We Are Living in an Age of Political Paranoia

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. . .Paranoia isn’t new to American public life. Its most violent manifestations are of course rare, but what the historian Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style” has always been part of American political culture, in part because America has always been complex and chaotic. Conspiracy theories bring order and solace, they make sense of the chaos and reorient the world along moral and logical lines. For this reason, the appeal of the paranoid style has always been particularly strong among Americans.

The difference now is that the paranoid style has gone mainstream. Evidence abounds in recent decades, but one need look no further than Trump’s own political career, which began with him wading into the Obama birther conspiracy in 2011. More recently, QAnon followers have been turning up at Trump rallies, from Texas to Florida to Pennsylvania, all with the same talking points: QAnon is a “community,” a “movement,” a “great awakening.” Their movement, as they will freely attest, is intimately bound to Trump’s presidency.

Although it’s unfair and irresponsible to implicate Trump in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, as some major media outlets were quick to do, there’s no question that Trump’s occasional allusions to conspiracy theories have given political paranoia more room to breathe, in much the same way that the rise of social media has given conspiracy theorists a platform and a powerful new way to connect to one another.

Still, to blame the mainstreaming of paranoia on Trump or social media is to misunderstand the role that political paranoia plays in our national life. In 1995, the late Michael Kelly wrote an essay for The New Yorker entitled, “The Road to Paranoia,” about a militia group that had risen to prominence in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. The main subject of Kelly’s article was a man named Bob Fletcher, the “investigative researcher” and spokesman for a group called Militia of Montana, or MOM. Fletcher and MOM espoused a sort of proto-QAnon conspiracy—a grand, all-encompassing conspiracy that has shaped the course of history and threatens to reduce all Americans to slavery under a New World Order.

Just as they did for the Pittsburgh shooter, “globalists” played a prominent role in the conspiracy worldview of Fletcher and his fellow militiamen of the mid-1990s—a worldview shared by the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, and those who sympathized with him. (Read more from “We Are Living in an Age of Political Paranoia” HERE)

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The Dems Have Nominated Radical, ‘Anti-American Candidates’

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LevinTV host Mark Levin began his radio show Wednesday evening discussing the out-of-control media and the urgency of voting for the forces of freedom on Election Day.

“This election, ladies and gentlemen, is up to you and me. Your family, your fellow citizens: what we want this country to look like. The reason it’s not a regular election is because the Democrats have nominated some very, very radical, even anti-American candidates. And I will say that because if you’re pushing socialism, if you’re pushing extra-constitutional policies, then that’s right, it’s unAmerican,” Levin started. “If you’re disgusted with the media, you need to turn out and vote and push them back too.”

He then discussed the legacy media using freedom of the press as a shield to push far-left policies, explaining how the Left has warped the Founders’ constitutional protection.

“Freedom of the press was about individualism. Freedom of the press was about representation and limited government. It was not a rabid progressive agenda,” he added.

Later in the segment, Levin discussed the birthright citizenship issue and its relationship to the Constitution, arguing that the president has the authority to alter the policy to protect American sovereignty.

Listen:

(For more from the author of “The Dems Have Nominated Radical, ‘Anti-American Candidates’” please click HERE)

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Nothing, Not Even Birthright Citizenship, Trumps Consent of the Nation

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It’s time to reclaim our birthright. When an invading army comes to our border, can its general’s pregnant wife have the baby in our country and demand citizenship? Can our nation do anything to stop people from evading the Border Patrol, going to a hospital, and forcing a citizen upon us against our consent?

If you believe the answer is “no,” you don’t deserve to live in a sovereign nation. As Harry Reid said in 1993, “no sane country” would do such a thing. Moreover, anyone who wants to continue the practice of allowing stolen sovereignty is demonstrating that they want continued illegal immigration and that the amnesty debate is not about the logistical question of what to do with those already here.

With rumors swirling around that Trump will issue an order to stop granting birth certificates to children born to illegal immigrants, there’s a lot of ignorance about our history being propagated on the web. In chapter 4 of my book, Stolen Sovereignty, I make the full legal, historical, philosophical, and policy case against the practice of granting citizenship to illegal aliens. For today, I want to focus on one angle: the notion that there is no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants when it comes to birthright citizenship, an assertation made by leftist Justice Brennan in a footnote of the 1982 Plyler v. Doe opinion, a case in itself wrongly decided.

One thing that all sides of the so-called birthright citizenship debate forget is that nothing ever supersedes the consent of a nation. Even if one believes that Wong Kim Ark (1898) was rightly decided (here’s why it wasn’t), thereby creating a definitive floor for citizenship within the Constitution, outside Congress’ regulatory power, for kids born to all immigrants, there is no way that can apply to people who come here without the consent of the nation.

