ActRight

The Ninth Circuit’s decision against President Trump’s immigration order is worse than wrong. It is dangerous. To review, Trump issued an executive order blocking entry by refugees and aliens from seven Muslim-majority countries. The travel restriction is to be short-lived: a period of months while better vetting procedures are developed. The administration, moreover, did not pluck the seven countries from its allegedly anti-Muslim imagination. They were cited in a statute enacted by Congress and signed by President Obama, based on the richly supported conclusion that these countries — Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan — are riven by anti-American jihadism, besides having governments that are either non-functional or implacably hostile to the U.S., rendering any efforts to screen their citizens uniquely difficult. A federal judge in Seattle, James Robart, issued a temporary restraining order against the travel ban at the behest of two states, Washington and Minnesota, run by Democratic governors. Now, the Ninth Circuit has upheld this single, unelected jurist’s usurpation of the power to make American national-security policy. According to the three-judge panel, even illegal aliens, to say nothing of aliens holding non-immigrant visas or permanent-resident status, have due-process rights against government actions to protect Americans from foreign threats. Therefore, the president and Congress (i.e., the branches of government constitutionally responsible for national security) may not take such actions unless and until the judiciary (the branch with no such responsibility) has approved those actions. That aliens are not citizens and have no constitutional right to come to the United States is apparently superseded by their newfangled “right” to be welcomed into the United States courts. And even if they are not here already, even if they remain in the far reaches of the globe, this alien “right” may be asserted by state governments. The states’ interest in having foreign students and scholars at their public universities, we are told, outweighs the public’s interest in excluding aliens who may be terrorists, law-breakers, public charges, or hostile to our Constitution and culture. The unanimous ruling is the type of lunacy with which the Ninth Circuit has become synonymous. It is also the inevitable result of a turn-of-the-century judicial power grab in the realm of national security. Writing for the Supreme Court in 1948 (in Chicago & Southern Air Lines v. Waterman), Justice Robert Jackson — FDR’s former attorney general and the chief prosecutor at Nuremburg — explained that decisions involving foreign policy, including alien threats to national security, are “political, not judicial” in nature. Thus, they are wholly confided by our Constitution to the political departments of the government, Executive and Legislative. They are delicate, complex, and involve large elements of prophecy. They are and should be undertaken only by those directly responsible to the people whose welfare they advance or imperil. They are decisions of a kind for which the Judiciary has neither aptitude, facilities nor responsibility and have long been held to belong in the domain of political power not subject to judicial intrusion or inquiry. It is bygone wisdom. The modern judiciary, and the modern Left whose water it carries, holds that no aspect of governance evades supervision by unelected federal judges. The full flower of this new thinking was revealed in Boumediene v. Bush, the 2008 Supreme Court decision on which the Ninth Circuit centrally relies. Boumediene radically altered the separation-of-powers doctrine on which our Constitution is founded. For the preceding two-plus centuries, the doctrine meant that each branch of the central government respected the Constitution’s delegations of supreme authority over different subject matters to its peer branches: the power of the political branches to conduct foreign relations, repel foreign invasions, and prescribe the conditions under which aliens may be admitted to and remain in the United States was every bit as plenary as the judiciary’s power to decide a breach-of-contract claim or issue a search warrant. With this understanding of the judiciary’s lack of power and institutional competence in national-security matters, the Congress enacted the 1952 law on which President Trump expressly relied. This provision, now codified at Section 1182(f) of federal immigration law, authorizes the president “by proclamation” to exclude classes of aliens whose admission would “in his judgment” — meaning: not subject to the judiciary’s judgment — be detrimental to the United States. Under the Constitution’s conception of separation of powers, this