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Democrats’ DACA dishonesty : Cal Cannon

Posted By on September 10th, 2017

Fulfilling his role as the titular head of “The Resistance,” Barack Obama took to Facebook Tuesday to snipe at the Trump administration’s announcement that it was rescinding the 44th president’s 2012 executive action called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

“We shouldn’t threaten the future of this group of young people who are here through no fault of their own,” Obama said. His post was florid and self-serving. But five words in his lengthy screed —“through no fault of their own” — are undeniably true.

It’s not the fault of the “Dreamers” that their parents brought them here, without papers, as minors. On that we can agree. But whose fault is it that they are still in limbo? For that answer, Obama needn’t take to social media. He can simply look in the mirror.

Ten years ago, a narrow consensus was forged in Washington, if only briefly. Its architects were Edward Kennedy and John McCain. Their carefully crafted legislation created a new temporary work visa, established an electronic data base for employers to check employees’ work status, and earmarked money for border enforcement. It also provided a path to citizenship for an estimated 11.6 million illegal immigrants, provided they paid a fine and back taxes, met English and civics requirements, and stayed on the right side of the law.

President George W. Bush signaled his support. But the vote was going to be close, which Kennedy and McCain knew. Conservatives dismissed the path-to-citizenship as a fig leaf for amnesty. Organized labor hated the guest-worker program, known as Y-1. McCain and Kennedy could have overcome that opposition, albeit narrowly, except for one last little group of senators. Call it the Senate Presidential Wannabe Caucus. Its membership included Illinois freshman Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. That’s only two votes, but it was enough.

On June 6, 2007, Sen. Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, introduced an innocuous-sounding rider to the McCain-Kennedy bill. Its official description was “an amendment to sunset the Y-1 non-immigrant visa program after a 5-year period.” As everyone in the Senate understood, this was a “poison pill” designed not to shore up the bill, but sink it. Dorgan got his way, too. The amendment passed 49-48, essentially killing comprehensive immigration reform.

Kennedy was incensed. He’d implored Dorgan and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid not to do it. McCain felt particularly sandbagged by Obama, who’d inserted himself into the legislative negotiations uninvited, wrangled a concession he wanted, then voted with Dorgan. McCain assumed Obama didn’t want George W. Bush or himself — the man Obama expected to face in 2008 — to get credit for immigration reform. Ted Kennedy, who ended up endorsing Obama over Clinton anyway, believed this, too.

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The Hard Right and Hard Left Pose Different Dangers By affirming benign goals, Antifa and its comrades make intolerance and even violence seductive. By Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on September 10th, 2017

The extreme right—neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and other assorted racists and anti-Semites—and the extreme left—anti-American and anti-Israel zealots, intolerant censors, violent anarchists such as Antifa, and other assorted radicals—both pose a danger in the U.S. and abroad.

Which group poses a greater threat? The question resists a quantitative answer, because much may depend on time and place. It may also be in the eye of the beholder: For many on the center left, the greater danger is posed by the hard right, and vice versa. Yet the most important reason for this lack of a definitive quantitative answer is that they pose qualitatively different dangers.

History has set limits on how far to the extremes of the hard right reasonable right-wingers are prepared to go. Following the horrors of the Holocaust and Southern lynchings, no one claiming the mantle of conservative is willing to be associated with Nazi anti-Semitism or the KKK. Neo-Nazi and Klan speakers are not invited to university campuses.

The hard left lacks comparable limits. Despite what Stalin, Mao, the Castros, Pol Pot, Hugo Chavez and North Korea’s Kims have done in the name of communism, there are still those on the left—including some university professors and students—who do not shrink from declaring themselves communists, or even Stalinists or Maoists. Their numbers are not high, but the mere fact that it is acceptable on campuses, even if not praiseworthy, to be identified with hard-left mass murderers, but not hard-right mass murderers, is telling.

The ultimate goals of the hard right are different, and far less commendable, than those of the hard left. The hard-right utopia might be a fascist society modeled on the Italy or Germany of the 1930s, or the segregationist post-Reconstruction American South.

The hard-left utopia would be a socialist or communist state-regulated economy aiming for economic and racial equality. The means for achieving these important goals might be similar to those of the hard right. Hitler, Stalin and Mao all killed millions of innocent people in an effort to achieve their goals.