The Fourteenth Amendment stipulates two requirements for birthright citizenship: that the individual be born “in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Let’s put aside the debate over what “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means. Nobody can unilaterally assert jurisdiction against the will of the nation. But even if the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t contain the second condition and only stipulated that the child must be “born in the United States,” it is beyond settled law that if you are here without consent, it is quite literally as if you are not present in this country. This concept should not only shut down the phony birthright citizenship debate once and for all, but end this notion that illegals can come here and demand other benefits or standing in court for specific status against the will of the political branches of government, including a right to an abortion, simply because they successfully landed on our soil.

No foreigner or foreign entity can control the destiny of our nation and force upon us prospectively an outcome for citizenship, judicial standing, or any other benefit against the will of the president or Congress. It’s obvious that a country can never be forced to issue citizenship against its will, for if that were the case, it would cease to be a sovereign country “free from external control,” as the term is defined by Webster’s dictionary.

This is why James Madison, in his essay on sovereignty, used the example of citizenship to explain how, in a republican society, decisions must flow with the consent of the people through their elected representatives. And there’s no greater decision for society than the future makeup of the society itself. James Madison wrote in the 1835 essay, “In the case of naturalization a new member is added to the Social compact … by a majority of the governing body deriving its powers from a majority of the individual parties to the social compact.”

Nobody can dispute that a president has the power to keep out anyone seeking entry for any reason. As Justice Thomas wrote in his concurrence in Trump v. Hawaii, “Section 1182(f) does not set forth any judicially enforceable limits that constrain the President. … Nor could it, since the President has inherent authority to exclude aliens from the country.”

Yet I’ve been asked by friends what happens if, after we close the points of entry, the caravan sneaks onto our soil between the points of entry. The answer is simple, because nothing trumps sovereignty. Therefore, for anyone who breaks into our country without consent or overstays the terms of his or her entry, it’s as if they are physically not present on our soil. Constitutional rights on our soil, much less the ultimate prize of citizenship, only apply if you come here with consent. That is deeply rooted in social compact theory and settled law. As the court said long ago in United States v. Ju Toy (1905), a person who comes to the country illegally is to be regarded as if he had stopped at the limit of its jurisdiction, although physically he may be within its boundaries.

Already as far back as the 1950s, the Supreme Court had already said, “For over a half century this Court has held that the detention of an alien in custody pending determination of his admissibility does not legally constitute an entry though the alien is physically within the United States.” Leng May Ma v. Barber, 1958.

This is why the court said in Turner v. Williams (1904) that an inadmissible alien does not have First Amendment rights because “[h]e does not become one of the people to whom these things are secured by our Constitution by an attempt to enter forbidden by law.”

In the notorious Zadvydas v. Davis case (2001), the court reiterated that any alien “paroled in to the United States pending admissibility,” without having “gained [a] foothold,” has “not effected an entry.”

It’s absurd to assert that people who are supposed to be off our soil can, strictly by trespassing on it, achieve the ultimate benefit of citizenship for their kids.

The most important case that sheds light on this debate is Kaplan v. Tod (1925), when the court denied citizenship and relief from deportation to the daughter of a naturalized citizen who emigrated from Russia.

Here is a factual analysis of that case, excerpted from chapter 4 of my book:

On July 20, 1914, the Kaplan family came to Ellis Island to reunite with the father of the family, who had been working in the country for a few years. The thirteen-year-old daughter was deemed inadmissible for being “feeble minded,” but because of the outbreak of World War I, her deportation was delayed. She was handed over to the custody of the Hebrew Aid Society, which had her live together with her father until she was ordered deported in 1923.

In the meantime, the father had become a citizen three years earlier, and asserted that because his daughter was under twenty-one at the time of his naturalization and was living in the United States, she should be automatically granted citizenship alongside him, pursuant to longstanding law. But in a unanimous and terse decision, the Court swatted down the petition:

“Naturalization of parents affects minor children only ‘if dwelling in the United States.’ The appellant could not lawfully have landed in the United States in view of the express prohibition of the Act of 1910 just referred to, and until she legally landed ‘could not have dwelt within the United States.’”

The Court backhandedly rejected the notion that she “dwelt within the United States,” even though she physically lived with her father for nine years on American soil, partly with temporary permission from the government. That is because “she was still in theory of law at the boundary line, and had gained no foothold in the United States” and had never “been dwelling in the United States within the meaning of the Act.” Now stop for a moment and compare the language of the naturalization statute for those immigrant children seeking naturalization together with their parents to the wording of the Fourteenth Amendment governing those born here.

The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the child be born here and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” It is indisputable that even according to those opinions in which jurisdiction means territorial jurisdiction and not political jurisdiction (absurdly rendering the phrase superfluous, as noted earlier), the language of “subject to the jurisdiction” is certainly more restrictive than the purely geographical and literal phrase “dwelling in the United States.” After all, everyone concedes that Indian tribes and children born to foreign diplomats were excluded by this phrase, even though they are physically born on our soil.

