RUTHFULLY YOURS

An important, persistent question of our times is how to account for the wide political and social polarization between liberals and conservatives. Monday’s 5-3 Supreme Court decision striking down a Texas abortion law reveals what’s beneath these divisions.

The Court’s opinion in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt was about abortion certainly, but the argument between the majority and minority goes deeper. In the final paragraph of his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas went to the heart of the matter.

He noted first the divisions that always emerge from an abortion case: “Today’s decision will prompt some to claim victory, just as it will stiffen opponents’ will to object.” But, he continued, “the entire Nation has lost something essential.” He said the majority’s reasoning is an acknowledgement that “we have passed the point where ‘law,’ properly speaking, has any further application.” Justice Thomas is accusing his colleagues of lawlessness.

If putting it that way sounds familiar, it is because Justice Thomas was quoting from a law review article by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Bluntly stated, the dissents by Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito accuse the majority of manipulating the Court’s precedents to police rights favored by liberal politics and to delegitimize the claims of their opponents. The favored right in this case is access to abortion.
In 2013 the Texas legislature passed a law that doctors doing abortions must have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the abortion clinic. It also said the clinics had to equal the health and safety rules of ambulatory surgical centers. The Court’s majority struck down the entire law as a violation of the Constitution because its provisions impose an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to an abortion. It suggested that the law’s hospital-admissions rules for abortion doctors would harm women in rural counties.

The phrase “undue burden” is the famous legal test of state regulatory authority as defined in the 1992 abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The point of Casey was to establish that states had the right to regulate abortion absent an undue burden on women. The point of Monday’s Texas decision is to tell the states to forget Casey, that the legal path is so narrow as to make state regulation of abortion a fiction. CONTINUE AT SITE

I have written a follow-up article to my March 18, 2016 piece with the sarcastic title, “Are DHS Leaders Seeking an MVP Award From ISIS? – The day after the San Bernardino terror attack, why exactly did USCIS managers block a team of ICE agents from entering their facility?”

I began my original commentary by saying that I was not trying to go “over the top” with the title of my article and that I had not lost my mind but that I was infuriated that a manager of USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) would block ICE agents from entering that facility.

It is worth noting that both USCIS and ICE are component agencies of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

At the time I wrote my original article, the actual identity of the manager who blocked five ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents was not known however, it has been disclosed that the manager is Irene Martin.

It must be noted that these ICE agents were assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the office that they sought to enter was located in San Bernardino, the very same city where less than 24 hours earlier, on December 2, 2015, Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook carried out a terror attack that resulted in the murder of 14 and the wounding of 22 innocent victims.

Furthermore, Enrique Marquez, the individual the ICE agents were hoping to locate at the office, was believed to have provided the weapons used in carrying out that terrorist attack. They had discovered that Marquez was scheduled to appear for an interview that day, in conjunction with the application he filed for his wife to provide her with lawful immigrant status.

The agents were not only concerned about questioning and arresting Marquez because of the crimes he was alleged to have already committed in providing weapons and possibly other material support to the two terrorists, but the agents were greatly concerned that Marquez may have provided similar assistance to other terrorists who had not yet carried out additional attack(s). Time was obviously extremely critical and potentially innocent lives were hanging in the balance. The clock was ticking and time was not on the side of the agents- or of possible additional victims, for that matter.

Obama is the biggest smuggler of guns to terrorists.

You won’t find many of the Democrats who pulled their phony publicity stunt over gun control backing the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act. It was after all their very own administration that chose to sendF-16 fighter jets, not to mention other serious firepower, to the Muslim Brotherhood regime that ruled in Egypt before being overthrown by military intervention and popular protests.

Not only was the Muslim Brotherhood regime linked to Hamas, which was designated as a foreign terrorist group by the State Department, but it had helped ISIS open up a front in the Sinai. Hamas is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al Qaeda is currently run by a Brotherhood splinter group. Osama bin Laden had been a member of the Brotherhood. Zarqawi, the founder of the group that eventually became ISIS, was freed as a gesture to the Muslim Brotherhood. If the Muslim Brotherhood were any more involved in Islamic terrorism, it would have copyrighted the term.

