Chuck Schumer’s Tears Shouldn’t Be Taken Too Seriously

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, January 30, 2017

I am beginning to suspect that the Democrats are not acting entirely in good faith.

Protests have been convened, and a national crisis declared, over the Trump administration’s promised expansion of Obama administration policies restricting some refugee inflows from the Middle East and identifying the residents of certain majority-Muslim countries as likely threats subject to heightened scrutiny. The Democrats are behaving as though President Trump had just commissioned a very large order of Zyklon B.

Funny what rises to command their attention.

As the National Review Editors have pointed out, both the list of targeted countries and the policy of using executive action to prohibit U.S. travel by members of suspect populations date from the Obama administration — they are not Trump-era innovations.

These of course were not the only Obama-era innovations nor the most significant of them. Only a few months ago, the idea of using unilateral executive action to limit the travel not of foreigners and green-card holders but of U.S. citizens — and to strip them of specific constitutional protections under the Bill of Rights — thrilled Democrats, who described all opposition to such heavy-handed abuse of civil liberties as indulgence of terrorism. Stripping away the constitutional rights of purported terrorism suspects — U.S. citizens who had never even been charged with a crime, much less convicted of one — “isn’t politics, it’s common sense,” declared Representative Ted Deutch (D., Fla.). Hillary Rodham Clinton supported stripping U.S. citizens of their constitutional rights in a secret process without trial or hearing or presentation of evidence, as did Senator Bernie Sanders, President Barack Obama, and practically every other Democratic figure of any consequence.

Stripping U.S. citizens of their rights was “common sense,” according to the same Democrats who now protest that temporarily refusing Yemeni nationals entry into the United States — the government of which has no particular obligation to them and where they have no legal right to entry or anything else — is a crime against humanity.

Strange, that. But then, who complained when the Obama administration announced its policy of assassinating U.S. citizens as part of the so-called war on terror? A few libertarians, Glenn Greenwald, and one right-winger at National Review.

So, to review: Stripping away the actual constitutional rights of U.S. citizens without due process through a secret military-intelligence process without appeal, trial, or representation? Hunky-dory. Ordering the assassination of U.S. citizens because one of them is, in your considered view, “the Osama bin Laden of Facebook”? Kill away. But telling a few Iranians that they are welcome to travel anywhere in the world they like except the United States?

Panic and alarums.

I wrote a few days ago that blind and unthinking opposition to a president is only a variation on blind and unthinking obedience, and that I myself intend not to do anything blindly and unthinkingly. I have advocated using the visa and immigration systems as an anti-terror tool since long before Donald Trump was a presidential candidate, much less president. I concur with my colleagues that his botching the executive order brings unhappily to mind the “amateurism that dominated his campaign,” i.e., the impression that Trump and his associates give of not knowing what in hell they are doing, and would add that it seems to me that a policy change of this scope should be led by Congress rather than by the president, whose proper role is not the making of new law but the execution of existing law. Perhaps congressional Republicans could rouse themselves to take an interest in this. Democrats do not object to this sort of presidential arrogation, only to the president doing the arrogating.

Here, I have a premonition of scoffing: “Oh, that’s just whatabout-ism!” You’ll remember “whatabout-ism,” which was the Democratic talking point of the day a few weeks back. And they’d have a point if the argument were: “It is acceptable for President Trump to do things that are wrong, illegal, or unconstitutional, because President Obama did those things, too, or similar things.” But that isn’t the argument at all. The argument is: Democrats are fundamentally unserious, opportunistic, and dishonest in their assessment of what is happening, believing that they can simply use Trump and Trumpism to discredit conservatism and perhaps mortally wound the Republican party. Alas, that “amateurism” the Editors mention promises to give them ample opportunity to do just that.

But no honest-minded person with a sincere desire to actually understand what is going on in American politics should take Chuck Schumer’s tears very seriously. The Democrats are happy to do what Trump contemplates doing — and much worse — not to foreign nationals and would-be asylum-seekers but to American citizens at home under the protection of the Constitution.

Which is to say, if you dislike Trump and believe that the credible alternative to his approach is that of Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi, you are mistaken. The Democrats stand ready not to inconvenience the citizens of other countries but to strip citizens of this country of their rights, so long as they get to be in charge of doing it. If you not only failed to speak up against the Obama administration’s all-out assault on the Bill of Rights but cheered it, then I do not want to hear very much from you about the Trump administration’s denying visas to would-be Somali immigrants or Sudanese tourists.

On Trump, Conservatives Have Little Choice But To Take It Issue By Issue

By David Harsanyi

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Resist!?

Sure. What would you have us resist? Everything?