Yet, the Court ruled in 1925, based on uncontested precedent, that those living here unlawfully don’t even satisfy the meaning and intent of “dwelling in the United States”—even in a case where they were granted temporary permission to live here on humanitarian grounds. It is therefore simply preposterous to assert that those who willfully violated our laws and snuck into the country without permission can secure jurisdiction for their children against the consent of the nation. As the Left would say, it’s “settled law” that illegal immigrants are considered “at the boundary line, and had gained no foothold in the United States,” irrespective of where they reside now.

The reality is that there was never a formal decision, much less a piece of legislation or a court case, mandating automatic citizenship for people who break into our country. Wong Kim Ark was about those invited in on immigrant visas. Justice Horace Gray, the author of Wong, referred to “domiciled” immigrants on 12 occasions in the case. Those promoting citizenship for illegals conveniently ignore his opinion six years earlier in Nishimura Ekiu, which clearly held that an alien not legally domiciled in this country is as if he is standing outside our soil as it relates to even due process rights, much less the right to assert jurisdiction on behalf of his child.

As illegal immigration became more common throughout the ’60s and ’70s, hospitals were never given any guidance and just lazily handed out birth certificates to everyone. The Social Security Administration and Health and Human Services were lax in oversight and never clamped down on this practice. It wasn’t until this issue became consequential, with hundreds of thousands of these new citizens every year in the early ’90s, that some in Congress demanded that it stop. It was in response to that outcry that leftists began concocting a retroactive constitutional mandate for this practice.

The proof that this was due to lax enforcement, not a deliberate legal decision, is that all sides agree that children of diplomats are excluded from citizenship. Yet there’s evidence that some of them were erroneously given birth certificates and never informed the SSA about the oversight. Trump is fully justified in using his ability to interpret the Constitution for executive purposes in the way he sees fit. I’d rather this be done through Congress, but legislators will never act.

Yes, obviously this will go to the courts, and the courts, which no longer believe in the Constitution or sovereignty, will rule that illegals can do whatever they want. But does the judiciary have exclusive and final jurisdiction over such a question that must be left to the people? This is not an individual case or controversy. This is the most sensitive national policy on citizenship. Judges certainly don’t have any more insight into this debate than our political branches of government do.

There you have it, folks. We are either a sovereign nation built upon the consent of the citizen or not. If we are told that there is nothing we can do to stop someone from invading, having a baby, and declaring this baby an American, then we no longer have America. (For more from the author of “Nothing, Not Even Birthright Citizenship, Trumps Consent of the Nation” please click HERE)

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America on the Brink: ‘Adolf Hitler Is Alive and Well in the United States, and Is Fast Rising to Power’

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Yet another shooting.

Yet another smear of ugliness, hatred and violence.

Yet another ratcheting up of the calls for the government to clamp down on the citizenry by imposing more costly security measures without any real benefit, more militarized police, more surveillance, more widespread mental health screening of the general population, more threat assessments and behavioral sensing warnings, more gun control measures, more surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities, more “See Something, Say Something” programs aimed at turning Americans into snitches and spies, more metal detectors and whole-body imaging devices at so-called soft targets, more roaming squads of militarized police empowered to do more stop-and-frisk searches, more fusion centers to centralize and disseminate information to law enforcement agencies, and more government monitoring of what Americans say and do, where they go, what they buy and how they spend their time.

All of these measures play into the government’s hands.

All of these measures add up to more government power, less real security and far less freedom.

As we have learned the hard way, the phantom promise of safety in exchange for restricted or regulated liberty is a false, misguided doctrine that has no basis in the truth.

Things are falling apart.

When things start to fall apart or implode, ask yourself: who stands to benefit?

In most cases, it’s the government that stands to benefit by amassing greater powers at the citizenry’s expense.

Unfortunately, the government’s answer to civil unrest and societal violence, as always, will lead us further down the road we’ve travelled since 9/11 towards totalitarianism and away from freedom.

With alarming regularity, the nation is being subjected to a spate of violence that not only terrorizes the public but also destabilizes the country’s fragile ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Clearly, America is being pushed to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.

This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, racism, classism, xenophobia, militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment), a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing government corruption and brutality, and a growing economic divide that has much of the population struggling to get by—is manifesting itself in madness, mayhem and an utter disregard for the very principles and liberties that have kept us out of the clutches of totalitarianism for so long.

Yet there is a method to this madness.

Remember, authoritarian regimes begin with incremental steps. Overcriminalization, surveillance of innocent citizens, imprisonment for nonviolent—victimless—crimes, etc. Bit by bit, the citizenry finds its freedoms being curtailed and undermined for the sake of national security. And slowly the populace begins to submit.

No one speaks up for those being targeted.

No one resists these minor acts of oppression.

No one recognizes the indoctrination into tyranny for what it is.

Historically this failure to speak truth to power has resulted in whole populations being conditioned to tolerate unspoken cruelty toward their fellow human beings, a bystander syndrome in which people remain silent and disengaged—mere onlookers—in the face of abject horrors and injustice.

