Leftover Obama Refugee Deal With Australia Draws Questions

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In mid-November, just after Donald Trump was elected president, the outgoing Obama administration reached an agreement with Australia to resettle hundreds of refugees to America.

Australia’s hard-line policy to deter illegal immigration had banished thousands of asylum-seekers, most from the Middle East, to offshore detention centers on the Pacific island nation of Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.

After human rights groups had reported poor conditions and abuse at camps on the islands, the United Nations intervened and worked with Australia to secure a pledge from President Barack Obama to accept about 1,250 refugees, provided they passed U.S. security screening.

Obama’s deal, which attracted little attention when the U.S. and Australia announced its terms, collided this week with the policies of the Trump administration, which just temporarily barred people from seven countries the Obama administration had designated as posing terrorism risks from entering the U.S.

In a phone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Saturday, Trump reportedly criticized the refugee deal, although the two leaders have disputed media accounts about the content of the discussion.

“You can see why Trump, given his views, would be upset about this deal,” said Kevin Appleby, senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies in New York, in an interview with The Daily Signal. “It’s like a fly in his ointment. He sees the deal puts him in a bad position politically. He’s probably wondering what Australia is doing for us when the U.S. is taking in all these refugees from countries that are now banned.”

Despite his misgivings, Trump later agreed to honor the initial agreement, according to Turnbull and the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer. It’s unclear how many refugees will ultimately be resettled in the U.S. and when they might come.

Spicer said Trump was “extremely upset” to have inherited the deal, but would fulfill the U.S.’ commitment to it.

Many of the refugees stranded in the Australian-run detention centers—and designated for resettlement in the U.S.—came from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and Somalia, countries included in Trump’s order.

A special provision in the Trump order allows for exceptions to honor “a pre­-existing international agreement,” a line that seems to reference the Australia deal.

In November, the parties to the deal said the U.S. would prioritize families and children, and that the transfer of refugees would take six months to a year as the refugees underwent vetting, including two rounds of interviews with America’s Department of Homeland Security.

According to the Australian government, around 80 percent of people in the offshore detention camps have been determined to be legitimate refugees.

As the Trump administration decides how to implement the deal, some are expressing concern about how the Obama administration negotiated the agreement in the first place.

On Thursday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote a letter to Rex Tillerson, Trump’s new secretary of state, asking him to declassify the details of the agreement.

Grassley first raised concerns about the agreement in November, when he wrote to the Obama administration and accused it of “failing to allow for public scrutiny of the plan” and not consulting Congress about it.

“As I said before, the American people have a right to be fully aware of the actions of their government regarding foreign nationals who may be admitted to the United States,” Grassley wrote in the letter to Tillerson. “American taxpayers not only foot the bill for the majority of the refugee resettlement in the United States, but they bear any consequences regarding the security implications of those admitted to our country.”

Appleby doesn’t consider the refugees coming to the U.S. in the deal as much of a security risk.

“It’s beyond reason that some ISIS terrorist would go through all of this when it’s much easier for them to radicalize someone already living in the U.S. or Australia than sending someone through this multi-year, brutal process,” Appleby said.

But he and other experts say the agreement could be viewed as rewarding Australia for an immigration policy that has been widely criticized.

“These are human beings who have been living in very difficult conditions on these islands for years,” Nayla Rush, a senior researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies, said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “It doesn’t make sense for the U.S. to take them. Why should the U.S. be the moral compass of Australia? These people want to go to Australia. They have been stranded by the Australian government, and they are responsible.”

While the Obama administration and Australian government have not said the U.S received something in return as part of the deal, the parties signed their agreement two months after Turnbull agreed to help the U.S. resettle refugees fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

“There will not be a people swap,” Scott Ryan, a special minister of state in Australia, said at the time.

Under a long-standing policy, Australia mandates offshore detention centers for asylum-seekers who arrive by boat.