For the vast majority of reasonable people, including centrist conservatives, the hard-right utopia would be a dystopia to be avoided at all costs. The hard-left utopia would be somewhat more acceptable to many on the center left, so long as it was achieved nonviolently.

The danger posed by the extreme left is directly related to its more benign goals, which seduce some people, including university students and faculty. Believing that noble ends justify ignoble means, they are willing to accept the antidemocratic, intolerant and sometimes violent censorship policies and actions of Antifa and its radical cohorts.

For that reason, the most extreme left zealots are welcomed today on many campuses to express their radical views. That is not true of the most extreme neo-Nazi or KKK zealots, such as David Duke and Richard Spencer. Former White House aide Steve Bannon recently told “60 Minutes” that “the neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates and the Klan, who by the way are absolutely awful—there’s no room in American politics for that.” In contrast, prominent American leftists, such as Noam Chomsky and even Bernie Sanders, supported the candidacy of British hard-left extremist Jeremy Corbyn, despite his flirtation with anti-Semitism.

The hard right is dangerous largely for what it has done in the past. For those who believe that past is prologue, the danger persists. It also persists for those who look to Europe for hints of what may be in store for us: Neofascism is on the rise in Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Greece, Lithuania and even France. Some of this rise may be attributable to regional issues, such as the mass migration of Muslims from Syria and other parts of the Middle East. But some may also be a function of growing nationalism and nostalgia for the “glory” days of Europe—or, as evidenced in our last election, of America.

The danger posed by the extreme hard left is more about the future. Leaders of tomorrow are being educated today on campus. The tolerance for censorship and even violence to suppress dissenting voices may be a foretaste of things to come. The growing influence of “intersectionality”—which creates alliances among “oppressed” groups—has led to a strange acceptance by much of the extreme left of the far-from-progressive goals and violent means of radical Islamic terrorist groups that are sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-Western. This combination of hard-left secular views and extreme Islamic theological views is toxic.

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I Guess We’re All McCarthyites Now A congressman insults John Kelly’s service—and nobody notices. By Philip Terzian

Posted By on September 10th, 2017

I’m indebted to Luis Gutiérrez, the bumptious congressman from Illinois’s Fourth District, for confirming what I long resisted acknowledging: America’s political discourse has been painfully coarsened.

My epiphany came last week, when Mr. Gutiérrez reacted angrily after Donald Trump put on notice the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Mr. Gutiérrez had met in July with John Kelly, the retired Marine general who was then secretary of homeland security, and who seems to have offered soothing words on the subject. But then Mr. Kelly became President Trump’s chief of staff—and, presumably, signed off on ending DACA.

“General Kelly is a hypocrite who is a disgrace to the uniform he used to wear,” Mr. Gutiérrez declared last week. “He has no honor and should be drummed out of the White House, along with the other white supremacists and those enabling the president’s actions by ‘just following orders.’ ”

Mr. Gutiérrez is no stranger to bombast, but what surprised me here was that his words passed largely unnoticed. A general in government service who is “a disgrace to the uniform.” Where have we heard that before?

In the early 1950s, an Army dentist named Irving Peress refused to complete forms asking about his political background. When Sen. Joseph McCarthy learned in 1954 that Peress had been recommended for honorable discharge, he subpoenaed the dentist to appear before his investigatory committee, where the dentist was alternately defiant and evasive.

McCarthy then summoned the commanding officer at the base where Peress worked to explain why the dentist—who McCarthy believed was a communist—had been promoted and discharged. Patiently and, presumably, very carefully, Brig. Gen. Ralph Zwicker explained that he had followed the recommendations of subordinates and Army protocol. McCarthy raged: “Any man who has been given the honor of being promoted to general and who says ‘I will protect another general who protects Communists’ is not fit to wear that uniform.”

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‘It Is Chilling to Hear . . . ’ Notre Dame’s president has some pointed words for Senate Democrats.

Posted By on September 10th, 2017

Our editorial last week on the spectacle of Senate Democrats questioning the Catholic faith of Notre Dame law professor and judicial nominee Amy Barrett struck a nerve. Many readers are stunned that politicians would suggest that having “orthodox” religious views could disqualify someone from the American judiciary.

Also concerned is John Jenkins, President of the University of Notre Dame. Fr. Jenkins is no conservative but he can spot an attack on religious belief, and on Saturday he wrote to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee who led the assault on Ms. Barrett. Here is the letter in full:

Dear Senator Feinstein:

Considering your questioning of my colleague Amy Coney Barrett during the judicial confirmation hearing of September 6, I write to express my confidence in her competence and character, and deep concern at your line of questioning.