Time has insulated us from the violence perpetrated by past regimes in their pursuit of power: the crucifixion and slaughter of innocents by the Romans, the torture of the Inquisition, the atrocities of the Nazis, the butchery of the Fascists, the bloodshed by the Communists, and the cold-blooded war machines run by the military industrial complex.

We can disassociate from such violence.

We can convince ourselves that we are somehow different from the victims of government abuse.

We can continue to spout empty campaign rhetoric about how great America is, despite the evidence to the contrary.

We can avoid responsibility for holding the government accountable.

We can zip our lips and bind our hands and shut our eyes.

In other words, we can continue to exist in a state of denial.

Whatever we do or don’t do, it won’t change the facts: the nation is imploding, and our republic is being pushed ever closer to martial law.

As Vann R. Newkirk II writes for the Atlantic:

Trumpism demands that violence be solved by local militarization: increased security at schools, the arming of teachers, and now, the adoption of guns in places intended quite literally to be sanctuaries from the scourges of the world. Taken altogether, what Trumpism seems to intend is the creation—or perhaps the expansion—of the machinery of a police state…

In facing what appears to be a rising tide of violence—a tide that Trump himself elevates and encourages—the prescription of arms merely capitulates to the demands of that bloodshed. The purpose of political violence and terrorism is not necessarily to eliminate or even always to create body counts, but to disempower people, to spread the contagion of fear, to splinter communities into self-preserving bunkers, and to invalidate the very idea that a common destiny is even possible. Mandates to arm people accelerate this process. They inherently promote the idea that society cannot reduce the global level of harm, and promote the authoritarian impulses of people seeking order.

Where Newkirk misses the point is by placing the blame squarely on the Trump Administration.

This shift towards totalitarianism and martial law started long before Trump, set in motion by powers-that-be that see the government as a means to an end: power and profit.

As Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, recognized years ago, “Adolf Hitler is alive and well in the United States, and he is fast rising to power.”

Roberts was not comparing Trump to Hitler, as so many today are wont to do.

Rather, he was comparing the American Police State to the Nazi Third Reich, which is a far more apt comparison.

After all, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—have fully embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics and have used them repeatedly against American citizens for years now.

Indeed, with every passing day, the United States government borrows yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook: Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention.

These are not tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme. Rather, they are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, where the only law that counts comes in the form of heavy-handed, unilateral dictates from a supreme ruler who uses a secret police to control the populace.

The empowerment of the Gestapo, Germany’s secret police, tracked with the rise of the Nazi regime in much the same way that the rise of the American police state corresponds to the decline of freedom in America.

How did the Gestapo become the terror of the Third Reich?

It did so by creating a sophisticated surveillance and law enforcement system that relied for its success on the cooperation of the military, the police, the intelligence community, neighborhood watchdogs, government workers for the post office and railroads, ordinary civil servants, and a nation of snitches inclined to report “rumors, deviant behavior, or even just loose talk.”

In other words, ordinary citizens working with government agents helped create the monster that became Nazi Germany. Writing for the New York Times, Barry Ewen paints a particularly chilling portrait of how an entire nation becomes complicit in its own downfall by looking the other way:

In what may be his most provocative statement, [author Eric A.] Johnson says that ‘‘most Germans may not even have realized until very late in the war, if ever, that they were living in a vile dictatorship.’’ This is not to say that they were unaware of the Holocaust; Johnson demonstrates that millions of Germans must have known at least some of the truth. But, he concludes, ‘‘a tacit Faustian bargain was struck between the regime and the citizenry.’’ The government looked the other way when petty crimes were being committed. Ordinary Germans looked the other way when Jews were being rounded up and murdered; they abetted one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century not through active collaboration but through passivity, denial and indifference.

Much like the German people, “we the people” have become passive, polarized, gullible, easily manipulated, and lacking in critical thinking skills. Distracted by entertainment spectacles, politics and screen devices, we too are complicit, silent partners in creating a police state similar to the terror practiced by former regimes.

Can the Fourth Reich happen here?

It’s already happening right under our noses. Much like the German people, “we the people” are all too inclined to “look the other way.”

In our state of passivity, denial and indifference, here are some of the looming problems we’re ignoring:

Our government is massively in debt. Currently, the national debt is somewhere in the vicinity of $21 trillion. Approximately half of our debt is owned by foreign countries, namely China, Japan and Saudi Arabia.

Our education system is abysmal. Despite the fact that we spend more than most of the world on education, we rank 36th in the world when it comes to math, reading and science, far below most of our Asian counterparts. Even so, we continue to insist on standardized programs such as Common Core, which teach students to be test-takers rather than thinkers.

Our homes provide little protection against government intrusions. Police agencies, already empowered to crash through your door if they suspect you’re up to no good, now have radar devices that allow them to “see” through the walls of our homes.