According to CNN, Australia launched Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB) in 2013 after a previous liberalization of immigration policies resulted in a surge of the number of people arriving by boat from 161 in 2008 to 2,726 in 2009.

But the new deterrence strategy did not slow the immigration flow.

The Guardian in 2016 reported cases of physical and sexual abuse of refugees at the detention centers. Protesters rallied across Australia demanding the closure of the centers.

In April 2016, Papua New Guinea’s Supreme Court ordered the Australian government to close the processing center there, calling the facility a violation of the migrants’ rights.

“The Australia deal with the U.S. is reflective of a failed policy, and that’s the larger point here,” Appleby said. “It’s a broader strategy the developed nations are pursuing to deter large movements of people. That doesn’t work, and the U.S. and Australia are now bailing each other out.” (For more from the author of “Leftover Obama Refugee Deal With Australia Draws Questions” please click HERE)

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Trump’s Executive Orders on Financial Regulation Are a Great First Step

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President Donald Trump has vowed to dismantle the Dodd-Frank Act, and on Friday he signed two executive orders to get that process moving. All Americans should be encouraged by this start, especially since the President is only two weeks into his administration.

One of Friday’s executive orders deals with a single Obama administration rule, but the other one sets the table for much broader reforms.

The former order lays out a path to rescind or revise what’s known as the fiduciary rule, a regulation designed to provide a single standard for anyone providing retirement investment advice.

The Dodd-Frank Act required the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to study the need for a new, uniform federal fiduciary standard for brokers and investment advisers. Despite this provision and a lack of evidence that there was any problem to fix, former President Barack Obama’s Department of Labor (DOL) issued its own fiduciary rule.

In general, a fiduciary standard requires financial advisers to put their individual client’s interests above their own. As simple as that sounds, imposing a one-size-fits-all approach on investors is likely to lead to many unintended consequences, such as less investment advice for average Americans.

Trump’s executive order puts the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule on a clear path to its demise, and makes it known that the administration wants to “empower Americans to make their own financial decisions.” This statement marks a sharp break from the Obama administration’s paternalistic view that Americans cannot sufficiently educate themselves on even basic investment issues.

The second order has much broader implications for a White House that expects “to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank.”

This order makes it the official policy of the Trump administration “to regulate the United States financial system in a manner consistent with” seven core principles. These principles are as follows:

empower Americans to make independent financial decisions and informed choices in the marketplace, save for retirement, and build individual wealth;

prevent taxpayer-funded bailouts;

foster economic growth and vibrant financial markets through more rigorous regulatory impact analysis that addresses systemic risk and market failures, such as moral hazard and information asymmetry;

enable American companies to be competitive with foreign firms in domestic and foreign markets;

advance American interests in international financial regulatory negotiations and meetings;

make regulation efficient, effective, and appropriately tailored; and
restore public accountability within Federal financial regulatory agencies and rationalize the Federal financial regulatory framework.

Many of these principles closely track the ideas in the Financial CHOICE Act, a bill that Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, proposed to replace large parts of Dodd-Frank.

The mere fact that the president stated these principles 15 days into his administration is a great sign for anyone who wants to get rid of bureaucratic red tape, government mandates, and taxpayer backing of losses.

Combining these principles with strong actions in new executive orders would be even better, but there’s no reason to suspect the Trump administration will remain idle. (For more from the author of “Trump’s Executive Orders on Financial Regulation Are a Great First Step” please click HERE)

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When Sending People to Jail, Criminal Intent Matters

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Can a person go to jail for a crime that he had no intent to commit, and that the government admits he did not know would occur?

Jack and Peter DeCoster, father and son executives of the Quality Egg business, have petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider their jail sentences for a crime committed by someone else without their knowledge: Selling eggs contaminated with salmonella.

The Outbreak

The DeCoster family was one of the largest egg producers in the United States, with 100 barns housing 5 million egg-laying hens. In 2010, a Salmonella outbreak that caused nearly 2,000 reported consumer illnesses was traced to their Iowa-based farms at Quality Egg, LLC.