There’s an expectation — often, a demand — that movement conservatives be all in or all out on the Donald Trump presidency. Lock-stepping partisans of both varieties offer this false choice. The election phase of the debate is over. Traditionally, presidents offer a menu of policies that more or less comport with the worldview of their party. This is different. So while I don’t contend to speak for all conservatives, I do imagine many are horrified/excited/sad/happy/content/embarrassed by what’s going on — often on the same day.

For me, it’s repulsive to hear Trump and friends use authoritarian-tinged rhetoric when talking about the press. Telling the media to “keep its mouth shut,” even if journalists are antagonistic, isn’t something a person in a position of power should be saying. Although the administration hasn’t yet inhibited the media in any way — by, say, illegally spying on journalists — this kind of statement is distressing because it exposes an un-American view of free expression.

Then again, Trump is also almost certain to pick an originalist Supreme Court justice on Tuesday, who, if confirmed, will defuse Democrats’ authoritarian efforts to empower the state to ban political speech outright by overturning Citizens United. Many of us assumed the court would be lost and state power unchecked. If Trump keeps his promises — a big if — conservatives could have a generational victory.

So why should we expect Republicans to act like only one of the above is happening?

Trump issued a statement commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day without mentioning that the Nazis’ final solution was specifically aimed at exterminating the Jews of Europe. This is offensive, amateurish, and historically illiterate — and get used to it. Most Jewish organizations, as they should, condemned the omission.

Then again, it’s also highly unlikely that the Trump administration would send a billion dollars in cash in an attempt to placate an anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying, nuclear-weapon-seeking, terrorist-backing regime that openly threatens the lives of millions of Jews in the Middle East. Not in 1939. But right now. That has been happening, as well.

When Trump issues an executive order instating a temporary travel ban from seven Muslim-majority countries, he inexplicably pulls in green-card holders. Although the hysteria surrounding the order is over-the-top, it’s a mess written by inept people. Conservatives like to claim that immigrants who follow the rules will be welcome in the United States. When they ignore this promise, they undermine trust in the process and our nation.

Yet for many it’s heartening to see a White House that isn’t going to pretend Islamic immigration is the same as Methodist or Hindi or Jewish immigration. Unlike the last administration, this one isn’t going to talk about Islamism — the most pervasively violent and illiberal movement in the world; one which is not only about terrorism but includes many Muslim theocracies — as if it were a fairy tale invented by conservative media outlets.

The fact that Trump installs a pseudo-intellectual chauvinist like Steve Bannon onto the National Security Council is an assault on common sense, norms, and decency. But Trump also has James Mattis, Mike Pompeo, and other apparently competent cabinet picks that align well with prevailing Republican worldviews. Most cabinet members have nothing to do with Trumpism, yet Democrats act as if every selection is a fanatic. Take Trump’s education secretary, who believes parents should have some measure of choice rather than condemning their kids to a failed public school system. This is something that’s invigorating for a lot of movement conservatives and evangelicals. Why should they pick Chuck Schumer over Donald Trump?

Despite the views of Congress and most of his cabinet, Trump says waterboarding isn’t torture. This is troubling. Yet the Trump administration also makes a point to participate in the March for Life. If pro-lifers had to choose between Trump (a person they might find crass or offputting) and the Democratic Party, which now supports unlimited abortion on demand until the moment of birth, who will they choose?

Trump will blatantly lie about crowd sizes to ease his petulant ego, and it sounds insane. Trump promises to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, and signed an executive order requiring two regulations be revoked for every new one issued, which sounds fantastic. These things happen simultaneously.

From my perspective, Trump is neither presidential, competent, nor ideologically (or otherwise) coherent most of the time. The alternative doesn’t sound that great, either.

I doubt I’m alone on this. In the best-case scenario, congressional Republicans do what ruling parties rarely do, which is hold their president in check. One day Trump’s negatives might make him completely unpalatable for most conservatives. Today, what reason do they give to make common cause with morally preening liberals who overreact to every executive order and utterance? In this environment, it’s perfectly acceptable, even preferable, to take politics issue by issue.

The Un-American Canard

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

The surefire way to bring the word “un-American” into vogue is to propose a restriction on immigration, no matter how minor.

Democrats, who have spent the past half-century since Joe McCarthy objecting to the suggestion that anyone in this country might not be patriotic, can barely mention President Donald Trump’s immigration order without calling it un-American. Judging by their performance over the past few days, if Democrats ever take back control of Congress, their first act will be to reinstitute the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate proponents of reduced immigration and their associates. (“Are you now or have you ever been an immigration restrictionist?”)