Our prisons, housing the largest number of inmates in the world and still growing, have become money-making enterprises for private corporations that rely on the inmates for cheap labor.

We are no longer a representative republic. The U.S. has become a corporate oligarchy. As a recent academic survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen.

We’ve got the most expensive, least effective health care system in the world compared to other western, industrialized nations.

The air pollution levels are dangerously high for almost half of the U.S. population, putting Americans at greater risk of premature death, aggravated asthma, difficulty breathing and future cardiovascular problems.

Despite outlandish amounts of money being spent on the nation’s “infrastructure,” there are more than 63,000 bridges—one out of every 10 bridges in the country—in urgent need of repair. Some of these bridges are used 250 million times a day by trucks, school buses, passenger cars and other vehicles.

Americans know little to nothing about their rights or how the government is supposed to operate. This includes educators and politicians. For example, 27 percent of elected officials cannot name even one right or freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment, while 54 percent do not know the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war.

Nearly one out of every three American children live in poverty, ranking us among the worst in the developed world.

Patrolled by police, our schools have become little more than quasi-prisons in which kids as young as age 4 are being handcuffed for “acting up,” subjected to body searches and lockdowns, and suspended for childish behavior.

We’re no longer innocent until proven guilty. In our present surveillance state, that burden of proof has now been shifted so that we are all suspects to be spied on, searched, scanned, frisked, monitored, tracked and treated as if we’re potentially guilty of some wrongdoing.

Parents, no longer viewed as having an inherent right to raise their children as they see fit, are increasingly being arrested for letting their kids walk to the playground alone, or play outside alone. Similarly, parents who challenge a doctor’s finding or request a second opinion regarding their children’s health care needs are being charged with medical child abuse and, in a growing number of cases, losing custody of their children to the government.

Private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, forcibly take our DNA, strip search us, and probe us intimately. Accounts are on the rise of individuals—men and women alike—being subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops.

Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice. The courts were established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet the courts increasingly march in lockstep with the police state, while concerning themselves primarily with advancing the government’s agenda, no matter how unjust or unconstitutional.

Americans have no protection against police abuse. It is no longer unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. What is increasingly common, however, is the news that the officers involved in these incidents get off with little more than a slap on the hands.

If there is any absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off. This is true, whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponry that will be used against us, endless wars that do little for our safety or our freedoms, or bloated government agencies such as the National Security Agency with its secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities. Rubbing salt in the wound, even monetary awards in lawsuits against government officials who are found guilty of wrongdoing are paid with taxpayer funds.

Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police. In early America, government agents were not permitted to enter one’s home without permission or in a deceitful manner. And citizens could resist arrest when a police officer tried to restrain them without proper justification or a warrant. Daring to dispute a warrant with a police official today who is armed with high-tech military weapons would be nothing short of suicidal. Moreover, as police forces across the country continue to be transformed into extensions of the military, Americans are finding their once-peaceful communities transformed into military outposts, complete with tanks, weaponry, and other equipment designed for the battlefield.

Now these are not problems that you can just throw money at, as most politicians are inclined to do.

These are problems that will continue to plague our nation—and be conveniently ignored by politicians—unless and until Americans wake up to the fact that we’re the only ones who can change things.

We’re caught in a vicious cycle right now between terror and fear and distraction and hate and partisan politics and an inescapable longing for a time when life was simpler and people were kinder and the government was less of a monster.

Our prolonged exposure to the American police state is not helping.

As always, the solution to most problems must start locally, in our homes, in our neighborhoods, and in our communities.

We’ve got to refrain from the toxic us vs. them rhetoric that is consuming the nation.

We’ve got to work harder to build bridges, instead of burning them to the ground.

We’ve got to learn to stop bottling up dissent and disagreeable ideas and learn how to work through our disagreements without violence.

We’ve got to de-militarize our police and lower the levels of violence here and abroad, whether it’s violence we export to other countries, violence we glorify in entertainment, or violence we revel in when it’s leveled at our so-called enemies, politically or otherwise.

For starters, we’ll need to actually pay attention to what’s going on around us, and I don’t mean by turning on the TV news. That will get you nowhere. It’s a mere distraction from what is really going on. In other words, if you’re watching, that means you’re not doing. It’s time to get active.

Pay attention to what your local city councils are enacting.

Pay attention to what your school officials are teaching and not teaching.

Pay attention to whom your elected officials are giving access and currying favor.

Most of all, stop acting like it really matters whether you vote for a Republican or Democrat, because in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t.

While you’re at it, start acting like citizens who expect the government to work for them, rather than the other way around. While that bloated beast called the federal government may not listen to you without a great deal of activism and effort brought to bear, you can have a great—and more immediate—impact on your local governing bodies.

This will mean gathering together with your friends and neighbors and, for example, forcing your local city council to start opposing state and federal programs that are ripping you off. And if need be, your local city council can refuse to abide by the dictates that continue to flow from Washington, DC. In other words, nullify everything the government does that is illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.