is the pinnacle of lawful executive power: an area in which (a) the president has a reservoir of his own foreign-affairs authority; (b) the Congress, responsible for prescribing the terms under which aliens may be admitted, has vested the president with maximum statutory authority; and (c) there is no legitimate judicial oversight role. Alas, Boumediene turned separation of powers on its head. Writing for himself and the Supreme Court’s liberal bloc, Justice Anthony Kennedy announced that, henceforth, the legitimacy of presidential or congressional power depends not on the Constitution but on the judiciary’s interpretation of the Constitution. Translation: There is no subject matter on which judges do not have the last word. This radical new theory led to Boumediene’s radical conclusion: Alien enemy combatants — foreigners whose only contact with the United States is to levy war against her — somehow have a constitutional right to challenge in federal court the commander-in-chief’s congressionally endorsed decision to detain them in wartime. A more restrained court would limit Boumediene to its sui generis facts. Not the Ninth Circuit. For the California-based appellate court, Boumediene paved the way for an even haughtier decree that, in a time of profound national-security threat, the president — despite a sweeping authorization from Congress — is powerless to exclude aliens from the United States absent judicial imprimatur. Because the travel ban was announced without warning on a Friday, the court was offended by the Trump administration’s haphazard implementation of the executive order. It led to chaos at the nation’s airports as aliens with lawful visas were denied entry. The judges took particular umbrage at the administration’s reckless application of the exclusion, at least initially, to lawful permanent-resident aliens — essentially, green-card holders who make America their home, are already subjected to thorough screening, and are considered “U.S. persons” for most legal purposes. Plainly, the panel was hardwired to rule against the administration. Nevertheless, the poor implementation is an issue entirely separate from what ought to have been the president’s indisputable legal authority to impose temporary restrictions on non-Americans for the purpose of improving vetting. And even on the matter of implementation, the Ninth Circuit churlishly refused to credit the administration with relenting on the exclusion of green-card holders. In the Ninth Circuit’s world, there’s no problem with a single lawyer in a robe imposing his national-security preferences on the entire country, but a directive by the White House counsel is insufficient to instruct executive enforcement agencies that the president has decided to exempt lawful permanent residents from his own order. Plainly, the panel was hardwired to rule against the administration. This is further evidenced by its overwrought intimation that because candidate Trump spoke on the campaign trail of implementing a “Muslim ban,” the order by President Trump, which manifestly is not a Muslim ban, might nevertheless be intended as one. The panel also twists a Supreme Court precedent, Zadvydas v. Davis (2001), to reach its conclusion. In fact, Zadvydas explicitly recognizes the government’s power to exclude deportable aliens and detain them until a country willing to take them is found. The caveat it imposed, though ill-conceived, was extremely narrow: The judiciary could concoct a due-process limit on the length of detention. Saliently, the Zadvydas Court took pains to exempt its ruling from cases raising national-security concerns. Even so, Justice Kennedy, in dissent, ripped the majority for “arrogating to the Judicial branch” foreign-policy powers the Constitution commits to the political branches. Such valid criticism was enough to induce Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the majority, to stress that the High Court was neither questioning “the political branches’ authority to control entry into the United States” nor considering “terrorism or other special circumstances where special arguments might be made for forms of preventive detention and for heightened deference to the judgments of the political branches with respect to national security.” The political branches’ plenary authority to control alien entry into the United States, and the heightened deference owed by courts to the national-security judgments of the political branches, are precisely at stake in the matter of President Trump’s executive order. As the case inevitably heads to the Supreme Court, is it too much to hope, even in a post-Boumediene world, that the justices will remember their protestations of modesty? Or are we all living in the Ninth Circuit now?