The family business had a poor environmental and public health record with several past regulatory violations. But their business was booming until the 2010 outbreak, when about 550 million eggs were recalled.

The Sentence

In 2014, the DeCosters pleaded guilty to introducing adulterated (i.e. contaminated) eggs into interstate commerce, in violation of federal law.

Under the food adulteration provision (21 U.S.C. § 331) of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, “[t]he introduction or delivery for introduction into interstate commerce of any food, drug, device, tobacco product, or cosmetic that is adulterated or misbranded” is prohibited.

The statutory penalty allows for fines and up to one year’s imprisonment.

The family and business paid $7 million in total fines under their plea agreement. Consumers also hit the business with a myriad of lawsuits seeking money damages. In 2011, the DeCosters reached settlements with at least 40 victims, some of whom reportedly received around $250,000.

The family’s loss of their business would seem to be a fair price to pay for sloppy operations that ended up making customers sick. The financial remedies they were forced to pay effectively bankrupted Quality Egg.

But in addition, both Jack and Peter DeCoster were sentenced to serve three months in prison.

This sentence, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit recently upheld, represents a dangerous misstep in the law of criminal liability for corporate supervisors.

As Judge Arlen Beam writes in his dissenting opinion, the government conceded that the DeCosters “did not know that any eggs distributed by Quality Egg at any relevant times ‘were, in fact, contaminated with Salmonella,’” and that “no person associated with Quality Egg had knowledge of salmonella contamination at any relevant time.”

The Appeal

In challenging only their prison sentences, not their convictions, the DeCosters explained that they had no knowledge of the harmful conduct.

They argue that, absent any level of criminal intent, their prison sentence for the offense of food adulteration authorized by statute (21 U.S.C. § 333) violates the due process guarantee of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

In their defense, the DeCosters note that they periodically conducted salmonella tests of their eggs even before they were under any obligation from the government to do so. They relied on expert advice from food-safety consultants at the University of Georgia and in private practice to develop their Salmonella testing program, which was conducted by a third-party.

Thousands of environmental tests conducted on Quality Eggs products yielded satisfactory results in the years leading up to the 2010 Salmonella outbreak.

Still, the relevant statute that criminalizes supplying adulterated eggs is silent on criminal intent. It does not require that management ever knew of the possible danger. The DeCosters violated the statute and were subjected to criminal liability under the Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine.

The Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine

Depending on the outcome of the DeCosters’ appeal, the Responsible Corporate Officer doctrine could become a more significant cause for concern among employers. The doctrine holds employers criminally liable for the bad acts of their employees, even if the former has no knowledge whatsoever of the alleged unlawful acts.

Traditionally, Anglo-American law required proof of some mens rea (Latin for “guilty mind”) standard, also known as a criminal intent standard, which specifies, as the influential English legal scholar William Blackstone wrote, that “an unwarrantable act without a vicious will is no crime at all.”

The United States Supreme Court has recently breathed new life into the old presumption that criminal statutes should be construed to require proof of criminal intent even when a statute is silent on the issue.

This Responsible Corporate Officer doctrine lingers on, in tension with that fundamental mens rea requirement, allowing convictions of supervisors on the basis that alleged misconduct took place “on their watch.”

In United States v. Park (1975), the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of John Park, the president of a national food chain who failed to prevent food safety violations.

Park entrusted compliance with the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to a district vice president and his employees who failed miserably in their duties by allowing food to be contaminated by rodents.

Although the results of noncompliance were dangerous to the public, Park had no personal involvement in, or intention behind, any violations of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act requirements.

Still, the Supreme Court credited him with responsibility for “the entire operation of the company” that was under his oversight, and upheld the criminal fine levied against him.

While the Responsible Corporate Officer doctrine served as the basis for a criminal conviction without a showing of intent in United States v. Park, it is an open question whether a person may be incarcerated for an unwitting offense under the doctrine.