Finally, remember that when you strip away all of the things that serve to divide us, we’re no different underneath: we all bleed red, and we all suffer when violence becomes the government’s calling card.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the oppression and injustice—be it in the form of shootings, surveillance, fines, asset forfeiture, prison terms, roadside searches, and so on—will come to all of us eventually unless we do something to stop it now.

Unless we can learn to live together as brothers and sisters and fellow citizens, we will perish as tools and prisoners of the American police state. (For more from the author of “America on the Brink: ‘Adolf Hitler Is Alive and Well in the United States, and Is Fast Rising to Power'” please click HERE)

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Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available online at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Atrocities Are Not Political Human Shields to Stifle Policy Debates

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Why are innocent people killed by savages in this world? “Rise up, O Judge of the earth; render a reward to the proud. How long will the wicked, O LORD, how long will the wicked exult?” — Psalm 94:2-3

That is the million-dollar question of this world. It is a question for which there will be no answer until God’s “feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives,” at which point the nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift the sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” Isaiah 2:4. That will only occur, of course, “at the end of the days” when people “shall say, ‘Come, let us go up to the Lord’s mount, to the house of the God of Jacob, and let Him teach us of His ways, and we will go in His paths,’ for out of Zion shall the Torah come forth, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem” Isaiah 2:2-3.

But for us in this world, all we can do is take solace in the fact that there is a supreme being keeping score. “The Lord knows the days of the innocent, and their inheritance will be forever” Psalm 37:18.

There is simply nothing to say, no fingers to point, no accusations to make when one individual wicked person who shall not be mentioned commits mass murder. The perpetrator alone is the perpetrator, along with those who gleefully cheer his action. The rest of us should all be on the same side. We should not point fingers at God or our political opponents for responsibility of murder by a madman. Like it says in Leviticus, “And Aaron was silent” in the face of God taking his two sons from him on the day of sanctifying the sanctuary.

All we are left with as mere mortals who get together and form communities, societies, and countries is to do justice, deter evil behavior as much as possible, keep ourselves armed, trained, and protected, and pray for divine protection.

Let’s keep policy debates in the realm of politics and leave tragedy to the realm of grieving. Let’s not use grief to promote a political agenda that could not stand on its own two feet based on its own merits absent the political human shield of an atrocity to stifle debate.

If a murderer harbored various opinion on taxes, regulation, immigration, foreign policy, or abortion, his incoherent babbling should never have bearing on the public policy debates that divide us. Let’s continue debating them on their own merits. We should be able to continue debating whether open borders to our south and mass migration from the Middle East at record numbers are a prudent policy, regardless of the views of the Pittsburgh shooter, the same way leftists and George Soros have the right to continue promoting their anti-Israel views, even though those views were also shared by the shooter.

The media, liberals, and leftist Jewish organizations who claim to speak for all Jews are essentially saying Trump incited this evil act, hatred of George Soros fueled it, and because the demonic attacker said some things on immigration, we must all support an invasion of our sovereign country that has brought in endless gangs and drugs.

Trump’s administration is a collection of the most prominent Israel supporters in politics – from Vice President Pence and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton. In fact, if we are hell-bent on looking at the mass murderer’s ramblings rather than his deeds, let’s not forget that he was stoked by the Trump administration, in his mind, being taken over by Jews. After all, no administration has ever done more to fight against the nations of the world isolating Israel than Trump has.

Thus, the notion that Trump incited this is despicable.

Not only is the Left blaming Trump for neo-Nazis, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, is now essentially saying we must duct-tape our mouths and allow George Soros to continue transforming this country, lest we be called anti-Semitic. We must not “evoke” his name in the discourse of political debate.

I’ve never heard a more counterintuitive argument in my life. George Soros is one of the biggest funders of the BDS movement that is stigmatizing and endangering Jews throughout the world, particularly on college campuses. The pro-Palestinian propaganda shows up at every leftist cause, particularly open-border rallies. The notion that by criticizing George Soros we are somehow anti-Semitic is scandalous.

Also, the notion that American conservatives who support Trump to varying degrees are anti-Semitic is ridiculous: There is no issue that is more embedded in the tissue of conservative philosophy than support for Israel – to the point that it’s nearly impossible for a Republican running for office to win a primary without it. And that is exactly what enrages the neo-Nazi types, the people the Left seek to pin on conservatives.

On the Democrat side, it’s just the opposite. The mainstream of the liberal base – not just the fringe – is now anti-Israel.

So, these left-wing organizations that claim to speak for the people of the Bible should study the book they claim to represent and learn the facts about the people they ally with and the people they despise.

The stone-cold truth is that there will be evil haters of all stripes, including neo-Nazis, to some degree until the end of time. But no mainstream group in this country does anything but marginalize neo-Nazis. Law enforcement uses everything within the constitutional constraints to keep them in check. Sadly, it only takes one successful attack to wreak havoc.