Professor Barrett has been a member of our faculty since 2002, and is a graduate of our law school. Her experience as a clerk for Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is of the highest order. So, too, is her scholarship in the areas of federal courts, constitutional law and statutory interpretation. I am not a legal scholar, but I have heard no one seriously challenge her impeccable legal credentials.

Your concern, as you expressed it, is that “dogma lives loudly in [Professor Barrett], and that is a concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for years in this country.” I am one in whose heart “dogma lives loudly”, as it has for centuries in the lives of many Americans, some of whom have given their lives in service to this nation. Indeed, it lived loudly in the hearts of those who founded our nation as one where citizens could practice their faith freely and without apology.

Professor Barrett has made it clear that she would “follow unflinchingly” all legal precedent and, in rare cases in which her conscience would not allow her to do so, she would recuse herself. I can assure you that she is a person of integrity who acts in accord with the principles she articulates.

It is chilling to hear from a United States Senator that this might now disqualify someone from service as a federal judge. I ask you and your colleagues to respect those in whom “dogma lives loudly”—which is a condition we call faith. For the attempt to live such faith while one upholds the law should command respect, not evoke concern.

Respectfully,

Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C.

President

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Victimizing Women: Islamic Laws vs. Multiculturalism by Khadija Khan

Posted By on September 10th, 2017

The majority of the judges nevertheless determined that “triple talaq” was actually “against the basic tenets of the Holy Quran,” and “what is bad in theology is bad in law as well.” According to the decision, the practice was in violation of Article 14 of India’s constitution, which guarantees the right to equality.

In Britain, abusive practices against Muslim women are still undertaken by Sharia Councils with impunity. In the West, the supposed dangers of multiculturalism are still regarded as more important than human rights. All Britain would need to do is enforce its own laws.

What supporters of this form of multiculturalism fail to realize — or refuse to acknowledge — is that the very existence of Sharia-compliant tribunals is not only a threat to modern justice, but necessarily abets the abuse of Muslim women, lack of equality, and the total lack of equal justice under law. In truth, justice is denied.

In a recent landmark ruling, India’s Supreme Court followed the lead of 22 Muslim countries — including Pakistan and Bangladesh — by outlawing the Islamic practice according to which a husband is able to divorce his wife instantly by uttering the word talaq (Arabic for “divorce”) three times — including by text or voice mail. The decision was not unanimous. A minority of the judges argued that banning “triple talaq” would be a violation of the Indian constitution, which protects religious freedom.

The majority of the judges nevertheless determined that “triple talaq” was actually “against the basic tenets of the Holy Quran,” and “what is bad in theology is bad in law as well.” According to the decision, the practice was in violation of Article 14 of India’s constitution, which guarantees the right to equality.

The verdict was the result of a petition filed by five Muslim women whose “triple talaq” divorces left them destitute, all because of undue powers bestowed upon their husbands by radical clerics. The verdict was an enormous relief to them, and other women like them across India. Its broader message, however, needs to serve as a road map. And a warning. In the West, the supposed dangers of multiculturalism are still regarded as more important than human rights.

In Britain, abusive practices against Muslim women are still undertaken by Sharia Councils with impunity. These practices include “triple talaq,” halala (a ritual enabling a divorced Muslim woman to remarry her husband only by first wedding someone else, consummating the union, and then being divorced by him) and iddah, a mandatory waiting period of three menstrual cycles before a divorced woman is allowed to remarry.

These Sharia Councils in the U.K. have been running unofficial parallel justice systems “everywhere in the country,” performing weddings and decreeing divorces according to the strictest interpretation of Islam.

In spite a liberal marriage contract issued in 2008 by the Muslim Institute, guaranteeing equal rights to British Muslim women (including the banning of forced marriages) — which was endorsed by the Muslim Council of Britain, the Islamic Sharia Council and other prominent Islamic groups — virtually nothing has changed. Britain’s Forced Marriage Unit reported 1,428 cases of forced marriages in 2016 alone. All Britain would need to do is enforce its own laws.

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North Korea: The Kims’ Cheat and Retreat Game by Amir Taheri

Posted By on September 10th, 2017

It is too early to guess how the latest storm triggered by North Korea’s behavior might end. Will this lead to a “surgical” strike on North Korean nuclear sites by the United States? Or will it cause “a global catastrophe” as Vladimir Putin, never shy of hyperbole, warns?