But will it last?

Update on 'After raising doubts, Trump affirms "One China" policy in phone call with Chinese leader'

Jeff Sessions is going to rid this country of elite pizza parties. Twitter: https://twitter.com/VeryDicey Website: https://www.verydicey.com

Four African-Americans accused of attacking an 18-year-old disabled man on Facebook Live while making anti-white racial taunts pleaded not guilty in a Chicago courthouse on Friday.

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Dark forces were at work during the 19th- and 20th-century.

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This morning, the New York Times published a story that will get far less attention than it deserves. It seems that Fallujah, liberated from ISIS last summer, may be “slipping back into turmoil.” Reading the article, one sees all the familiar elements of continued instability. ISIS sleeper cells remained behind, the Iraqi army used one set of jihadists (Shiite militias) to help defeat another set (ISIS fighters), and hovering over it all is a government that can’t seem to keep its promises. The picture is grim: The Shiite-dominated national government has not yet demonstrated that it can secure and rebuild this shattered Sunni city, soothe sectarian grievances or provide for 250,000 returning residents. Iraqi and American security officials now fear that if the Sunnis of Falluja are given no reason to trust the government, they may once again embrace the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL. Local officials say Islamic State sleeper cells remain active, and many residents continue to aid the insurgents. Guerrilla attacks have resumed; in one of the most recent episodes, a suicide car bomb on Jan. 28 killed two police officers. None of this is surprising. Spend much time in Iraq and you’ll quickly understand that outside of a few thriving areas (much of Kurdistan, for example), the culture is deeply dysfunctional. The image of a great and historic nation tormented by a “few extremists” is just fundamentally false. The toxic power of jihadist Islam has been amplified and spread through a tribal Iraqi society that is both extraordinarily violent and wedded to a concept of collective guilt that actually incentivizes attacks on innocents. The result is a nation where jihadists don’t lack for recruits, a nation where extremists are plentiful and often eager to fight. Even if young men aren’t terribly religious, tribal loyalties will pull them straight into religious militias, and there they’ll remain until feuds are resolved or tribal loyalties shift. Other nations across the Middle East and Southwest Asia that combine extremist Islam with pre-Islamic tribal cultures are similarly combustible. These societies are primed for violence, and when they are replicated on a smaller scale overseas (say, for example, in Europe), they can bring with them many of the same dysfunctions. Think of this culture as the soil from which jihad grows. Import the soil, and you will ultimately import jihad. Of course not every refugee or immigrant from a war-torn nation carries with them the soil of conflict. Some are desperate to flee and thoroughly reject the norms that caused so much suffering. Others have proven their devotion to American ideals through sacrificial service. Nor is it right to think of the “Muslim world” as a vast, undifferentiated mass of people, all possessing the same values and tribal mindset. But it is simply wrong to say that American immigration policy is a “success” if it merely weeds out those who have immediate intentions to strike Americans. We often take on faith the notion that any new immigrant community will ultimately become just like the communities that came before. And, yes, the civilization we’ve built possesses immense powers of assimilation. But those powers are not limitless, and for evidence of that fact we need only look at recent terror attacks from immigrants who were radicalized well after they came to the United States. They didn’t come here ready to kill, and even the best screening system couldn’t have discovered intentions they didn’t possess before they arrived. Some even came as kids and spent years apparently trying to fit in with the dominant American culture. But jihadist Islam ultimately gained deeper purchase. And why not? The call of jihad combined with the culture of the tribe appeals not just to eternity but also to a civilization that predates the faith itself. For all the controversy, Donald Trump’s contentious immigration order represents nothing more than the smallest baby-step toward creating a rational entry policy for people migrating from jihadist-conflict zones. The spike in recent plots and attacks demonstrates the last administration’s failures. A 90-day pause is nothing in the sweep of American history (and it’s literally nothing now; the pause is on hold while legal challenges head to the Supreme Court). All the serious work lies ahead. A prudent government should realize that not all cultures are the same and that entry to the United States is a high privilege, not a fundamental human right. I’ve written this before, but in the current climate it’s worth writing again. When a person seeks to join our community from a nation that is torn to shreds by religious and tribal conflict, the American message should be clear: We’re proud to welcome those immigrants who’ve demonstrated their commitment to American ideals, but the burden of proof is on them. Properly vetting terrorists is only the beginning of the challenge. — David French is a staff writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.

President Trump’s administration started off strong on policy but predictably chaotic on messaging.  Here are his grades thus far: Trump’s First Week: B+ Trump’s Second Week: A-

Tame that racist toddler!

Before we get started, let’s agree on three things which are inarguable. First, that the U.S. Constitution vests plenary power in the President of the United States where foreign policy is concerned. Federal law, moreover, defines that power to include immigration. Section 212(f) of the Immigratio?