Contrast this to the threat of Islamic supremacism growing in our country, just like in Europe. There were several hundred Islamists in the New York immigrant community who rallied in New York when Trump moved the embassy, shouting “Intifada” and referring to genocide of Jews. There are numerous mosques where the imams preach hatred against America and refer to Jews as subhuman. These mosques have prominent Muslim figures attending them who are respected by the media and the political class. These same leftist organizations couldn’t care less. Our body politic would do everything legal to marginalize a rally of hundreds of neo-Nazis chanting genocidal slogans against Jews and promoting anti-Semitism on college campuses. Somehow, when it comes to Islamists doing the same, conservatives stand alone in their concern.

Any American – Christian, Jew, atheist, or otherwise – is entitled to his own views on immigration or any other issue. But if liberals, including liberal Jews, want to envelop the policy goal of open borders with the tapestry of Jewish thought, it’s time we debate the effects of open borders on anti-Semitism based on its own merits. America is blessed to be the safest home for Jews in the world, certainly the safest outside Israel. Anti-Semitism is out of control in all corners of the world, particularly where there is a growing presence of Sharia supremacism. America has certain unique values, and despite the despicable actions of a few individuals, we seek to preserve those values. As Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts warned of the effects of mass migration during the debate over the Naturalization Act of 1790, “The citizens of America preferred this country, because it is to be preferred.”

But in the same way mass migration, as opposed to gradual and balanced immigration, will bring in the political views of the rest of the world, mass migration from parts of the world – Islamic or otherwise – that still believe in conspiracy theories about Jews will result in the same outcome. There is no right to immigrate, and this is indeed why Trump deported a low-level former Nazi even though he was in his ’90s and carried out on a stretcher. We shouldn’t bring in anti-Semites, white supremacists, or Islamic supremacists. Everyone stands to benefit from strong borders, but Jews in particular need strong borders when America is head and shoulders above all other nations in its treatment of Jews.

It is incumbent upon all of us to continue respectfully debating these issues on the merits and not to allow those issues that polarize us to change our common abhorrence of senseless hate and mass murder or to use the senseless hate and mass murder to shut down important debates. (For more from the author of “Atrocities Are Not Political Human Shields to Stifle Policy Debates” please click HERE)

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Rather Than Being an Asylum From Persecution, We Are Bringing the Persecution to the Asylum

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The lynchpin of our border crisis is not a lack of border enforcement, but a lack of legal enforcement. It all boils down to the invasion under the guise of asylum backed by lawfare. But is there really anything wrong with the way the asylum laws are written, or is there something wrong with the brains of our political class applying a law to the exact opposite situation it was intended to address? In the case of the Central American invasion since 2014, it’s a lot more of the latter.

To begin, both our laws governing refugee status for unaccompanied children and asylum are designed to protect victims of trafficking and persecution, not those engaging in trafficking to fleece America or those simply reuniting with other illegal family members with no evidence of persecution at home. Asylum was not designed for anyone living in an impoverished and/or violent country. That would make two billion or so people eligible for legal status. It was designed for individuals persecuted by their government. For example, a case like Charlie Gard’s parents in Great Britain, in my opinion, or groups of persecuted ethnic or religious minorities victimized by the majority in a one-way persecution, not a civil war.

Say what you want about Central America, but it’s one of the most homogenous places in the world. There are no persecuted ethnic and religious minorities, and none of them are coming to America because they are being persecuted by the government for, say, supporting free market health care or gun rights. In other words, it’s inconceivable that any of them are persecuted based on “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion,” as required by law.

Illegal immigration is all about incentives, not persecution

To the extent that there are push factors driving the migration, it’s all economics. Of course people will come if we incentivize them to come here through amnesty. Hundreds of millions of people would come if we opened our doors. But the ebb and flow of Central American migration does not respond to push factors, much less factors associated with violence (which, again, is not grounds for asylum); it responds to pull factors of our politics in America.

The media has lied to us from day one. To begin with, 80 percent of the children who have crossed over the border since 2014 are not with parents but are unaccompanied. Only 20 percent come with parents. Either way, almost all of them have been resettled with family members who have successfully evaded the Border Patrol over the years and have settled in the country illegally. Why did this begin in 2014? Because of DACA and the understanding that they will get amnesty, just like it is resurging this year because of catch-and-release policies. The El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) drafted a memo in 2014 asserting that 95 percent of the border-crossers interviewed cited the promise of amnesty as the primary factor behind their migration, not violence back home.

Violence is down, migration is up!

The twisted irony is that violence in Central America actually dropped by 30 percent over the exact same time of the border surge, which shows that this is all a fraud being perpetrated on America’s dime. Oh, and 73 percent of the migrants in fiscal year 2017 were male, the most violent demographic of any civilization, which doesn’t exactly reflect a reality of fleeing from violence. If the primary factor were violence, then why in the world would we not see more women in this percentage? Sounds similar to what’s going on in Europe, huh?