But Secretary of State John Kerry had defended the weapons giveaway to the Brotherhood by claiming that, “Not everything lends itself to a simple classification, black or white.” Apparently aiding Islamic terrorists defies simple classification. Not everything is black and white. Sometimes it’s bright red.

While Democrats have harped on gun sales to potential terrorists, their own government was responsible for selling far more lethal weapons to far more dangerous Islamic terrorist groups.

Our weapons have gone to such diverse forces for democracy in Syria as the Islamist militias operating under the moniker of the Free Syrian Army whose leader defended Al Qaeda and the majority of whose commanders wanted to work with Al Qaeda, Jaysh al-Qasas, a former ally of ISIS and Ghuraba al-Sham, which had called for slaughtering Americans “like cattle” and whose former leader had ISIS ties.

President Barack Obama said Thursday that despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s tie vote, which essentially blocks his immigration plan, the millions of illegal immigrants that he sought to make legal with his executive action will remain a low priority for deportation by his administration.

“Enforcement priorities developed by my administration are not affected by this ruling. This means that the people who might have benefited from the expanded deferred action policies – long-term residents raising children who are Americans or legal residents – they will remain low priorities for enforcement. As long as you have not committed a crime, our limited immigration enforcement resources are not focused on you,” he said.

The tie vote leaves in place the ruling of the federal appeals court in New Orleans, which said the administration lacked the authority to shield up to 4 million immigrants from deportation and allow them to obtain work permits without congressional approval, the Associated Press reported Thursday.

Obama said the decision “is frustrating to those who seek to grow our economy and bring a rationality to our immigration system and to allow people to come out of the shadows and lift this perpetual cloud on them.”

“For more than two decades now, our immigration system – everybody acknowledges – has been broken, and the fact that the Supreme Court wasn’t able to issue a decision today doesn’t just set this system back even further, it takes us further from the country we aspire to be,” the president said.

Obama said that since Congress was unable to pass commonsense comprehensive immigration reform, he was “left with little choice but to take steps within my existing authority to make our immigration system smarter, fairer, and more just.”

“Four years ago, we announced that those who are our lowest priorities for enforcement – diligent, patriotic, young Dreamers, who grew up pledging allegiance to our flag should be able to apply to work here and study here and pay their taxes here. More than 730,000 lives have been changed as a result,” he said.

We don’t have an adult political system. What we do have is a political system in which childish tactics are used to play childish games with adult consequences. As described by Dr. Berne in Games People Play, “games” are dysfunctional strategies that can be used by adults to elicit childish or parental responses. Childish strategies shift responsibility to the “parent” while still claiming power. An adult who acts like a child gets to control what happens without being responsible for it.

(This article uses a very loose adaptation of Berne’s Games People Play as a model.)

When the left shifted from a worker’s movement to a youth movement because dissatisfaction was more likely to be found in the children of the middle and upper classes than among workers, protest strategies often became childish. The classic protesters were self-consciously juvenile outraging sensibilities so to force their establishment opponents to play the role of the sanctimonious parent while they reveled in being the liberated children. “Outrage” is a game that children learn to play at an early age. Some adults never stop playing it, at parties or at family reunions.

The modern campus crybully movement doesn’t seek to outrage sensibilities by being provocative. Instead it’s playing an even more immature childish game. The Yale protest over “offensive” Halloween costumes was the perfect example as a student screamed, “It is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman.” This is the “Bad Parent” game.

Protesters, whether on campus or at #BlackLivesMatter events scream about their pain and how neglected they are. They claim to be traumatized, exhausted, in fear of their lives and unable to go about their daily business because the adults aren’t taking good care of them. They’re bad parents.

The classic protesters were playing children outraging parental sensibilities. The modern protesters claim to be abused children who need safe spaces and protection from bullying. They demand the right to be children while everyone must adopt the role of parents and coddle them. Tears, outbursts and tantrums glorified as “die ins” in which everyone lies on the floor reinforce their childish case.

The “Crybully” is a perfect example of adults using childish behavior to achieve their demands while forcing their opponents into a parental mode. The protesters openly disavow responsibility for their own behavior and demand that administrators, authorities and society stop being bad parents.

“Bad Parent” is a further regression to childhood than “Outrage”. Its origins go back directly to the coddled baby. Crybullies achieve their political goals using a childish strategies in which they use power while claiming to be powerless and demand that those who have power do what they want.