Trump’s immigration order is vulnerable to any number of legitimate criticisms, on its merits and particularly on its shambolic rollout. But it is not true that a months-long pause in immigration from seven Muslim-majorities countries, some of which lack functioning governments, and all of which are either war-torn or hostile to the United States, is a violation of the nation’s creed.

Nowhere is it written that the United States can never tap the brakes on immigration. For much of the political class and for an inflamed Left, any new restriction is tantamount to melting down the Statue of Liberty, an ahistorical attitude that desperately needs a corrective. President Trump, in blunderbuss fashion, is setting out to provide one.

Everyone knows that we are a “nation of immigrants,” although immigration has been highly contested throughout our history. “America,” the late political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote, “has been a nation of restricted and interrupted immigration as much as it has been a nation of immigration.”

Levels of immigration spiked in the 1880s, dropped in the 1890s and reached new highs before World War I. They declined precipitously during the war and bounced back afterward. Then the 1924 immigration law brought a new phase of lower immigration that didn’t end until the late 1960s. In 1965, fewer than 300,000 immigrants were admitted to the U.S. We have been at elevated levels for decades since then and now admit about 1 million a year. The proportion of the foreign-born population is set to hit a record in 2025.

This means there is a lot of room to reduce immigration without shutting our doors entirely. A cut in half in legal immigration to the levels of the early 1980s would still mean roughly 500,000 new immigrants a year, a high absolute number compared with almost every other country in the world. Of course, the Trump policy that has caused such a reaction is not close to change of this scale.

Trump also has temporarily suspended the U.S. refugee program and capped it at 50,000 refugees. This is in the same ballpark as the figure for admittances from the past five years or so, when the number of refugees was typically between 50,000 and 70,000 a year. If we are using an overall level of refugees to judge our American-ness, 1976, 1977, 1978, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 must have been woefully un-American years, because the number of refugees was less than 50,000 in each of them.

All of this said, the critics are right to sense something different in President Trump. He is going to put much more emphasis on the integrity of our borders and less on humanitarian considerations than his predecessors. This is a direct challenge to the lazy cosmopolitanism that assumes the only correct answer in immigration policy is always “more” and never “less.”

The rocky rollout of the Trump policy means that the administration is expending political capital on its executive order that would best be preserved for more important immigration-related causes, like getting Congress to pass a mandatory e-verify system to stop employers from hiring illegal labor and to emphasize skills in the legal immigration system — you know, other alleged betrayals of America.

Why Yates Had to Go

National Review Online

Monday, January 30, 2017

It is a very simple proposition. Our Constitution vests all executive power — not some of it, all of it — in the president of the United States. Executive-branch officials do not have their own power. They are delegated by the president to execute his power. If they object to the president’s policies, their choice is clear: salute and enforce the president’s directives, or honorably resign. There is no third way.

No one knows this better than high-ranking officials of the Department of Justice. That is why President Trump was right to fire Acting Attorney General Sally Yates.

Over the weekend, President Trump issued an executive order temporarily restricting the admission into the United States of aliens from various Muslim-majority countries, as well as aliens from Syria and elsewhere who are claiming refugee status. Naturally, this has triggered protests by Democrats and the Left. They erroneously claim that Trump’s executive order violates the Constitution, statutory law, American tradition, and human decency.

For inexplicable reasons, the new president left Yates in place to run the Justice Department in anticipation of the confirmation of Senator Jeff Sessions. A faithful Obama-appointed progressive, Yates obviously knew which way the political wind was blowing in her tribe.

Like most Democrats, Yates objects to the president’s executive order. Fair enough. But she is not a political operative, she was a Justice Department official — the highest such official. If her opposition to the president’s policy was as deeply held as she says, her choice was clear: enforce the president’s policy or quit.

Instead, she chose insubordination: Knowing she would be out the moment Senator Sessions is confirmed, she announced on Monday night that the Justice Department would not enforce the president’s order. She did not issue this statement on the grounds that the order is illegal. She declined to take a definitive position on that question. She rested her decision, rather, on her disagreement with the justice of the order. Now, she’ll be a left-wing hero, influential beyond her heretofore status as a nameless bureaucrat. But she had to go.

To make an analogy, there are many federal judges who oppose abortion. They apply Roe v. Wade even though they disagree with it intensely, because their duty is to obey superior courts. As every official in the Justice Department knows, if one disagrees with the law one is called upon to apply, or the policy one is bound to enforce, one is free to resign. Staying on while undermining government policy is not an act of courage. It is an act of sabotage.

It was foolish of President Trump to leave officials such as Acting Attorney General Yates in place. The president has issued a raft of executive orders in his first eight days. His obvious intent is to change governance significantly, which means he needs entirely new personnel. Yates never should have been in the position to undertake her grandstanding in the first place — but at least that particular error has now been corrected.

