Twitter is fulminating and the MSM is metaphorically melting down in the white heat of the confected outrage of the progressive establishment over President Trump’s Executive Order temporarily banning immigration movements of certain refugees into the US.
The MSM has adopted the now well-worn tactic of stripping away the detail of the Executive Order and presenting a hyperbolic headline followed by a prerogatively crafted misrepresentation of the terms of the order to claim, yet again, that this will be the end of Trump. Over in Twitter-land and on Facebook the left are working themselves into a spectacularly proportioned lather. In Britain an online petition has erupted seeking to force parliament to debate preventing a Trump state visit to Britain – which doesn’t actually mean that Trump can’t come, but would mean that he doesn’t get to meet and apparently embarrass the Queen and the Prince of Wales. The captured and cuckolded Western politicians of the progressive kind are united in ‘global’ condemnation, and only mildly more restrained than the twitterati; in the US Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is struggling to hold back the tears, the ‘Never-Trumpers’ in the GOP are deserting in short time, Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel don’t like it, Theresa May has uttered some muted criticism, and the Dutch Prime Minister and the Danish Foreign Minister are blathering about ‘safe havens’ and the ‘unfairness’ of an ‘inhumane’ ban on Muslims.
The agents of the self-proclaimed morally and intellectually superior better-educated left are out marching again, with the associated assaults on anyone who has the misfortune to cross their path and the now expected destruction of private and public property. The baying hordes all excitedly cheered when two US Federal judges issued temporary and partial restraining orders in hurriedly-crafted constitutional challenges to the Executive Order, manifesting the confirmation bias of the legally ignorant, as they foolishly interpret an interlocutory decision imposing a temporary restraint to preserve the status quo as something that presages the final opposition of the judiciary.
All of that sounds terribly troubling if you don’t bother to look at the detail, which the MSM and their puppet masters really don’t want you to do, because if you do, it all falls apart like an over-cooked chicken.
The Executive Order does the following things: a temporary 120-day halt on all refugee admissions to the US while new vetting processes are developed and implemented; a temporary 90-day halt on refugee admissions to the US from seven (7) countries linked to terrorism (Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen); and a mandate of priority be given to refugees who are Christian or part of other minority religions in preference to Muslims. Basically, for a short time, anyone from the affected countries will be turned away at the US border if they are attempting to enter without United States Citizenship (Visa or Lawful Permanent Resident Status) or unless they have some form of special exception.
The restraining orders issued by Federal courts in New York and Boston are in suits commenced by the ACLU on behalf of certain named people currently detained in US airports who are otherwise subject to the terms of the Executive Order; the restraint is nothing more or less than a temporary order that prevents the deportation of certain people currently on US soil pending a final hearing of the constitutional challenges to the Executive Order. Most significantly, nothing in either restraining order prevents the full implementation of the other provisions of the Executive Order, and notably the US Dept. Homeland Security are rightly continuing to implement and enforce ‘… the president’s executive orders in a manner that ensures the safety and security of the American people’. Contrary to the MSM interpretation, the US Federal courts have not stopped the implementation of the Executive Order in any meaningful way.
The underlying constitutional challenge is also seriously flawed, and has very little prospect of success. It essentially relies on an act of Congress that prevents discrimination in the issue of immigrant visas based on certain factors, including nationality and place of residence. The US Constitution expressly vests all executive powers in the president, and there is no doubt that the powers of the president are plenary in foreign affairs, as the US Supreme Court made clear in United States v. Curtiss-Wright (1936), when it wrote that ‘the very delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations – a power which does not require as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress’. In short, when there is a conflict between a presidential policy and an act of Congress, the presidential policy prevails. The argument is also implicitly predicated on an assumption that that there is, in fact, a conflict between the terms of the Executive Order and other rights, which on one view there is not, and it takes no account of other acts of Congress that specifically vest in the President a power to ban for such time as he thinks appropriate the entry of all or any class of aliens if their entry is detrimental to the interests of the US; and President Trump has expressed national security as his reason for the temporary ban.
So even if Trump were somehow excluded from using his constitutional authority, he is in any event exercising an express power and discretion granted by Congress. For all of those reasons, progressive and MSM excitement about the current constitutional challenge is somewhat misplaced; although maybe someone will come up with a better argument when they all calm down and start to think about the legal issues more rationally.
So what are we to make of all of this? If you take your news from the MSM you have been authoritatively told that Trump has gone too far and it will be his downfall – this from the people who have a stark and sorry history of predicting Trump’s downfall from the moment be apparently be-clowned himself and the GOP by entering the race for the nomination, to the abject certainty that he could not beat Clinton in the general election, onto the increasingly desperate reasons why having won Trump could never be sworn inaugurated, and now to the apparently inevitable destruction of his presidency. Seriously, don’t these people ever tire of predicting the end of days, and trashing what little credibility they have left in so doing?
For what has Trump done? Nothing other than to set about doing in office the very thing that he promised to do in seeking the presidency and, in the world of the political establishment and their MSM cheer squad, that is a very dangerous thing. They are so used to the insider status and privilege that accompanies a system where it was expected that you can say anything necessary to make the chumps in voter-land elect you and, once in office, promptly jettison the impediment of your electoral promises and instead prefer the interests of others, and to do so with no consequence. These people actually cannot comprehend the idea that politicians should, and now must, do what they promised the electorate; and it seems that they really have been functioning on an ultimate assumption that even if Trump won, he would then behave as they do and burn the electorate in the service of globalism, open borders and the interests that have obscenely profited from them. They have misread and misunderstood Trump from first to last; and slow learners they must be, because catching on they are not.
The panic is all about the fact that Trump, by honouring the electorate, is exposing in a very harsh light the corruption that is the very soul of establishment politics in the West and, if nothing else, it is the gift given by Trump to the ordinary people who have been so abused in the process.