What’s at Stake

In challenging their prison sentence, the DeCosters rely on the Supreme Court’s decision in Staples v. United States (1994), which instructs that a court should look at the potential penalty before deciding whether it is constitutionally permissible for a statute to lack a mens rea standard.

There, the Supreme Court reiterated that imposing “a small pecuniary penalty [on] a person who has unwittingly done something detrimental to the public interest” is reasonable, but incarceration for an unwitting defendant is entirely different.

The DeCosters’ three month prison sentence represents one small stint for man, one giant leap backward for the law. Other federal courts have reasoned that “the imposition of severe penalties… for the commission of a morally innocent act may violate the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.”

Heritage scholars have argued elsewhere that incarceration for such an offense could violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

Judge Arlen Beam wrote in his dissenting opinion in the DeCosters’ case that “there is no precedent that supports imprisonment without establishing some measure of a guilty mind on the part of [the DeCosters], and none is established in this case.”

The DeCosters are now asking the Supreme Court to hear their case and rule that the Constitution forbids the imposition of a jail sentence for an unintentional violation of a law that lacks a mens rea standard.

A failure to remedy the lower courts’ reasoning in the DeCoster case could cast the specter of a jail sentence for employers over everyday business activities that they have no involvement in whatsoever. (For more from the author of “When Sending People to Jail, Criminal Intent Matters” please click HERE)

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Trump Vows to Repeal Political Limits on Churches

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Warning that religious freedom is “under threat,” President Donald Trump vowed Thursday to repeal the Johnson Amendment, an IRS rule barring pastors from endorsing candidates from the pulpit.”

“I will get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution,” Trump said during remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, a high-profile event bringing together faith leaders, politicians and dignitaries.

Trump made a similar pledge as a candidate but has not detailed how he plans to scrap the rule or how quickly he will proceed in doing do.

Religious conservatives whose overwhelming support propelled Trump to the White House have been watching closely for him to deliver on promised protections for religious objectors to gay marriage and abortion. Kelly Shackelford, head of First Liberty Institute, a non-profit legal group that specializes in religious freedom cases, said no other presidential candidate was “more outspoken on their commitment to religious freedom” than Trump.

The president made no mention at the prayer breakfast of other steps he may take on those issues, saying only that religious freedom is a “sacred right.” He used his remarks to thank the American people for their prayers in his opening days in office. (Read more from “Trump Vows to Repeal Political Limits on Churches” HERE)

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Leftist, Big Spending Lisa Murkowski Hypocritically Attacks Trump’s Border Wall Because of Deficit

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In an incredibly brazen attack on President Trump today, Alaska’s Senator Lisa Murkowski pledges his border wall will never get through Congress. Why? Because it will add to the deficit:

“If you’re going to spend that kind of money, you’re going to have to show me where you’re going to get that money,” Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski told CNN. “I don’t see how you can get a bill like that through [Congress] without offsets. I don’t see how that’s possible.”

Of course, Murkowski has never seen a debt ceiling increase she hasn’t embraced. For her, any problems with the budget have to do with why more money is not being spent, not less. Although she is the biggest Senate liberal on the RINO side, save Susan Collins, Murkowski is probably the biggest advocate for spending among Republicans. Her crony-capitalist handlers depend on the billions she directs their way and – in exchange – they manipulate Alaska’s elections for her.

Moreover, Murkowski may be way over her head on this one. To think she can actually run the numbers on the deficit – after failing the Alaska Bar exam five times – is a big question. Basic logical skills seem to elude her.

Unsurprisingly, big-spender Murkowski has never received a majority of Alaskan votes. Joe Miller’s two challenges, including one in which Murkowski was defeated in the primary, reflect that most Alaskans reject her style of politics. But, as long as her good friend and former campaign co-chair controls the corrupt voting system in Alaska, she will remain a fixture in the U.S. Senate.