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February 12 is Darwin Day, and this year the international celebration falls on a Sunday. Look for theistic Darwinists to reassure churches that Charles Darwin believed in God, or at least that his theory of evolution harmonizes beautifully with Christian theology. The reality is more complex. In Th…

President Trump at a signing ceremony Jan. 24. He signed another executive order Jan. 27 pausing refugee resettlement for four months until ‘extreme vetting' can be implemented. As the debate over President Trump's travel ban rages in courts of law and public opinion, one new book reminds Americans what's at stake if the nation's leaders allow nearly unchecked immigration from Muslim countries to continue on its current path. In “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and the Resettlement Jihad,” WND news editor Leo Hohmann exposes the plan to change America by changing its people and values – with help from the U.S.'s own refugee resettlement program. Here are Hohmann's five biggest examples of lies, fraud and corruption in the refugee program: 1) Refugee resettlement is sold to city and state leaders as a humanitarian endeavor, but the true reason for expanding the program is to increase the amount of money flowing into the coffers of the resettlement contractors. There are nine volunteer agencies that contract with the U.S. government to permanently resettle refugees into hundreds of cities and towns across America. The feds pay these nine contractors $2,025 for every refugee they resettle in the United States, incentivizing the contractors to plant as many refugees on American soil as they can. And the contractors keep their plans hidden from local citizens in the communities they target for resettlement. “By contracting out this resettlement work, the federal government can evade many of the state open-records laws and the federal Freedom of Information Act and conduct the nefarious colonization of American cities largely under cover of darkness,” Hohmann writes in his book. 2) The resettlement contractors are not the only ones who benefit financially from this supposedly humanitarian endeavor; the program has become a source of cheap labor for corporate America. Chobani, the yogurt company, showed up in Twin Falls, Idaho, in 2011 promising to invest more than $430 million in a new 1 million-square-foot plant. Local officials rejoiced, saying the new yogurt plant would employ 600 people, almost all of them local. But instead of hiring locals, Chobani turned to cheap foreign labor. A steady stream of refugees was resettled in Twin Falls from more than a dozen countries, and the refugees filled nearly one-third of the 600 jobs at the plant. Hohmann writes in his book that refugee resettlement contractors often establish a presence in American meatpacking towns to supply the meatpacking plants with a steady flow of cheap Third World labor. They have continued to pour refugees into Amarillo, Texas, where food giant Cargill is one of the area's biggest employers, even though the city's mayor has begged the government to stop. Likewise, the resettlement contractor Catholic Charities has funneled Somali refugees into the small city of Owatonna, Minnesota, where they have been scooped up in large numbers by local window manufacturing plant AmesburyTruth. Hohmann reports the Somalis are allowed time off work to pray no matter what shift they are working, which causes tension when American workers realize their Somali coworkers are not as productive as they need to be. The Somalis also create an unsafe work environment by spilling water all over the floor of the employee bathrooms as they perform their ceremonial washings, which are required before a Muslim can pray. Many American workers eventually got fed up with the Somalis and quit, and the factory filled the vacancies by hiring more Somalis. 3) The resettlement contractors often lie by claiming the vast majority of refugees are “self-supporting” within three or four months of arrival. In fact, as Hohmann demonstrates in the book, most of them remain dependent on various welfare programs longer than that. For example, 60.2 percent of refugees still use food stamps after five years in the country, whereas only 15.1 percent of native-born American citizens use food stamps. Hohmann also notes refugees use food stamps at a rate of 75.9 percent (90 percent for Middle Eastern refugees) and cash assistance at a rate of 46.9 percent in their first year. Sixty percent of refugees use Medicaid, including 75 percent of those from the Middle East and Africa. “The Obama administration puts the costs of the refugee program at a little over $1.2 billion per year, but that is not a reliable figure as it does not include federal welfare benefits or the cost of educating refugee students at the state and local level,” Hohmann writes. “According to Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation, the additional ten thousand refugees that Obama brought from Syria in fiscal 2016 will cost U.S. taxpayers $6.5 billion over the course of the refugees' lifetimes. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., [then-]chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, warned his colleagues in the Senate that funding for the refugee program could easily surpass $55 billion in 2016.” 4) Many of the “refugees” being placed in American communities do not meet the definition of a refugee. The 1951 Geneva Convention defines a refugee as a person displaced by a “well-founded fear of persecution” due to their religious, political or ethnic affiliation. Under that definition, migrants seeking greater economic opportunity or even those fleeing wars have no standing as refugees eligible for permanent resettlement in a foreign land. In fact, Hohmann notes in his book no group of people would fit the 1951 definition of a refugee better than persecuted Christian minorities in the Middle East. “Yet, instead of bringing Middle Eastern Christians to America, the Obama administration focused on bringing their persecutors – the Sunni Muslims – to the United States,” he writes. “In some cases, such as in Sterling Heights, Michigan, the very same vulnerable Iraqi Christian communities that did find refuge in the United States were later surprised to learn that their Muslim persecutors were now being imported into nearby neighborhoods where they are proposing to build a mega-mosque.” 5) Back in 2008, the P-3 family reunification program was suspended when it was discovered the vast majority of East African refugees who applied to come to America under the program lied on their applications. DNA tests on P-3 applicants in seven African countries showed only around 20 percent of those trying to enter the U.S. were actually related to everyone to whom they claimed to be related. The program remained suspended for four years, and when it resumed, DNA testing was required for all those applying for family reunification. Get all the details in “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and the Resettlement Jihad,” available at the WND Superstore.

