RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/26/close-the-birthright-citizenship-

The law is full of loopholes. If you do not first secure two witnesses, your last will and testament may not be valid. If a policeman fails in reading the Miranda warning, a criminal’s confession may be thrown out and kept away from the jury. And, through the lawbreaking and evasive maneuvers by their illegal alien parents, young children, through no merit (or choice) of their own, may end up with the very beneficial acquisition of U.S. citizenship.

Birthright citizenship began as an unintended consequence of the language of the 14th Amendment. This beneficent amendment was ratified in the wake of the Civil War to address the former Confederate states’ restrictive “black codes,” which limited the rights of the newly freed slaves. Such laws included provisions limiting the right to bear arms, to travel, to make contracts, and much else, often using roundabout maneuvers, such as racially neutral language that based rights on whether one’s grandparents had a particular right.

Thus, the amendment states broadly, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The amendment goes on to protect all such citizens’ “privileges and immunities,” the right to “life, liberty, and property,” and “equal protection of the laws.”

In other words, this was not an immigration amendment, but rather a law aimed at addressing the particular obstacles that faced the recently freed slaves. While tortured readings of the 14th Amendment have also brought us such abominations as an abstract “right to privacy,” which in turn led to the right to abortion and gay marriage, on the question of citizenship, there is at least a debatable question arising from the text of the amendment itself.

What the Court Has (and Has Not) Said

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2018/07/23/can_the_center_hold_it_must_solve_immigration_first_110723.html

The country seems perpetually stuck in 2016. Pundits and authors continue rehashing what “really” happened in the election. Our president — as he demonstrated once again in Helsinki last week — remains preoccupied with electoral math. The Justice Department continues to grind away on the campaign, emerging every few weeks to send the media into a frenzy. And Republicans are still deciding whether, how, and how much to separate themselves from Trump.

The Democrats seem to be stuck even further back — in 2016 primary season — with their establishment wing trying to beat back a populist surge to its left. Bernie’s latest bounce back took the form of a surprising win by fellow New Yorker and self-described socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, over one-time Speaker hopeful Joe Crowley. Meanwhile, long-time senator Diane Feinstein lost the support of California’s Democratic Party to Kevin de Léon, the challenger to her left, despite crushing him in the primary. Even presidential hopefuls looking ahead to the 2020 primary season have darted left, likely in fear of being outflanked.

In other words, moderate Democrats face in 2018 much the same challenge Hillary Clinton faced in 2016, with populist storms surging on both sides. The difference is that today’s Democrats can learn from Clinton’s mistakes.

New Democracy, an initiative led by the Progressive Policy Institute’s Will Marshall, seeks to do just that. For New Democracy’s recent debut at the Washington Court Hotel, center-left politicians and policy experts exchanged ideas on a new Democratic platform. Speakers included Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, and William Galston, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who was domestic policy adviser to Bill Clinton. Galston’s talk focused on what he argued is a sine qua non for the center-left’s agenda: sensible immigration policy.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270771/lefts-embarrassing-plea-open-borders-michael-cutler
Pro law-and-order immigration advocates in America whine about the emotional arguments and unhinged publicity stunts used by the open borders/abolish-ICE anarchists to sway public opinion.

But, when they use these emotional arguments, the abolish ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) crowd are merely playing to their own personal strengths: irrationality, magical thinking, and projection. The important issue is that law-and-order advocates, like us, have failed abysmally to use our own emotional arguments in changing minds on the immigration topic.

Indeed, the most persuasive emotional arguments strongly favor secure borders and effective immigration law enforcement.

Let’s begin by understanding that a nation’s leaders should be most concerned about the safety, well being and futures of its own citizens the same way that rational parents must prioritize the safety and well being of their own children above all others. From a nurturing perspective, pro law-and-order immigration advocates will have an edge by using this argument.

While we are on the topic of children, consider how the DREAM Act and then DACA were sold to us on the lies that this legislative detritus was supposed to help “young immigrants” who were brought here as children and had no control over their situation.

