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.
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