As the debate over President Trump’s travel ban rages in courts of law and public opinion, one new book reminds Americans what’s at stake if the nation’s leaders allow nearly unchecked immigration from Muslim countries to continue on its current path. In “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and the Resettlement Jihad,” WND news editor […]

Morning Joe is reporting that sources confirm to him that the White House is already redrafting a new version of his executive order that was blocked by the 9th circuit court: .@JoeNBC reports: Sou…

Hundreds of thousands of Iranians rallied on Friday to swear allegiance to their clerical leaders and reject U.S. President Donald Trump's warning that he had put the Islamic Republic "on notice", state TV reported.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was supposed to meet with students and teachers at Jefferson Academy, a public middle school in Southwest Washington, D.C., on Friday. Instead, protesters blocked her from entering the building. Sec. DeVos physically blocked by protesters from entering DC school—turned away and left. Unclear if she attempted another door. @ABC7News pic.twitter.com/buNgmOJbya— Sam Sweeney (@SweeneyABC) February 10, 2017

ISIS anyone? Hezbollah too.

President Donald Trump’s “wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border would be a series of fences and walls that would cost as much as $21.6 billion, and take more than three years to construct, based on a U.S. Department of Homeland Security internal report seen by Reuters on Thursday.

Sometimes your best friends can inadvertently become your worst enemies. Such was the case of Hillary Clinton and the mainstream media according to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight. Most observant people knew that the MSM was all in for Hillary this past election to the extent of acting like cheerleaders for her. So instead of cautioning Hillary when Donald Trump made exactly the right moves to win the necessary electoral votes for victory, they instead mocked him for his ignorance of political campaigning. As a result this gave the Hillary campaign a false sense of security when they should have campaigned in the previous "blue wall" states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

House Republicans will vote next week to liberate states from an Obama rule requiring them to subsidize Planned Parenthood. In one of his last actions, Obama effectively forced states to fund Planned Parenthood. Many states have policies barring state funds for the abortion giant, and Obama's 11th-hour executive order prohibited such policies. Next week, the House plans to use the Congressional Review Act to repeal that Obama regulation — a first salvo in their fight to roll back Obama's legacy on abortion. According to congressional aides, the vote is scheduled for late next week and will specifically axe Obama's Title X rule. During his final weeks in office, Obama finalized the regulation, explicitly barring states from pulling federal grant money from clinics that provide abortion. Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told The Washington Examiner that the effort is about protecting life and stopping the federal government from forcing states to support abortion.

The actor's He Will Not Divide Us exhibit was 'disrupted from its original intent,' the museum said. The Museum of Moving Images released a statement today saying it has shut off the camera.