If past experience is an indicator, the latest crisis is likely to fade away as did the previous six crises triggered by North Korea since the 1970s. Under the Kim dynasty, North Korea, in an established pattern of behavior, has been an irritant for the US, not to mention near and not-so-near neighbors such as South Korea, Japan, and even China and Russia.

By one reading, that pattern, otherwise known as “cheat-and-retreat” could be laughed at as a sign of weakness disguised as strength.

However, if only because nuclear weapons are involved, one would have to take the provocation seriously. The Kim dynasty has relied on that ambiguity as part of its survival strategy for decades. The strategy has worked because the Kims did not overreach, sticking to strict rules of brinkmanship.

(Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)

Contemplating their situation, the Kims know that they have few good options. One option is to embark on a genuine path to the peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula. But in that case, the Kim regime would be doomed. That is what happened to Communist East Germany when it was swallowed by the German Federal Republic.

At 52 million, the population of South Korea is twice that of North Korea. As the world’s 13th largest economy with a Gross National Product of almost $2 trillion, it is also far wealthier than its northern neighbor. South Korea’s annual income per head is close to $40,000 compared to North Korea’s $1,700, which makes the land of the Kims poorer than even Yemen and South Sudan, in 213th place out of 220 nations.

The other option is for North Korea to invade the South, to impose unification under its own system. That, too, is not a realistic option. Even without the US “defense umbrella,” South Korea is no pushover. Barring nuclear weapons, the South has an arsenal of modern weapons that the North could only dream of. The South could mobilize an army of over 800,000, three times larger than that of the North.

The North, of course, has the advantage of nuclear weapons. But it won’t be easy to use such weapons against the South without contaminating the North as well. Almost 70 per cent of the peninsula’s estimated 80 million people live in less than 15 per cent of its total area of around 200,000 square kilometers, which are precisely where nuclear weapons would presumably be used.

In other words, the Kims cannot rule over the whole of the Korean Peninsula, either through peaceful means or by force.
The other option the Kims have is to keep quiet and steer clear of provocations.

But that, too, is a high-risk option. For it would mean peaceful coexistence with the South which, in turn, could lead to an exchange of visits and growing trade, and investment by the South. In such a situation, the South Korea’s wealth, freedom and seductive lifestyle would be a permanent challenge to the austere lifestyle that the Kims offer.

Again, the East German experience after Willy Brandt launched his Ostpolitik for normalization with the Communist bloc in Europe comes to mind.

But how could the Kims claim legitimacy and persuade North Koreans to ignore the attraction of the model presented by the South?

One way is to wave the banner of independence through the so-called Juche (“self-reliance”) doctrine, which says that while those in the South have bread, those in the North have pride because the South is a “slave house of the Americans” while the North challenges American “hegemony”.

The Kims know that by picking up a quarrel with the US, they upgrade their regime. However, such a quarrel must not go beyond certain limits and force the US to hit back.

Thus, in every crisis provoked by the Kims since the 1970s, North Korea has never gone beyond certain limits. And each time it has obtained concessions and favors from the US in exchange for cooling down the artificial crisis.

The pattern started under President Jimmy Carter and reached its peak under President Bill Clinton, who sent Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on a pilgrimage to Pyongyang and offered to build two nuclear reactors for the Kims.

One overlooked fact is that during the past four decades, the US has helped save North Korea from three major famines.

Upgrading yourself by picking up a quarrel with the US is not an art practiced by the Kims only. The Soviets did it from the 1960s onwards. The Cuban missile crisis was one example; it helped create the image of the USSR as a superpower, later symbolized by “summits”.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Communist China, regarding the US as a paper tiger, did the same by occasional attacks on Quemoy and Matsu and saber-rattling against Taiwan.

The Khomeinists in Iran upgraded their ramshackle regime by raiding the US Embassy in Tehran, which kept them on American TV for 444 days.

The Kims’ strategy has worked because successive American administrations have played the role written for them in Pyongyang, pretending outrage but ending up offering concessions.

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Jeremy Black: Dunkirk’s Global Significance

Posted By on September 10th, 2017

German successes against Denmark, Norway, Belgium and France were a product of the geopolitical situation, thanks to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which gave Hitler a free hand in the west. Dunkirk was a defeat, that’s true. But Churchill’s resolve to fight sowed the seed of victory.

