RUTHFULLY YOURS

How will the country wake up from its coma in 2016 to reality in 2017?

Next year the lame-duck, legacy-starved Obama administration will double down on its executive orders, bureaucratic fiats, and circumvention of the law. Obama will seek to fundamentally transform America, contrary to law, effecting change in ways he was not able to by adhering to the law.The media, as it has the past seven years, will not only ignore the illegality, but also rationalize and commend it.

Then comes 2017.

If a Republican is elected president, what will the media and its liberal sympathizers do should the next chief executive decide to follow the Obama modus operandi?

Consider a number of issues, starting with immigration.

Obama, when facing midterm and general elections, warned that executive-order amnesty and non-enforcement of immigration laws were simply out of bounds for a constitutionally elected president. Then he pursued both, and became exactly the constitutional monster that he had warned us about.

Barack Obama continues to fundamentally transform and tilt our nation to favor one of his favorite groups – Muslims — at the expense of everyone else.

Early in his presidency, Barack Obama’s plans to control the Census Bureau unleashed a firestorm of criticism. The White House in a radical move ordered the Census Bureau to work directly with Barack Obama aides. Since the 2010 census would play a key role in drawing House districts and electoral votes at least until 2020 there was criticism that Obama’s moves, supported by other Democrats, would be used for partisan purposes to empower Democrats.

But there may have been ulterior motives, as there so often are when it comes to Democrat machinations. The Wall Street Journal reports that moves are afoot to create a new way to empower Muslims who live in America:

The U.S. Census Bureau has opened the door to counting people of Middle Eastern descent for the first time, setting off an intense debate about who fits in the category and whether they will also divulge their ethnicity to the government.

The hysterical, politically correct outburst following Donald Trump’s idea of barring Muslims from abroad produced much emotion and wacky claims, including the protest that barring someone based on his religion is unconstitutional according to the 1st Amendment.

The ignorance here is shocking. The rights, privileges and obligations of a U.S. citizen are simply inapplicable to non-citizen foreigners.

But this is hardly the first time the 1st Amendment has been misunderstood. It may be, in fact, the most misunderstood, starting with its first words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

In our time, these words have been used to bar school prayer, prevent football coaches from presiding over collective team prayer, disallow references to God in high school graduation speeches, buttress the demand that “Merry Christmas” be deleted from American speech in exchange for “Happy Holidays,” etc. Today’s standard, politically correct interpretation is that the purpose of the 1st Amendment was to make of the new United States an irreligious republic when that was nowhere near its original intent.

The massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., came a few days after a law went into effect banning access by intelligence agencies to key digital communications. It is time for the U.S. to get ahead of terrorism by finally allowing its intelligence agents to use digital tools before the next attack.

Soon after the San Bernardino massacre, law-enforcement agents discovered digital records left behind by Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik. If intelligence agencies had been allowed access to the information in real time, the terrorist attack might have been prevented.

Politics forces the National Security Agency to operate with blinders. The Obama administration blocked the agency from its post-9/11 practice of collecting metadata—tracking digital data on an anonymous basis, and then seeking a court order if Americans are involved—for emails and other digital communications. The law that went into effect just before the San Bernardino killings ended direct NSA access to historic phone records.