If President Trump wants to do something about Lisa Murkowski, he should follow through on his commitment to review vote integrity issues in America, starting with Alaska’s dirty system. Otherwise, we can count on another six years of hypocrisy, corruption, and down-right stupidity from our senior senator.

Did Obama Just Hack President Trump’s Statement on Israel?

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The final major policy fight of Obama’s presidency was his public dispute with Israel over their right to build homes in their biblical homeland. The country was rightly appalled that Obama and then-Secretary of State John Kerry chose to focus on a few thousand Jewish homes in the foothills of ancient Samaria at a time when Islamic mayhem is breaking out all over Western Civilization. In many respects, this parting shot from Obama epitomized the moral dyslexia of his entire presidency.

At the time, conservatives and even some intellectually honest liberals breathed a sigh of relief that a new a president would soon be welcomed — one who stopped condemning our ally as a way of apologizing to the Islamic world. We thought we could finally break away from the global elite’s maniacal obsession with the illogical and incoherent distraction of the two-state solution and focus on the root problem: Islamic supremacism.

Thus, naturally, this statement from the Trump White House was shocking:

The American desire for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians has remained unchanged for 50 years. While we don’t believe the existence of settlements is an impediment to peace, the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders may not be helpful in achieving that goal. As the President has expressed many times, he hopes to achieve peace throughout the Middle East region. The Trump administration has not taken an official position on settlement activity and looks forward to continuing discussions, including with Prime Minister Netanyahu when he visits with President Trump later this month.

At first I thought this was a hoax, or that it was drafted by an Obama holdover.

Some might suggest that at least Trump’s White House put some distance between this administration and his predecessor by recognizing some right for Jews to live in part of Judea and Samaria.

Really folks? Is this the soft bigotry of low expectations? Are we aiming for pale pastels, haggling over a few inches in an area virtually invisible on a map compared to the mass of land controlled by Islam? At a time when the entire premise of this two-state solution has been countermanded by reality, are we going to continue the same failed recognition of the PLO terrorists the way Clinton, Bush, and Obama did?

What exactly does it mean to “achieve peace” and why is the creation of a 23rd Arab state in our best interest? Why should we continue to invest our diplomatic capital into the foreign policy version of Obamacare? I spent the entire week robustly defending Trump’s immigration policy from a legal, political, historical, and philosophical perspective precisely because we don’t want to endanger our land with Islamic supremacism. Why is the Trump White House asking Israel to do something he wouldn’t want to do himself?

Moreover, this is the very stupidity that embodies the anger people felt against the political establishment and why they voted for Trump. While on the campaign trail, President Trump boldly decried the “stupid” politicians who are “pathetic losers” and perpetuate failed policies that are devoid of common sense. There is nothing that better fits this description than the globalist elite obsession with creating a PLO terror state west of the Jordan River; one which will become saturated with ISIS and Al Qaeda elements within days.

The two-state solution is the Obamacare of foreign policy. Much like Obamacare has locked up our economy and job market on the domestic front, the PLO nonsense has paralyzed our leverage in the Middle East and has consumed our foreign policy for 23 years. It is rooted in an apologetic concession to Islam instead of confronting the reality of Sharia-based Islam. Now, Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood know that any time they want to leverage Trump into making a concession, they will call upon Hamas and the PLO to ratchet up attacks on Israel and criticize the presence of Jews in Jewish territory. We have lost our leverage now that they know we “fear the Arab street” as it relates to moving the embassy and our ally building homes wherever they damn please.

What happened to the tough negotiator? Is this coming from his meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan today? A tough negotiator would tell Abdullah, “listen buddy, you create an Arab terror state on your western border and your country will fall to the Islamists within weeks. We won’t be there to save you.” Jordan would be just as adversely affected by such a dumb move as Israel.