Of course, those “young immigrants” could have been in their mid-thirties and simply had to claim to have been present in the U.S. prior to their 16th birthdays. Then, when that bill failed to pass, President Obama cobbled together DACA — again claiming that this was about the children because, “Congress had failed to act.” I wrote about this deception in my article, DACA: The Immigration Trojan Horse, How the original DREAM act was designed to cover 90% of the illegal alien population in the US.

Now the press, and the Democrats along with certain judges, have gone off the deep end where an estimated 3,000 children have been separated from their parents along the U.S. Mexican border when they were caught being smuggled into the United States.

Various religious and charitable organizations like T’ruah and Church World Services have turned this into a media circus. Psychologists have been rushed in to help treat these “traumatized” children.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/house-democrats-introduce-first-bill-abolish-ice/

House Democrats introduced legislation on Thursday that would abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the first legislative manifestation of the anti-ICE rhetoric that has increasingly captivated Democrats in recent weeks.

The bill, sponsored by Representative Mark Pocan (D., Wisc.), provides Congress one year to terminate ICE in favor of a more “humane immigration enforcement system.” In practice, the legislation would empower a special commission to redesign the system for handling asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, absent any role for the White House.

The commission would comprise eight lawmakers from both parties as well as nine members selected from “major civil society and immigrants’ rights organizations and individuals directly impacted by ICE practices.”

“The ICE brand has been so damaged by the president that it can no longer accomplish its original mission,” Pocan said, reiterating a message that has become increasingly common among progressive Democrats. “Even ICE agents recognize that ICE doesn’t do what it was intended to.”

The commission would be tasked with identifying “all essential functions of ICE that uphold the Constitution,” and “the appropriate federal agencies that shall be tasked with executing activities such as combating financial crimes, cybercrimes, trade fraud, human trafficking and drug smuggling.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-voters-oppose-abolishing-ice/

Most voters oppose abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll, after some congressional Democrats called for scrapping or reimagining it.

Over half, 54 percent, believe the government should keep the border enforcement agency, while only 1 in 4 voters think it should be abolished.

The remaining 21 percent of voters were undecided.

ICE has become more controversial lately as the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy for illegal border crossers resulted in as many as 3,000 minors being separated from their parents as the adults were prosecuted.

Protests against the agency have erupted across the nation, with demonstrators adopting slogans like “No person is illegal” and “Crush ICE.”

Several high-profile Democrats have added their voices to the chorus calling for the agency’s elimination.

Potential 2020 presidential candidates Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris have called for ICE to be scrapped or replaced.

Socialist upstart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who last month beat out veteran Representative Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for his New York City district House seat, has called the “draconian” ICE to be abolished.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270686/lefts-immigration-con-game-michael-cutler

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

With that famous quote George Orwell warned decades ago against history revisionists and that which has come to be referred to as “fake news.”

On July 4, 2018, the New York Post headline read, “Statue of Liberty Climber Identified as Immigrant Activist.”

The Post and other news outlets have identified this ”immigrant activist” as Therese Patricia Okoumou — a 44-year-old originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

How better to celebrate the birth of our nation than stage a dangerous illegal protest against the enforcement of America’s immigration laws at the Statue of Liberty? Okoumou’s actions threatened to severely damage a precious national landmark and endangered the lives of hundreds of tourists — who had patiently waited in line, then paid a steep admission fee to ferry to Liberty Island — only to be evacuated because of her illegal hijinks.

Officers of the NYPD were also endangered by Okoumou’s stupid trick when they had to neutralize her threat to the public and to the Statue of Liberty when they took her into custody.

According to various reports about Okoumou, she is quite comfortable with both law-breaking and initiating lawsuits against businesses for alleged “racism.”

– An Uber driver has been charged with trying to forcibly touch a passenger in Westchester County.

27-year-old Iqbal Hussain was arrested by Rye Brook detectives at his apartment in the Bronx on Tuesday.

Police say Hussain was working as an Uber driver when he attempted to subject a female passenger in his vehicle to sexual contact.

The woman was injured while trying to defend herself.

Hussain was charged with assault and attempted forcible touching, and was released on $500 bail.