California Shouldn’t Secede from the U.S.

By John Fund

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Los Angeles — Liberals used to hate secession, the notion that states could leave the Union as they did before the Civil War because they didn’t agree with the policies of the federal government. But with Donald Trump’s election, many California liberals suddenly have warm words for a budding ballot initiative that has just begun collecting signatures in order to place secession, or “Calexit,” on the ballot.

At the height of the tea-party movement, Texas governor Rick Perry merely hinted at the thought that Texas might react to President Obama’s executive overreach by reclaiming its one-time status as an independent republic. He was denounced as something akin to a traitor; critics lamented that he wanted to return Texas to the era of sharecroppers or Jim Crow. Now Dan Schnur, who teaches political communications at the University of Southern California, says “California is the new Texas,” with its elected officials promoting a “virtual secession.” The secessionists plan to take to the legislature, the courts, and the streets to resist Trump’s agenda. Never before have so many prominent Californians gotten into such a reactionary, defensive crouch.

Some of their rhetoric resembles that of the “massive resistance” movement in the 1950s South, which vowed to fight federal intrusion into the right of states to run their own discriminatory elections, segregate public schools, and ignore federal law enforcement. Assembly speaker Anthony Rendon has warned Trump that he better not dare to go after any of the state’s estimated 2 million illegal immigrants: “If you want to get to them, you have to go through us.” Governor Jerry Brown vows to block any attempt to divert California from its radical plan to limit carbon emissions: “We’ve got the scientists. We’ve got the lawyers, and we’re ready to fight.” State attorney general Xavier Bacerra says one of his top priorities is the “resistance” against Washington’s deportation of illegal immigrants, even to the point of paying their legal fees to fight the federales.

On policy after policy, from dramatically higher minimum wages to the nation’s most steeply progressive income tax, California’s leaders are pursuing a 180-degree departure from the priorities of Team Trump. They say this is the perfect time for a breakup, and they cite a new Reuters-Ipsos poll showing that 32 percent of Californians (mostly Democrats) back the idea.

As a Californian, I view the “Calexit” movement with amusement, since there is zero chance that Congress would ever provide enough votes to allow California to leave peacefully, and the alternative exit ramp would involve a modern-day civil war.

During my recent trips back to California, I have often debated with liberals over the idea. I point out that before they sign up for secession, there is a more serious, more tolerant way of giving Californians more choices: Let the sprawling, diverse state divide up into two or more states to ease tensions between farmers and coastal types, defuse the war of ideology between Left and Right, and allow more policy experimentation,

Efforts to divide California into more manageable and homogeneous parts are as old as the Bear Flag that was raised over the state capitol at statehood in 1850. When I was a legislative staffer in Sacramento in 1980, a state assemblyman named Stan Statham had a serious proposal that attracted bipartisan support. He recognized that California’s people (now 40 million) would be better served if its competing constituencies had more in common.

Lots of people have their favorite maps for new states. For decades, the natural dividing line ran due east from the coast, just north of Bakersfield; it emphasized the differences between northern and southern California. My favorite design was for three states: one centered on Los Angeles, one centered on San Francisco, and everyone else in a third state. More recently, in 2009, then GOP assemblyman Bill Maze proposed creating two states: a Coastal California state and an Inland California state. The big population centers of San Francisco and Los Angeles would be in the first, but the inland state would include some large coastal counties such as Orange (home of Disneyland) and San Diego.

The new states would be far more in sync on policy. The coastal state would emphasize environmental values, the “next big thing” economy of Silicon Valley, and the multicultural diversity of L.A. The inland state would have vast water resources, abundant agricultural lands, and its own cutting-edge facilities in sectors ranging from aerospace to data processing.

Politically, the two states would provide an escape from the current political conformity of California, which is dominated by public-sector unions and progressive activists. Take the last governor’s race in 2014. Democrat Jerry Brown won reelection over Republican Neel Kashkari by 60 percent to 40 percent statewide. But in Inland California, they were separated by just a few thousand votes. The two Californias would include a progressive stronghold able to experiment (even more than the state already does) with new “small is beautiful” ideas; next to it would be a politically competitive state with many constituencies that would favor pro-growth policies. Tensions and gridlock under a two-state model would probably be reduced.

Of course, it’s unlikely that California will ever be divided. It’s even more unlikely that it would cut its ties to the rest of the nation and become a separate country. But the debate on both ideas is healthy. To what extent should we let arbitrary political boundaries established many decades ago curb our imagination and prevent us from creative solutions to our problems?