The appearance and success of the film Dunkirk have added to the list of war films that are both impressive and harrowing, but the film has not done much to explain the significance of the episode. Indeed, precisely because of the film’s overwhelming focus on the beach and on the immediate military conflict, there is a failure to consider the wider military context let alone the political one.

In 1940, the world was provided with its greatest geopolitical crisis of the last century, one that was even graver than that in 1917-18, serious as that was. In 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Germany and Russia posed the threat of a new alignment, one that would enable Germany to turn all its efforts on the Western Allies (Britain, France and the United States), while Bolshevism was able to establish itself with German help. In January 1918, Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, suggested that the Allies help anti-Bolshevik movements in Russia that “might do something to prevent Russia from falling immediately and completely under the control of Germany … while the war continues a Germanised Russia would provide a source of supply which would go far to neutralise the effects of the Allied blockade. When the war is over, a Germanised Russia would be a peril to the world.” The challenge was not ended by the close of the war. Indeed, in July 1919, the British General Staff argued, “taking the long view, it is unquestionable that what the British Empire has most reason to fear in the future is a Russo-German combination”.

The threat recurred in 1940, but in a more acute form. By the end of 1939, Germany was allied with Japan, Italy and the Soviet Union, and had co-operated with the Soviet Union in conquering Poland and determining spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, which left the independent states there with few options. The United States was neutral. Britain and France, while supported by their mighty empires, were reduced to dubious hopes of long-term success, in particular through a blockade that was in practice not going to work due to the Russo-German alignment.
This essay appears in the current edition of Quadrant.
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German successes in early 1940, first against Denmark and Norway, and subsequently against the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Britain, were a product of the existing geopolitical situation, because Germany was able to fight a one-front war and thus maximise its strength. In short, Stalin was the root cause of the German triumph in the West in 1940. In 1939, by allying with Hitler, Stalin had followed Lenin in 1918 by joining the cause of international communism to that of state-advancement in concert with Germany.

This process was greatly facilitated by a shared hostility to Britain and its liberalism. This hostility stemmed from a rejection of liberal capitalism as a domestic agenda for liberty and freedom, but also hostility to it as an international agenda focused on opposition to dictatorial expansionism. Just as Britain had fought to protect Belgium in 1914, and had intervened in favour of Estonia and Latvia in 1919-20, so it went to war in 1939 in response to the invasion of another weak power, Poland.

The past rarely repeats itself, as comparisons between the German offensives in 1870 and 1914, and 1918 and 1940 indicate, or, indeed, between the Russo-German combination in 1939–41 and more recent relations between the two powers. German success in the field in 1940 owed much to the serious deficiencies of French strategy and planning, especially the deployment of mechanised reserves on the advancing left flank so that, in practice, they were not available in a reserve capacity, and, linked to this, the absence of defence-in-depth. French failures magnified German efforts at innovation, efforts which were subsequently in the war to be revealed as inadequate against defence-in-depth.

And so to Dunkirk. The problem with war is ultimately that of forcing opponents to accept your will. That is the outcome sought. Output, the “boys and toys” of killing and conquest, is important to the process, but only if linked to a political strategy that will deliver the outcome. That strategy involves maximising international advantages, as the Germans did in 1939 and continued to do in 1940 with Italy’s entry into the war, and dominating the political agenda of your opponent’s society.

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Weathering the Punches By Julie Kelly

Posted By on September 10th, 2017

As the nation continues to debate the critical, constitutional question of who can be punched and who cannot be punched (I vote for permitting the punching of slow drivers in the left lane and anyone who drinks Riesling), it appears the “peaceful” Left has a much more expansive list of acceptable human-punching bags. Liberals encourage their mob to assault not only Nazis, white supremacists and conservative speakers on college campuses, they are now advocating violence against people who dare to challenge the reigning dogma on manmade climate change.https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/07/weathering-the-punches/

Two destructive hurricanes in the span of one week have emboldened the climate bullies. One of the most unhinged is actor Mark Ruffalo, best known for his role as Bruce Banner/the Hulk in Marvel’s multi-billion-dollar-earning Avengers movie series. Ruffalo must think that playing a scientist on the silver screen imbues him with some special scientific powers and moral authority, much like Martin Sheen started to think he was the president because he played one on The West Wing. Ruffalo is an outspoken—albeit ignorant and misinformed—climate activist who continues to cling to the thoroughly debunked idea that the country can be fully powered by renewable energy sources. He is also a Trump-hater and progressive rabble-rouser.