There are two ways to counter this protest style. The adult approach is to insist that the protesters are adults and must be responsible. Rather than falling into the parental style which reproves and plays into the psychodrama, the adult style is to reject the entire dynamic and hold them responsible.

The more familiar way is to meet them on a childish level by taunting and ridiculing their childishness. This can be emotionally satisfying. But it plays into the psychodrama, riling up the crybullies to further cries that they are being picked on. The authorities are pressured to stop being “bad parents” and protect them. Enough taunting may lead the crybullies to overplay their hand, but it is at least as likely to lead to crackdowns on free speech. This already occurred on Twitter.

In September 2014, members of Congress were informed that disgraced former Homeland Security adviser Mohamed Elibiary was being relieved of his duties after a long series of controversies, including the fact that his tweets cheering the inevitability of an Islamic caliphate were used by ISIS supporters for recruiting purposes.

Now Elibiary has gone after Egypt’s Coptic Christian community — again — after a prominent Coptic businessman expressed support for Donald Trump. Elibiary ominously warned in a tweet today that such support would be “not good 4 Copts in Egypt.”

“They should change their dinner’s name then from Coptic Solidarity 2 Coptic Fascism. Trump’ll lose in Nov inshallah. https://twitter.com/walidphares/status/746135994232016896 …

“#PT Where’s wisdom in most prominent #Egypt’n Copt endorsing most anti-Islam Pres candidate in US history? That’s not good 4 Copts in Egypt”

This is not the first time that Elibiary has attacked the persecuted Coptic Christian community.

In September 2013, Elibiary went after the Coptic Christian community for nurturing anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiment just a month after Muslim Brotherhood cadres had burned down 70+ Coptic churches in Egypt:

There’s an underappreciated side to the now-infamous New York Times Magazine story about Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security advisor for strategic communications. As shallow and self-important as Rhodes comes across in the article, he clearly knows his audience. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes said. “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” Rhodes, like much of the media he spins, is a well-educated member of the upper middle class. He is a product of the same progressive cultural and ideological milieu, and he thus has keen instincts for what he can get away with—and no shame about revealing it.

Rhodes has good reason for such confidence. Surveying America’s elite liberal arts institutions, with a focus on Oberlin College, The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller illustrates just how unhinged most institutions of higher education have become. Schools like Oberlin have for decades rejected the tenets on which they were founded—namely, that exposing young minds to the Western canon would teach them to think critically and yield productive, well-rounded members of society. Instead, Oberlin and many other once-prestigious schools have become cauldrons of radical leftism. Heller describes students who simply refuse to talk with classmates of other races; scholarship students who view the same college that provides them with free world-class educational opportunities as a “tool of capitalist oppression”; and students who feel they are being oppressed because their classwork distracts them from social activism.

Heller’s account confirms what critics of campus environments have been chronicling for years: that “trigger” warnings must be slapped even on the greatest books to protect students from ideas that might upset them, and that “identity” is treated as a kind of knowledge in itself—classic literature, not so much. Students at many of today’s leading institutions no longer study the classics. What do dead white males know about microaggression or cultural appropriation, anyway? At Stanford University, students recently voted down an initiative to institute a two-quarter Western Civilization requirement for undergraduates. Today’s academy replaces the knowledge and wisdom gleaned from Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus with political correctness, multiculturalism, and infantilization—to devastating effect.

Supposedly liberal and tolerant campuses create “safe spaces” limited to certain identity groups and those of a certain ideological inclination. In reality, safe spaces are safe only from the diversity their inhabitants claim to cherish. Activist students decry institutions based in “imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy,” as one group of aggrieved black students at Oberlin described it. One can’t escape the impression that liberal arts schools are more focused on coddling the next generation of community-organizing social-justice warriors than on educating them.

U.S. markets are in for a rough ride today following the British vote for freedom from the European Union and its anti-democratic Brussels bureaucracy. Investors should look beyond the short-term uncertainty and transition costs and consider the significant competitive edge the U.K. gains with this massive de-regulatory stimulus. The EU did not make London a world financial center—smart British policy makers and businesspeople did. Going forward, the U.K. can likely cut a trade deal with the EU along the lines of what Norway and Switzerland have done. Even if Britain can’t, as Matt Ridley noted this week, “container shipping, budget airlines, the internet and the collapse of tariffs under the World Trade Organization” have made it “as easy to do business with Australia and China as with France and Germany.”

