RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/on-stupid-emergency-laws/

I’m getting to be a bit of an old dog to learn many new tricks, but maybe some day I’ll learn not to be flip when the situation calls for something more thoughtful.

This morning, I was interviewed by Fox News’s Bill Hemmer about what to expect from President Trump’s speech tonight and, in particular, whether the president could legitimately declare a national emergency in order to rationalize the reallocation of Defense Department funds for the construction on the southern border of a “wall” — or, at least, some kind of physical barrier (the semantics of which are of more interest to the Beltway’s posturing antagonists than they are to me — if I may be flip about it).

I don’t think the president should do this because it is bad policy (I’ll come to why); and I hope he won’t do it because it would be smarter to try to convince more of the public that he has a good case, which would put pressure on Congress to address the problem. But that said, I do not doubt that federal law empowers the president to declare a national emergency and reprogram funds to construct civil-defense projects the president deems essential to national defense. (See, e.g., Section 2293 of Title 33, U.S. Code.)

Speaking with one of the producers as commonly happens before these interviews, I glibly opined described as “stupid” this and other laws strewn through the federal code that authorize executive action on the president’s unilateral determination that action is required.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-baseless-trite-arguments-against-walls/

Of all of the flatulent memes that have been running low on gas since the late 1960s, the most aggravating — against stiff competition — are probably all variations on “Build bridges not walls.” The bridge I must cross most often in an average year is Westminster Bridge. Since a jihadist plowed a car along the pavements of one side of the Westminster Bridge (killing and wounding dozens of locals and tourists) a couple of years ago, it has been covered in walls. Specifically, it has been covered in metal crash barriers erected to stop replays of that incident. So as I find myself reminded on a weekly basis at least, when it comes to bridges and walls, the world is not necessarily an either/or choice. Who could have guessed?

Well, a lot of the president’s opponents by the sound of it. There are satisfactory arguments on both sides about the utility of building a wall along the southern border of the U.S. My personal view is that since the president was partly elected on the promise of building this wall, he should probably get a chance to build it and give at least some voters what they asked for.

But it is not the practical but the moral objections to the president’s initiative that are so unutterably tired. For instance, one objection just made by Nancy Pelosi is that building a wall is “an immorality” and “not who we are as a nation.” Walls are also, according to Pelosi an “old way of thinking.”

In fact, in Europe — among many other places — walls are not an old way of thinking at all. In fact, they are a much newer way of thinking than anything Nancy Pelosi is offering. Since the European migrant crisis was at its height in 2015, countries across central and eastern Europe have begun erecting walls. I have gone to see a number of them, and very smart, modern fence-like things they are, with movement-detectors, drones to fly overhead, and more. When the Hungarian government erected their first wall (having had hundreds of thousands of people pour across their previously un-walled borders in a few months), they received some criticism from their neighbors.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/41874/nancy-pelosi-says-wall-immorality-james-woods-asks-amanda-prestigiacomo
Pelosi is not alone regarding such double standards, of course. A house owned by the Obamas is barricaded by a ten-foot tall wall, too.
Reacting to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s anti-Trump and anti-wall speech last week, successful actor and outspoken conservative James Woods asked the Democrat one simple question: Why do you have a wall around your property, then?

Like many politicians, Pelosi apparently lives by a set of politically-expedient double standards. Though she has repeatedly slammed President Donald Trump for his goal of funding a wall at the Southern border, calling it an “immorality,” she’s perfectly fine with securing her own property.

“The fact is, a wall is an immorality. It’s not who we are as a nation,” Pelosi told a crowd of reporters Thursday. “We are not doing a wall. Does anybody have any doubt? We are not doing a wall,” she added.

Woods replied to the tweet, asking, “Well, then, why do you have one?”

According to a report from right-wing outlet The American Mirror in 2018 (see photos, here), and begrudgingly backed by left-wing fact-checking site Snopes, Pelosi has a barrier around a multi-million dollar property she and her husband own in Napa Valley.

According to The Washington Post, the estate was worth around $5 million in 2011, and brought in “at least $5,000 worth of grape sales from the vineyard, according to financial disclosure forms for 2010.” (Nancy and Paul Pelosi, by the way, are estimated to be worth somewhere between $58.7 and $72.1 million.)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272473/opposition-border-wall-opposition-public-safety-michael-cutler

The battle between the Congressional Democrats and the Trump administration continues over the construction of a border wall along the U.S./Mexican border.