On Wednesday morning, as Hurricane Irma began pounding Caribbean islands on its alarming path towards Florida, Ruffalo was less Bruce Banner and more Hulk:
Mark Ruffalo

✔ @MarkRuffalo

I know not all people in the GOP are deniers. But their leadership is and they are in part responsible for these disasters going forward. https://twitter.com/markruffalo/status/905408275734245377 …

(Ruffalo was subtweeting another noted climate expert, Star Trek actor George Takei.)

One could write this off as just another emotional rant from an uneducated Hollywood celebrity. But Ruffalo has quite a following, including 3.4 million Twitter followers and the media’s admiration. So it is not without consequence when the actor invites his minions to attack a Trump Administration cabinet official and anyone deemed a climate change denier. Considering one of Ruffalo’s fellow Bernie Bros tried to assassinate several Republican congressmen earlier this summer, nearly killing one of them, it’s outrageous for a top celebrity activist to fan the flames in this kind of political environment.

It’s also a bit ironic, since he routinely tweets about love, compassion, and tolerance. But Ruffalo’s hypocrisies don’t stop there. Ruffalo claims to be a feminist champion except for conservative women (you can read about that here.) He regularly protests the use of fossil fuels, blasts corporations like Exxon, and demands states such as New York stop fracking, but he works in the entertainment business, one of the most energy-intensive industries. He is also an ardent foe of genetically engineered crops, which have numerous environmental benefits including retaining carbon in the soil and withstanding climate impacts.

His movie character isn’t the only thing about him with a split personality.

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Byron York: Crime and immigration: What’s in the Dream Act by Byron York

Posted By on September 10th, 2017

Commentary on the DACA controversy frequently notes that the nation’s nearly 700,000 so-called Dreamers are a law-abiding group. But a new bill to give DACA recipients full legal status, sponsored by Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake and Democratic Sens. Richard Durbin and Chuck Schumer, would allow newly legalized Dreamers to have many run-ins with the law — arrests, charges, convictions — and still receive benefits. Schumer, the Democratic leader, is demanding quick passage.

Former President Barack Obama’s original 2012 executive action creating Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals stipulated that to be eligible, recipients must have “not been convicted of a felony offense, a significant misdemeanor offense, multiple misdemeanor offense, or otherwise pose a threat to national security or public safety.” When Obama announced the criteria for renewing DACA status in 2014, the standard was “have not been convicted of a felony, a significant misdemeanor or three or more misdemeanors, and do not otherwise pose a threat to national security or public safety.”

The Obama administration defined a “significant misdemeanor” as a crime with a maximum sentence of one year, or, regardless of length of sentence, “an offense of domestic violence; sexual abuse or exploitation; burglary; unlawful possession or use of a firearm; drug distribution or trafficking; or driving under the influence.”

With the Dream Act of 2017, Graham, Flake, Durbin, and Schumer have adopted much of the existing Obama-era criteria about crime, but in a way that would allow Department of Homeland Security officials to be more generous with newly legalized DACA recipients.

The Dream Act would exclude anyone who has been convicted of “any offense under federal or state law, other than a state offense for which an essential element is the alien’s immigration status, that is punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of more than one year; or three or more offenses under federal or state law, other than state offense for which an essential element is the alien’s immigration status, for which the alien was convicted on different dates for each of the three offenses and imprisoned for an aggregate of 90 days or more.”

The phrase “other than a state offense for which an essential element is the alien’s immigration status” could excuse a lot of criminal activity. “It would grant status to illegal aliens who have been convicted of felony ID fraud or other crimes that could be considered to be related to their immigration status,” noted Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter restrictions on immigration. “You could say human smuggling, document fraud, benefits fraud, false claims to citizenship, illegal voting, and many other felonies have an essential element that involves immigration status.”

In addition, Graham, Flake, Durbin, and Schumer throw in the phrase “for which the alien was convicted on different dates for each of the three offenses” when referring to misdemeanor convictions. Many crimes involve multiple charges. The Dream Act of 2017 would require a young Dreamer to have committed offenses on not one, not two, but three separate occasions, and been convicted of all before he or she is ineligible for legalization.