“For the first time in modern history, most workers and families will be able to file their taxes on a form as simple as a postcard,” writes House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, who is rolling out a tax plan today with his Republican colleagues. Mr. Brady adds that the “current IRS will not exist,” and that Washington’s 35% corporate income-tax rate will fall to a flat 20%, among other significant reforms.

A Journal editorial calls the Democratic sit-in disrupting the House of Representatives “the most disgraceful floor spectacle since Preston Brooks beat Charles Sumner with a cane in 1856.” The editorial board adds that the Pelosi Democrats “are betraying the public trust they hold. The first obligation of political leadership is to maintain order, and better still if politicians show respect for the rules of the government to which they belong. Democrats will ride to November on a protest politics that is antithetical to self-government, but they do America no good by bringing the methods of the bullying radical left to America’s House.”

A 4-4 Supreme Court deadlock means that President Obama’s lawless immigration order “is dead for the rest of his Presidency, as it deserves to be,” notes a separate editorial. “He said multiple times that he couldn’t issue such an order because there was no justification in law and ‘I am not a king.’ But he later decided to act like a king anyway when he couldn’t get his version of immigration reform through Congress. His order has further poisoned the politics of immigration and assisted the rise of Donald Trump. Thanks, Barack!” …Meanwhile Peggy Noonan reminds us today that Mr. Trump is no Reagan.

Economic forecasting has never been easy, but it may now be more wrong than ever. “Unpredictability may be the new normal,” says Roger Altman, founder and chairman of Evercore, as “financial markets and financial investors are increasingly driving the world economy.”

“It isn’t every day that a Supreme Court Justice guts his own precedent, but that’s what happened Thursday when Anthony Kennedy voted to uphold racial preferences in admissions at the University of Texas,” writes the editorial board.

Note: Yesterday, I testified before the House Judiciary Committee in Part II of a hearing on “Examining the Allegations of Misconduct Against IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.”

The hearing, at which three other lawyers also testified, explored impeachment principles. Below is the written testimony I submitted prior to the hearing.

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Chairman Goodlatte, Congressman Nadler, members of the committee, my name is Andrew C. McCarthy. For over eighteen years, I was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, retiring from the Justice Department in 2003 as the chief assistant United States attorney in charge of the Southern District’s satellite office (which oversees federal law enforcement in six counties north of the Bronx).

During my tenure in the office, I investigated, tried and supervised the prosecution of numerous criminal cases, running the gamut from organized crime and narcotics trafficking through political corruption and terrorism. In addition, I held various executive staff positions in the office, including deputy chief of the appellate unit, in which I wrote and edited briefs submitted by the United States to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and prepared other prosecutors for oral argument (in addition to writing briefs and presenting oral argument in numerous of my own cases).

During my Justice Department service, I was twice awarded the Justice Department’s highest honors: the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service in 1987 for the “Pizza Connection” organized crime and international narcotics trafficking case targeting the Sicilian mafia, and the Attorney General’s Award for Extraordinary Service in 1996 for the terrorism prosecution against the jihadist cell of Omar Abdel Rahman (a/k/a “the Blind Sheikh”) responsible for (among other atrocities) the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and an unsuccessful plot to bomb New York City landmarks.

Since retiring from the Justice Department, I have been a writer, focusing on matters of law enforcement, national security, constitutional law, politics and culture. Concededly, I tend to come at policy matters from a conservative and constitutionalist perspective; nevertheless, I have always believed the application of legal principles and precedent should be a non-partisan endeavor, just as it was when I was a prosecutor. In my post-Justice Department career, I have written several books, including (in 2014), Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

In a nutshell, Faithless Execution argues that the Framers saw impeachment as an “indispensable” tool (to quote James Madison) in the constitutional framework of divided authorities, which obliges Congress to police executive overreach. The principal purpose of the Constitution is to limit the power of government to intrude on the liberties and suppress the rights of the American people. Separation of powers is the primary way the Constitution guarantees these liberties and rights. Thus, the Framers were deeply worried that maladministration — including overreach, lawlessness, or incompetence — could inflate the constitutionally-limited executive into an authoritarian rogue who undermines our constitutional order.