RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of Justice Antonin Scalia’s last official acts may be among the most important of his distinguished career. Last week, he joined with four other justices to halt implementation of President Obama’s new carbon regulation for so long as it is under legal review — an unprecedented move to stay an unprecedented federal overreach into states’ energy decisions.

Titled by the administration the “Clean Power Plan,” the regulation would be one of the costliest ever, dramatically increasing electricity prices across the nation — all while producing essentially zero climate benefits, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s own models.

Thanks to Justice Scalia and the four other justices who voted with him, Americans won the first battle against this reckless plan. But the fight is far from over. Even though the Supreme Court is not expected to issue a final ruling until at least 2017, the EPA is essentially flouting the stay order and encouraging states to continue developing their plans.

State officials — governors, legislators, regulatory agencies, public-utilities commissions, and utilities themselves — should reject the EPA’s offers of assistance. In fact, they should be issuing stop-work orders to prevent the regulation’s implementation until the courts have completed a full review.

With the possible exception of Richard Nixon, there is no president in modern history that has shown more disdain for Congress and the constitutional process that Barack Obama. In his zeal to establish a legacy, he has systematically used his executive powers to trample upon the Constitution and the legislative branch of government.

Obama is now fixing his sights on closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility housing America’s most dangerous and maniacal foes. He announced his intention to do so on Tuesday, citing a plethora of reasons, each of which lacks merit.

Obama’s announcement coincides with his overall scheme to advance U.S.-Cuba ties. Last week, Obama announced that he would pay a visit to the despotic Castro brothers. That obscene gesture was made contemporaneous with his notice that he would not be attending Justice Antonin Scalia’s funeral, demonstrating to all just how morally bankrupt Obama has become.

Since assuming office in 2009, Obama has had an unhealthy obsession with Gitmo and made it a priority to close the facility. He sees Guantanamo as an extension of American imperialism and a hindrance to closer ties with the Muslim world. Closure of the facility would curry favor with the Cubans and an assortment of repressive Muslim regimes.

Of course, to advance his scheme to close Guantanamo, Obama must make the argument in terms that are palatable to the American public. Establishing closer ties with the Muslim world is not high on the list of priorities for the average American constituent, but security is.

The public argument between Apple and the FBI over cracking the encryption on an iPhone used by the San Bernardino Muslim terrorists is one of those ongoing civil liberties debates that negotiate the terms on which we are asked to sacrifice our civil liberties for the sake of Muslim immigration.

We have already made a thousand accommodations and we will make a thousand more. There will be more databases, naked scanners, eavesdropping, vans that can see through walls, backdoors to every server, registrations, warrantless searches, interceptions and regulations. There will be heavily armed police on the streets. And then curfews and soldiers. These things exist in Europe. They’ll come here.

Some libertarians will argue that we should have none of this and no restrictions on immigration. That we should just shrug off each terror attack and move on with our lives.

Eventually though there will be a terror attack that we can’t shrug off and that can’t be minimized by using the cheap statistical trick of comparing Terror Attack X to the number of people who die every year from cancer. Or there will just be an endless parade of daily attacks, bombings, stabbings or shootings, as in Israel, which create a constant climate of terror that will preclude any hollow rhetoric about the number of people falling off ladders each year or getting struck by lightning.

Some hawks will cheer every terror fighting measure short of closing the door on the root cause of the problem. They would rather see every American wiretapped, strip searched and monitored every hour of the day then just stop the flow of Muslim terrorists into this country.

The encryption methods of an iPhone, like the question of how many ounces there are in your tiny bottle of mouthwash, would not be much of an issue, if Muslim migration did not make it one.

Terrorists adapt to the terrain. They use the native population as protective coloration. They can find a way to transform a shoe, a tube of toothpaste or instant messaging on a game console into a terror tool. Just as the left can ‘politicize’ everything, Muslim terrorists can ‘terrorize’ everything. When everything is a potential terrorist tool, then there can be no such thing as privacy or civil rights.

In November 2014, Congress voted to ban the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States. It was not a close vote. The final margin was 91 to 3 in the Senate and 370 to 58 in the House. Those are bipartisan, veto-proof majorities. And since those votes happened, Republicans have gained control of the Senate and increased their House majority.

Yet today President Obama unveiled a plan that directly contradicts the law. He wants to release 35 detainees and move the other 56 to a prison that would be built somewhere in the United States to house them.

In making his case, President Obama repeated the same tired talking points about how Gitmo has been a terrorist recruiting tool, even though there is scant evidence to support this proposition. Even two scholars at the liberal Brookings Institution, Cody Poplin and Sebastian Brady, dispute Obama’s contention. They write:

**Indeed, other issues and grievances seemingly receive much more airtime and emphasis than the detention camp does; and Guantanamo, when mentioned, is often lumped in with other controversial facilities—like Bagram and Abu Ghraib. Detention and abuse of suspected terrorists by the United States, in other words, is a readily discernable motif. But the contemporary propaganda narrative seems to treat that motif as but one category of offenses in a long chain of western transgressions against the Muslim world.

Accordingly, it is hardly clear that Guantanamo’s closure would matter much, so far as concerns the contents of jihadist propaganda. U.S. detention operations at Bagram and Abu Ghraib, after all, are now in the past—but that hasn’t persuaded jihadis to drop their invocations of both prisons in their online literature.**

Poplin and Brady note that Gitmo is especially unimportant in the ISIS narrative. What has really been a terrorist recruiting tool has been the administration’s weakness in the face of the Islamic State. But rather than announce a serious plan to destroy ISIS, Obama finds it much easier to score rhetorical points by announcing a plan to close Gitmo.

His timing is especially bad because, as I argued in the Washington Post, the U.S. needs a detention facility to hold captured ISIS leaders, assuming that we actually capture and interrogate some (as we should). If not Gitmo, then where?