Finally, there is a background here that is probably missed in the media. The reason Israel announced more construction in Samaria today is because, thanks to Israel’s crazy Supreme Court [Robert Bork wrote a lot about it during his lifetime], the Israeli government just dismantled an entire community of Jews in a town called Amona and sent their own army in to kick out their own families who have been living there for 20 years. This is something, to my knowledge, no other nation has done in history. So the building of more homes was somewhat of a domestic compromise for kicking those people out. For the Trump administration to then issue a statement on the same day and rip that wound wide open is appalling to the many religious Christians and Jews who so enthusiastically supported him on the premise that he wouldn’t follow such policies.

The bottom line is there was absolutely no reason to even focus on this issue at a time like this or issue any such statement. Silence in the face of Israel building homes would have been the refreshing change we all expected.

It’s disappointing that Trump is willing to get us sucked into the foreign policy cause célèbre of the very political establishment he claims to detest. On the one hand, he (rightfully) proclaims that our political leaders have been stupid to try to create democracy in the Middle East among existing Arab nations. Yet at the same time, he is willing to expend American capital creating a new Arab state that hates America, exports terrorism, destabilize the region, strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood, and will become a client-state of Iran?

We know you are better than this, Mr. President. Return to the inner voice of common sense and ignore the foreign policy elites. (For more from the author of “Did Obama Just Hack President Trump’s Statement on Israel?” please click HERE)

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Mainstream Media Prints Fake News About Man Who Wrongly Claimed His Mom Died Due to Trump

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The mainstream media claims to be very concerned about fake news, but continues to report it. When a story comes out that makes the right — especially President Trump — look bad, reporters are so excited to break the news that they get sloppy about verifying its accuracy. It seems to be happening more and more lately, perhaps because Trump is now president.

A man claimed a few days ago that his mother died in Iraq after Trump banned refugees from entering the U.S. Mike Hager told a Fox News affiliate in Detroit that he had flown to Iraq to bring her back to the U.S. for medical treatment.

The Media Ran With It

“I really believe this in my heart: if they would have let us in, my mom — she would have made it and she would have been sitting right here next to me,” he said. “She’s gone because of him.”

The mainstream media ran with the story and the sad statement. Sources running it included CNN, CBS, Buzzfeed and Yahoo.

However, Imam Husham Al-Husainy, of the Karbalaa Islamic Education Center in Dearborn, told the news station that wasn’t true. He said Hager’s mother actually died five days before the travel ban. Some of the media outlets corrected their previous articles, but others, like “award-winning reporter” Jim Smith for CBS Boston, didn’t bother.

Business as Usual

This comes just days after the media fell for another anti-Trump fake news story. Zeke Miller, a reporter with Time magazine, tweeted on January 20 that Trump had removed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., from the White House. His tweet spread like wildfire, as mainstream media outlets breathlessly ran with the story.

Miller didn’t even check with anyone at the White House about it. He simply decided since he couldn’t see the bust, it must have been removed. In reality, the statue had never been moved — he couldn’t see it from where he was standing in the room.

He eventually issued a retraction, but it wasn’t covered nearly as much as the initial fake story. He doesn’t appear to have been disciplined over the incident.

It’s just business as usual for those in the mainstream media. White House press secretary Sean Spicer tweeted a reminder to the press to check facts before they tweet. But without any consequences, there is little incentive for the press to fact check awful stories about Trump.

(For more from the author of “Mainstream Media Prints Fake News About Man Who Wrongly Claimed His Mom Died Due to Trump” please click HERE)

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Ryan: Presidents Often Prioritize Refugee Claims–Obama ‘Put a Preference in for Sexual Orientation’

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House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Thursday that there’s nothing wrong with President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration including a preference for religious minorities facing persecution, because it’s a common practice for presidents to include preferences in refugee populations and that former President Barack Obama did the same thing for sexual orientation.

“Presidents always and often put preferences in refugee populations,” Ryan said. “I think President Obama had one for sexual orientation. They didn’t call that a sexual orientation test. He put a preference in for sexual orientation.