Many political battles are fought over hypothetical arguments. This debate, however, is well-grounded in cold, hard, irrefutable facts and in the deaths of far too many innocent people, who have fallen victim to aliens who entered the United States illegally, often repeatedly.

Let me be clear, in my judgement, the Democrats have left the administration with no choice but to take the action of shutting down a part of the government. As a former INS agent I can certainly empathize with the federal employees. All too frequently the employees of the government suffer from the bad decisions of our political leaders. However, America faces many threats and challenges that are the direct result of multiple failures of the immigration system and our nation must finally address these failures beginning with securing our borders.

The most critical issues that the federal government must address are national security and public safety.

On January 3, 2019 I participated in an interview of Fox & Friends First to discuss the senseless murder of 33 year old police officer Ronil Singh, from Newman, California, by a citizen of Mexico who was allegedly an illegal alien: 32 year old Gustavo Perez-Arriaga.

The Washington Post’s December 29, 2018 article, Suspect, 7 others, arrested in fatal shooting of California police officer, noted that this arrest that has sparked a debate about California’s sanctuary policies began with this excerpt:

The arrest Friday of a man in the shooting death of a California police officer has renewed criticism of sanctuary laws, with a local sheriff suggesting that the state’s efforts to protect undocumented immigrants could have contributed to the killing.

Gustavo Perez Arriaga, a 32-year-old undocumented immigrant, was charged with homicide in connection with the shooting death of 33-year-old Newman police officer Ronil Singh, according to law enforcement.

Stanislaus County Sheriff Adam Christianson assailed sanctuary laws that limit state and local governments’ cooperation with federal immigration agents, but he did not detail how those rules applied to Perez’s case or how they would have prevented Singh’s death.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/president-trump-calls-for-america-to-recruit-the-smartest-people-in-the-world/

Not a word appeared in the mainstream media about President Trump’s call for more legal immigrants to build America’s talent pool. The liberal media is so anxious to portray the president as a jingoist xenophobe that it ignored a key policy statement on immigration. Trump declared in his Jan. 4 press conference on the government shutdown that the U.S. should convince the hundreds of thousands of foreign students who attend our universities to stay here and contribute to the U.S. economy. He’s been listening to U.S. tech companies, who need the talent. And he’s exactly right:

At the same time, [people] can apply to come into our country legally, like so many people have done. And we need people, Major. We have to have people. Because we have all these companies coming in. We need great people. But we want them to come in on a merit basis, and they have to come in on a merit basis. They can’t come in the way they’ve been coming in for years.

I get calls from the great tech companies, and they’re saying we don’t allow people at the top of their class, at the best schools in the country, we don’t allow them to stay in our country. So they end up going back to China and Japan and so many other countries all over the world, and we don’t keep them. They get educated at our finest schools, and then we don’t allow them, through a various set of circumstances, to have any guarantees of staying. So we lose out on great minds. We can’t do that.

We have companies that, if we don’t change that — and we’re working on that, and we discussed that with the Democrats, and I think they agree. We’re working on that. But we don’t want to lose our great companies because we have a ridiculous policy that we won’t accept smart people. So, call it politically correct or not, but we have to let these great, brilliant companies have the smartest people in the world.

Only 7% of U.S. undergraduates major in engineering, compared to a third in China. Russia, with roughly a third of our population, graduates as many engineers. We need more opportunities in STEM for Americans. We should subsidize engineers, mathematicians, and scientists and starve the resentment-studies programs that pollute American universities. To train more engineers and scientists, though, we would have to recruit more teachers from overseas, as Edward Dougherty, distinguished professor of engineering at Texas A&M University, explained in a recent essay in Asia Times. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/trump-border-wall-construction-pentagon/

He should ditch the “military version of eminent domain” and order the Pentagon to start building.

Donald Trump spent much of his 2016 campaign railing against President Obama’s misuse of executive power, especially Obama’s decision to extend legal protection to underage children who were brought to the U.S. by their foreign parents.

But now President Trump, frustrated by Congress’s failure to deliver $5 billion in funding for the border wall, is proposing to bend the Constitution to get what he wants. Trump told reporters that he may be willing to declare a state of national emergency to build the wall “very quickly” without congressional backing, and that he may even use “the military version of eminent domain” to seize the property such a structure might need. “I can do it if I want,” he declared.