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What America Should Do Next in the Middle East The policies of the Obama administration led to carnage in Syria, regional chaos, and the rise of Iran and its alliance with Russia. Can the momentum be reversed—without going to war?Michael Doran And Peter Rough

Posted By on September 10th, 2017

During last year’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to do a great deal more in the Middle East than his immediate predecessors, but with much less. That is, he would achieve significantly more than Barack Obama at a much smaller sacrifice of blood and treasure than was incurred under George W. Bush. This he would accomplish by defining American interests sharply and pursuing them aggressively, not to say ruthlessly. The result would be a global restoration of American credibility and, as Trump never ceased to remind voters, renewed global respect. https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2017/09/what-america-should-do-next-in-the-middle-east/

As an act of political “signaling,” Trump’s blunt message was savvy. Many Americans, especially those in his base of supporters, regarded Obama as timid, weak, and more solicitous of enemies than of friends; Bush, they believed, had been strong in some ways but prone to quixotic adventures like building democracy in the Middle East, a putative sin of which Obama had at least been innocent. Trump offered an attractive alternative: a hybrid approach that would combine the best qualities of his predecessors in office while jettisoning their worst inclinations. “America First” meant placing a Bush-style readiness to use military force in support of a leaner, Obama-style agenda that nixed democracy promotion. Unlike Bush, Trump would resist thankless nation-building projects; unlike Obama, he would reward friends and punish enemies.

Exactly how Trump intended to translate this framework into concrete policy started to become clear only after the election. As he appointed his national-security team, four major policy goals in the Middle East came into focus. First in line was the swift defeat of Islamic State (IS). Second, the Trump team was keen to improve relations with America’s traditional allies in the region, especially Israel, who had felt abandoned by Obama. Third, the administration would push back aggressively against Iran’s hegemonic regional ambitions while also renegotiating the 2015 agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Finally, Trump was personally eager to explore the possibility of a strategic accommodation with Russia, especially in Syria.

These goals were not and are not obviously compatible with each other. The most significant contradiction has emerged between, on the one hand, Trump’s desire to defeat IS with the smallest possible commitment of American ground forces and, on the other hand, his intention to contain Iran. In the event, as we shall see, the administration has chosen to prioritize the defeat of IS. In so doing, however, it has unconsciously assimilated much of the strategy developed by the Obama team in its final years, a strategy thatconsciously facilitated the rise of Iran and brought the policies of the United States into alignment with that goal.

This alignment is now so extensive that any serious effort to contain or roll back Iranian power will require an equally lengthy and systematic effort to rethink American interests and reorder American policy. Such an effort will demand sustained presidential attention, the devotion of new resources, and, inevitably, the disruption of established relations with key allies. It will also bring down on Trump even more criticism than he is already receiving from pundits, allied nations, his own national-security bureaucracy, and, on a few key issues, his political supporters.

In the short term, the path of least resistance for the administration has been to accept Obama’s terms and muddle through on that basis. Ultimately, however, the outcome of any such course of action is certain to be deadly—not only for Trump’s agenda but for the interests and the national security of the United States.

I. The Great Reset

At the heart of Trump’s dilemma are the binding restrictions that the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, Obama’s signature foreign-policy initiative as president, has placed on the United States. But the nuclear deal itself was the direct outgrowth of an earlier decision in foreign policy, a decision at which Obama had arrived years earlier. Before he ever convened a meeting of the National Security Council, consulted with an ally, or received an intelligence briefing—indeed, before he ever set foot in the Oval Office in January 2009—Obama resolved to go down in history as the president who brought Bush’s wars to an end and who restructured relations with the Middle East.

Obama had articulated this vision throughout his first presidential campaign. At every rally, he promised that he would avoid the calamitous misadventures of the past, especially as exemplified by the war in Iraq. To fulfill this promise, Obama’s first priority in office was to bring the troops home from that country.

But how could the military withdraw without turning Iraq into a satellite of Iran? Obama declined to think in such terms. Rather, in keeping with a current of thought then circulating in national-security circles, he believed that the Middle East was altogether no longer as important to the United States as it once had been, and that, moreover, the fundamental interests of the United Statesoverlapped with those of Iran (not to mention Russia). In the case of Iraq, whose stability was vital to both Tehran and Washington, those interests were especially well-matched. The United States, therefore, could tolerate a reduction of its influence and a tilt by Baghdad in the direction of Tehran.