“Religious minorities who are being persecuted, there’s nothing wrong with preferring religious minorities from persecution. Yazidis are being persecuted. Sunnis in Shia countries are being persecuted. Christians are being persecuted, so there’s nothing wrong with saying we’re going to take into account minority religious persecution with our refugee situation,” he said.

Trump’s executive orders states: “The Secretary of State shall submit to the President an initial report on the progress of the directive in subsection (b) of this section regarding prioritization of claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution within 100 days of the date of this order and shall submit a second report within 200 days of the date of this order.”

In 2015, then President Obama issued a presidential memorandum titled Presidential Memorandum — International Initiatives to Advance the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons. (Read more from “Ryan: Presidents Often Prioritize Refugee Claims–Obama ‘Put a Preference in for Sexual Orientation'” HERE)

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Warmongering Iran Threatens to Unleash ‘Martyrdom’ Operations on America

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An influential Iranian leader has threatened to unleash thousands of “martyrdom” operations by loyal allies of the Tehran regime already inside the United States. The move comes as President Donald Trump has put Iran “on notice” for its illegal ballistic missile tests and escalating anti-American activities.

Hassan Abbasi, an Iranian political theorist who has been dubbed “the [Henry] Kissinger of Islam,” made the remarks Thursday, claiming that Iran doesn’t need a nuclear bomb because of such loyalists ready for suicide operations, according to author, and Gatestone Institute chairman, Amir Taheri.

Abbasi is a high-ranking officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which is tasked with exporting Iran’s Caliphatist revolutionary ideology worldwide. He is also the head of a premier Iranian think tank affiliated with the IRGC called the Center for Borderless Security Doctrinal Analysis.

Additionally, National Review has described Hassan Abbasi as a “theoretician” for Iranian dictator and Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the past, he has designated America as part of an alliance of “sworn enemies of God and Muslims.”

Iran’s escalating rhetoric follows the White House administration change — and its corresponding change in tone on Iran.

Pres. Trump warned the Tehran regime Thursday morning: “Iran has been formally PUT ON NOTICE for firing a ballistic missile. Should have been thankful for the terrible deal the U.S. made with them!”

He added in another Tweet: “Iran was on its last legs and ready to collapse until the U.S. came along and gave it a life-line in the form of the Iran Deal: $150 billion.”

Additionally, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn put Iran “on notice” on Wednesday, condemning the regime’s ballistic missile test and sponsorship of terrorism.

Flynn said in a statement:

“Recent Iranian actions, including a provocative ballistic missile launch and an attack against a Saudi naval vessel conducted by Iran-supported Houthi militants, underscore what should have been clear to the international community all along about Iran’s destabilizing behavior across the Middle East.”

The Iran-backed Houthis committed a deadly strike on a Saudi warship in the Red Sea earlier this week, utilizing “suicide boats” to hit their target. The Iran-backed militants have been accused of targeting U.S. vessels as well.

“As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice,” Flynn concluded his statement.

Iran has described its offensive ballistic missile program as an “inalienable and absolute” right of the country, and claims its tests do not violate sanctions or the nuclear deal signed with the Obama administration and world powers. (For more from the author of “Warmongering Iran Threatens to Unleash ‘Martyrdom’ Operations on America” please click HERE)

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From Campaign Finance to Regulations: Why Gorsuch Was the Perfect Pick for Trump

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When President Donald Trump introduced his pick for the U.S. Supreme Court at the White House Tuesday night, he told the American people that he had kept his campaign promise “to select someone who respects our laws … and who loves our Constitution and someone who will interpret them as written.”

With the nomination of Tenth Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch, Trump has indeed kept his word. Gorsuch’s record as a lawyer, judge, and legal intellectual demonstrates that he is indeed a constitutional textualist who believes, as he said in a 2016 speech on the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia at Case Western, that judges must:

apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be – not to decide cases based on their own moral convictions or the policy consequences they believe might serve society best.

