metropolitan areas. The idea is nothing new — I saw similar “No Republicans Need Apply” ads years ago when looking for apartments in Washington and New York — but the intensity seems to have been turned up a measure or two: In 2017, the hysteria knob goes up to eleven. Katie Rogers of the Times offers an amusingly deadpan report:

In one recent ad, a couple in the area who identified themselves as “open-minded” and liberal advertised a $500 room in their home: “If you’re racist, sexist, homophobic or a Trump supporter please don’t respond. We won’t get along.”

Washington: It took a historic tie breaking vote cast by Vice President Pence on Tuesday to get President Donald Trump’s education secretary nominee, Betsy DeVos, confirmed by the Senate.

A few months ago, very few people would have predicted DeVos would be confirmed on a 51-50 vote, the narrowest confirmation vote of a Cabinet nominee ever. Two Republicans, Senator. Lisa Murkowski , Alaska, and Susan Collins, Maine, joined the entire Democratic caucus to oppose her.
Pence breaks Senate tie to confirm DeVos

The Senate has confirmed school choice activist Betsy DeVos as Education secretary, with US Vice President Mike Pence breaking a 50-50 tie. It was the first time a vice president had to break a tie on a Cabinet nomination

But in retrospect, what happened to DeVos makes sense. Her inexperience in public schools, her alienation of some moderate Republicans, a powerful populist movement against her and Senate Democrats’ will to oppose Trump at every turn came together to create the perfect storm.

There are several dynamics going on here, so let’s break down DeVos’ troubled confirmation into four factors.

1) She’s a one-issue nominee

DeVos, a Michigan billionaire philanthropist, is a national figure on the cause of giving vouchers to parents so they can choose whether to send their kids to private or public schools. That is mostly a non-starter for Democrats. But the school-choice-above-all-else narrative also doesn’t fit with some red-state Republican senators, whose rural states don’t necessarily have a ton of private or charter schools to choose from.

“If you are a senator who disagrees with DeVos on the issue of school choice and vouchers,” said Elizabeth Mann of the Brookings Institution, “there aren’t a lot of other places to find common ground.”

2) She doesn’t have experience in public schools

DeVos has not attended, sent her children to, or worked in public schools. And that’s a big problem for people who see the education secretary’s primary role as managing public schools, which a majority of American students attend.

“[L]ike all of us, Mrs. DeVos is the product of her experience,” Collins said on the Senate floor explaining why she’d be voting against DeVos.

Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat, poses with boy and his sign for a family member during a rally in Portland, Oregon. Photo: AP

DeVos’ viral confirmation hearing – where she seemed unfamiliar with basic laws and suggested guns in schools could help protect students “from potential grizzlies” — did nothing to assuage those concerns. And it even added a few more, like whether she’d support students with disabilities.

3) A united opposition, a split front of support

The increasingly nationalised debate over school reform has propped up a sizable, well-organized and often powerful coalition of labour and progressive groups that are opposed to DeVos’ school choice position.

But it’s not just teachers unions opposing DeVos. The Washington Post’s Emma Brown talked to parents across the country who opposed Devos and found them to be part of a surprisingly diverse group:

“[A] small army of parents, teachers and others around the country who have risen up against DeVos as President Trump’s nominee heads toward a breathtakingly close confirmation vote. They come from places as diverse as rural Alaska, inner-city Detroit and — suburban Nashville.”

“Vouchers don’t come with any oversight of the schools in which they’re spent,” Anna Caudill, a Tennessee mother of two, told Brown.

Very few Cabinet nominees have such a built-in and well-organized opposition, said Frederick Hess, a DeVos supporter with the American Enterprise Institute. “I don’t know who has that kind of mobilisation on the secretary of state, no matter how much more high-profile the position is,” he said.

In a recent column titled “The Elephant in the Living Room,” I surmised that liberals and Democrats are playing a very dangerous game by continuing to question the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidency. What makes that bit of nonsense so dangerous for Democrats is the fact that, by continuing to question Trump’s legitimacy, they could easily invite renewed interest in Barack Obama’s presidential eligibility… an issue that lies festering just beneath the surface.

In Obama’s case, enough is known about his lack of presidential eligibility to invite future researchers to dig deeper into his personal history. As a result, the American people will one day be shocked to learn that, between January 20, 2009, and January 20, 2017, a period of time during which the forces of Islamic jihad made the greatest gains in the conquest of the Christian world since the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, the United States was governed by a half-Muslim impostor with no legitimate claim to the presidency.

But man is a curious animal, and if he feels that he’s been lied to or that certain historical facts have purposely been kept from him, he will move mountains to discover the truth.

A great many major historic events and mysteries remain unresolved and unexplored for years… often for decades, centuries, and even millennia. For example, as World War I raged on in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson (D) reassured the American people of U.S. neutrality. He said, “The United States must be neutral in fact, as well as in name, during these days that are to try men’s souls. We must be impartial in thought, as well as action, must put a curb upon our sentiments, as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.”

However, what the American people did not know was that Wilson, himself, was violating U.S. neutrality by supplying war materiel to the British and, with no apparent regard for the safety of the traveling public, shipping it to England aboard passenger ships. The German spy network in the United States was fully aware of the deceit, causing the German government to publish an April 22, 1915, warning in 50 major newspapers, urging travelers not to sail aboard the RMS Lusitania. And when travelers expressed concern, the Wilson administration assured them that trans-Atlantic travel was safe and that there was no reason for concern.

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.