*Between June 2014 and June 2018, there have been at least 375 reported sexual assaults committed by Uber and Lyft drivers upon their female passengers in the U.S., according to the watchdog website “Who’s Driving You?”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/pro-illegal-immigration-politicians-killed-center-left/

Pro-illegal immigration politicians, that’s who

The victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over long-time Democratic congressman Joe Crowley of New York inspired some hysterical punditry. We were told that the 28,000 people who voted in a district of more than 600,000 had decided the fate of the political universe. Ocasio-Cortez, in this telling, heralds the coming of Democratic-Socialist, multiracial, female-dominated America. The 28-year-old bartender and community activist is the Democrat of the future — according to no less an authority than the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. And in a polarized media climate, with hyperbolic insinuations of “civil war” and calls for the harassment of political opponents, one is tempted to believe that romanticism and extremism grow ever stronger.

I remain skeptical. For one thing, New York politics is sort of the equivalent of the Las Vegas party scene — what happens there tends to stay there. Crowley was boring and out-of-touch; Ocasio-Cortez is appealing and a tireless campaigner. Her picture of democratic socialism is all rainbows and unicorns, platitudes and aspirations. And the numbers involved in the primary were so small that randomness has to have played some part in her 4,000-vote win. Ocasio-Cortez is neither a threat to America nor to the American right. But she is representative of the transformation of the American left.

The only civil war happening at the moment is within the Democratic party. The old-guard corporatists are under attack from activists with radical goals and immoderate tempers. You can trace a line from Occupy Wall Street in 2011 through Black Lives Matter in 2013 through Bernie Sanders in 2016 through the Women’s March a year later, Tom Steyer’s and Maxine Waters’s impeachment campaigns, the growing prominence of Democratic Socialists of America, and the movement to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement today.

This is a trend that has been building for some time but over the last two years acquired galvanic force. Why?

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/08/america-is-not-a-nation

“America belongs to no one but Americans. It does not belong to the foreign masses of the world and it does not belong to the Left who, having rejected the American way, cannot count themselves among its patriots.”

America is a nation of immigrants. It’s a commonplace among the political class. Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), emergent leaders in the open-borders vanguard of the Democratic Party, never tire of saying so. Both object to the Trump Administration’s hard line on border control and have buttressed their calls for an “immigration reform” that would in effect re-open the floodgates of migrants from south of the border. The reason, they say, is that immigration is the defining characteristic of the nation.

It isn’t.

The “nation of immigrants” trope is relatively new in American history, appearing not until the late 19th century. Its first appearance in print was most likely The Daily State Journal of Alexandria, Virginia, in 1874. In praising a state bill that encouraged European immigration, the editors wrote: “We are a nation of immigrants and immigrants’ children.” In 1938, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the Daughters of the American Revolution: “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” John F. Kennedy would later use the term as the title of a book, written as part of an Anti-Defamation League series, so it is undoubtedly objective, quality scholarship.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/abolish-ice-rhetoric-democrat-self-defeating-strategy/The race to be most radical is a self-defeating strategy.

The Democrats have an all-but-unbeatable potential presidential candidate lined up for 2020. She’s a woman who enjoys an A rating from the National Rifle Association and brags about going out to shoot the family turkey for Thanksgiving. She has spoken out in favor of federal fines for sanctuary cities, supported making English the national language, called for more border enforcement, and opposed driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. She is a fiscal moderate and a proud face of rural America. Ohio? Pennsylvania? Wisconsin? She’d romp in all of them.

Unfortunately for her party, this woman no longer exists. She is Kirsten Gillibrand circa 2008, the days when she was a congresswoman representing New York’s largely rural 20th district. The 2018 Gillibrand has renounced all of these stances, moving left and left and left again. She supports the New New Deal that is today’s progressive economics (Medicare for all, a federal jobs guarantee, a $15 minimum wage) and says she “couldn’t have been more wrong” about her previous support for gun rights. By 2010, her first full year in the Senate, the NRA had altered its rating of her record — to an F. A decade ago Gillibrand was a strong supporter of Israel; these days she is writing hymns of praise in Time magazine for the far-left anti-Semitic activist Linda Sarsour. She was the only senator to vote against confirming James Mattis as secretary of defense.