Gorsuch confirmed that this is his view of the proper role of a judge when he spoke to the invited crowd of administration supporters at the White House, and said something that many liberals — including some who sit on our federal courts — disagree with:

in our legal order it is for Congress and not the courts to write new laws. It is the role of judges to apply, not alter, the work of the people’s representatives. A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a bad judge stretching for results he prefers rather than those the law demands.

Most importantly, Gorsuch has demonstrated that same approach in numerous opinions upholding basic rights in the Bill of Rights. In Riddle v. Hickenlooper, for example, he concurred in an opinion that tossed out a law setting different campaign contribution limits for major and minor party candidates. As he said, no one can dispute:

that the act of contributing to political campaigns implicates a ‘basic constitutional freedom,’ one lying ‘at the foundation of a free society’ and enjoying a significant relationship to the right to speak and associate — both expressly protected First Amendment activities.

This is very important because the Supreme Court has had a series of cases in recent years involving restrictions on campaign financing and speech that the liberal justices on the Court have refused to recognize as violating the First Amendment right to freely associate and engage in political activity. Justice Scalia was the needed fifth vote in these cases, such as Citizens United v. FEC, so it is vital that the new justice be someone like Gorsuch who has shown a firm commitment to upholding the First Amendment in the area of political speech and political activity.

In cases ranging from Hobby Lobby v. Burwell to Little Sisters of the Poor v. Burwell to Summum v. Pleasant Grove City, Gorsuch either joined majority opinions or filed dissents upholding the religious freedom rights of citizens under the First Amendment or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, particularly their right to be protected from undue burdens imposed by the government that violate their religious beliefs. And that includes dissents criticizing the Supreme Court in American Atheists Inc. v. Davenport and Green v. Haskel County Board of Commissioners for creating a test that is far too likely to find supposedly impermissible endorsements of religion by the government when none was intended, resulting in religious adherents being prohibited from participating in public life.

Given the threat imposed to our liberty, our freedom, and our financial wellbeing by overregulation and unaccountable federal bureaucracies, the views that Gorsuch has expressed towards the administrative state are also needed on the Supreme Court. Last year in Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch, he authored a concurring opinion in which he criticized the validity of the Supreme Court’s holding in Chevron v. NRDC.

That decision established a rule giving broad deference to decisions made by federal bureaucrats, rather than judges, when it comes to interpreting ambiguous laws. According to Gorsuch, this rule allows “executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power and concentrate federal power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the Constitution of the framers’ design.”

Gorsuch summarily encapsulated the problems with the type of activist judges who think of themselves as super legislators in his speech at Case Western. As Gorsuch said, consider what happens when we allow a judge to act as a legislator:

Unconstrained by the bicameralism and presentment hurdles of Article I, the judge would need only his own vote, or those of just a few colleagues, to revise the law willy-nilly in accordance with his preferences and the task of legislating would become a relatively simply thing. Notice, too, how hard it would be to revise this so-easily-made judicial legislation to account for changes in the world or to fix mistakes. Unable to throw judges out of office in regular elections, you’d have to wait for them to die before you’d have any chance of change. And even then you’d find change difficult, for courts cannot so easily undo their errors given the weight they afford precedent. Notice finally how little voice the people would be left in a government where life-appointed judges are free to legislate alongside elected representatives. The very idea of self-government would seem to wither to the point of pointlessness.

That is exactly the kind of attitude against unrestrained judges who rewrite the law to suit their ideology that we need in a Supreme Court justice. Hopefully with the help of Justice Gorsuch, President Donald Trump and the new Congress will finally start to rein in the federal government and the administrative state and start to corral it back within the limits on its power that the Founders set out in the Constitution. (For more from the author of “From Campaign Finance to Regulations: Why Gorsuch Was the Perfect Pick for Trump” please click HERE)

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