Trump can certainly declare a national emergency, but the courts would probably look askance on any rash actions. In 1952, President Harry Truman cited a state of emergency when he ordered the government to seize the steel mills during a strike. He claimed it was the only way to guarantee that the mills would continue to produce weapons for the Korean War. The Supreme Court — packed with justices appointed by New Deal presidents — nonetheless concluded by a 6 to 3 vote that he didn’t have the authority to nationalize private businesses. Few legal scholars believe that the current Supreme Court — the conservative portion of which is steeped in Federalist Society principles of limited government — would give Trump the benefit of the doubt in a non-war situation.

But many legal scholars say there is a way Trump could act legally. Current law allows the Defense Department to use “un-obligated” money to fund construction projects during war or emergencies. “The Department of Defense has funds in its account that are not specifically designated for anything,” Harvard Law School professor Mark Tushnet told NBC News. “My instinct is to say that if he declares a national emergency and uses this pot of unappropriated money for the wall, he’s on very solid legal ground.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/a-tale-of-two-immigrants/
The murder of police corporal Ronil Singh highlights the deadly consequences of Democrats’ border-weakening and ‘sanctuary’ policies.

‘He’s not coming back,” said Reggie Singh.

The inconsolable brother of the late Newman, Calif., police officer Ronil Singh told journalists last week, “There’s a lot of people out there that misses him.”

Corporal Singh is gone for good because Gustavo Perez Arriaga shot him dead, officials say. This small-town case has national repercussions. This tale of two immigrants finds Singh and Arriaga as the apotheoses of how Republicans and Democrats respectively see immigration.

Singh, 33, was a model immigrant. He came to America from Fiji — legally. He reportedly drove a four-hour round trip to attend Yuba City’s police academy. He took speech classes to smooth his heavily accented English, his third language. He became a public servant and spent seven-and-a-half years as a cop.

“He came to America to become a police officer,” Newman police chief Randy Richardson said. “That’s all he wanted to do.” On Facebook, Ugesh Yogi Singh, Ronil’s uncle, called him “my adventurous nephew” and “my family’s Action Hero.”

President Donald J. Trump sent every member of Congress the slides from the security update that Pelosi and Schumer ignored. According to that presentation, Customs and Border Protection seized 850 tons of narcotics and arrested 17,000 adults with existing criminal records in fiscal year 2018, blocked 3,755 known or suspected terrorists from entering the country in FY 2017, and apprehended 6,000 gang members. How much of these substances and how many of these dangerous individuals eluded federal officials? Who knows?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272403/how-two-gustavos-used-californias-sanctuary-state-daniel-greenfield

Less than 200 miles separate Tulare County and Stanislaus County. And a little over a week separates the two reigns of terror in these two California counties by Gustavo Garcia and Gustavo Perez Arriaga.

Both Gustavos were dangerous and violent illegal aliens. On Monday, December 17, Gustavo Garcia went on a murderous rampage that killed at least two people and put seven more in the hospital. On Wednesday, December 26, Gustavo Perez Arriaga murdered a law enforcement officer at a traffic stop.

Cpl. Ronil Singh, murdered by the second Gustavo, and Rocky Paul Jones and Rolando Soto, murdered by the first Gustavo, did not have to die. They died because California’s sanctuary state law took their lives.

Gustavo Garcia had a criminal record dating back to 2002 covering everything from illegal weapons to meth. He had been deported in 2004 and then again in 2014. There had been three immigration holds on the illegal alien criminal. Before he began his murderous spree, Tulare County sheriff’s deputies arrested him. ICE put a hold on him as a dangerous illegal alien. But because of California’s sanctuary state law, local law enforcement had to let him loose. A few days later, the illegal alien’s carnage began.

Garcia shot a farmworker picking fruit in the chest, robbed a mini-mart at gunpoint of $2,000, shot and killed a man, shot at a woman in the parking lot of a Motel 6, wounding her in the arm and torso, opened fire at two gas stations, killing Rocky Jones, fired shots into several homes, including the home of his ex-girlfriend, forcing her and her children to flee, opened fire on the deputies pursuing him, stole a car from three other farmworkers at gunpoint, and got into a high speed chase while deliberately trying to hit other cars.

He exchanged fire with pursuing cops during the chase, and smashed into other cars while going 100 miles, taking his own life and putting four other people in the hospital, including one critically wounded.

And that’s actually an incomplete list of the illegal alien killer’s crimes after the ICE hold wasn’t honored.

“Before SB 54, Gustavo Garcia would have been turned over to ICE officials. That’s how we’ve always done it, day in and day out. After SB 54, we no longer have the power to do that,” Sheriff Mike Boudreaux said.