If you break down the murder rate trends by individual country, you see an inverse relationship between violence and migration. As noted earlier this week, by far, Guatemala is dominating the illegal migration, with Honduras increasing but more modestly, and El Salvador decreasing. Guess what? El Salvador has three times the murder rate of Guatemala and is still 46 percent higher than Honduras. Thus, the country with the lowest murder rate has the highest migration rate and vice versa. According to Phoenix ICE officials, 85 percent of the families coming through the Yuma sector of the border are from Guatemala!

Bringing the violence to America – the exact opposite of asylum

With this factual background in mind, now we can appreciate how the fact that Central America is still relatively violent is actually a reason not to let these people in without first being processed off our shores. We are bringing in predominantly young males from some of the most violent countries in the world, all of which are from the same homogenous population as the “persecutors.” This is not to say all of them have been violent or will be violent when coming here, but just that there is no way to disentangle a persecuted minority from a persecuting majority as we could with, for example, the Yazidis, who are being persecuted by the Sunnis in Iraq. In that case, we could bring in the Yazidis a) because they are legitimate asylees and b) because there is no concern that we would also be bringing in the very problem they are fleeing.

Obviously, this violates the most basic solemn duty of the federal government to protect American citizens from external violence. But for all those virtue-signalers who think the job of our government is to sacrifice our security for the needs and desires of other countries, they must remember that their virtue-signaling is a vice, not a virtue for those very people. What good are we doing those peaceful migrants if we bring them in through the uncontrolled border migration in such large numbers that they reconstitute the worst elements of a place like Honduras right here in our own cities? While the gangs and drugs are killing all Americans, it is most concentrated in the communities where these illegal immigrants are living.

Liberal outlets like the Washington Post forget the irony of their virtue-signaling when they have reported endlessly on places like Brentwood, Long Island, where a predominantly Hispanic community and school were torn apart by hordes of teenagers in 2014, some of whom “had never gone to school and couldn’t read or write in any language.” They reported on MS-13 becoming a “powerhouse” and the community “changing” with the surge of Central American teens. Remember, many of those teens are now 19-23 years old.

The same outlet also reported on an “overwhelmingly Hispanic school in Prince George’s County,” Maryland, where MS-13 would “sell drugs, draw gang graffiti and aggressively recruit students recently arrived from Central America, according to more than two dozen teachers, parents and students.” It was so bad that “most of those interviewed asked not to be identified for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted by MS-13.”

Last year, the Post did a report on an illegal immigrant woman from Guatemala who has to pay ransom to MS-13 not to be killed and how she felt she was living with the very elements she fled. She was living in the U.S. for 10 years, but things changed around the DACA surge when “MS-13 was on the rebound, fueled by fresh recruits from an unprecedented wave of almost 200,000 unaccompanied minors from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.”

The gang was almost eradicated under Bush’s 287(g) program, but DACA and sanctuary cities fueled this unprecedented surge, growing every month.

According to the Post, “The gang’s growth has been fueled by a wave of 200,000 teens who traveled to the United States alone to escape poverty and gang violence in Central America. … Nearly 5,000 of those unaccompanied minors have arrived in Prince George’s since 2012.” This parallels comments made by Geraldine Hart, police commissioner of Suffolk County, New York, that the entirety of the MS-13 crisis is because of the unaccompanied minors and that Long Island had it bad because it was “the largest recipient of UACs in the nation.”

Former Ohio governor and presidential candidate John Kasich says the Lord wants us to have open borders. We know people like him couldn’t care less about Americans, but if he had a shred of compassion in his soul, he’d support Trump’s plan to only accept asylum claims in a stable and secure environment in our consulates, so we are not bringing along with them the very hellish environment from which they seek refuge. (For more from the author of “Rather Than Being an Asylum From Persecution, We Are Bringing the Persecution to the Asylum” please click HERE)

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Analysis: Trump Is Not Responsible for the Actions of a Mentally-Disturbed Supporter

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The biggest story of the day is the arrest of a Florida man, in connection with the series of mail bombs sent to prominent critics of President Trump. In addition to reportedly having a criminal record for minor offenses and threats, the suspect appears to be a mentally unstable and cartoonishly-fanatical Trump supporter. This is unsurprising information. As I wrote yesterday, based on the identities of the bomb targets, Occam’s Razor suggested that these acts of terrorism were politically-motivated. It now seems likelier than ever that they were. Allow me to make a handful of non-mutually-exclusive observations:

(1) Our country would be better off if our public officials and other prominent political figures debated issues with more substance, greater civility, and less hysteria. This very much applies to the president, who likes to claim — among other things — that his opponents “favor” or “love” ruthless gangs who murder Americans. It also very much applies to Democrats, who frequently frame Republican proposals as world-ending, or tantamount to mass killings.

(2) Overheated partisan rhetoric that falls well short of direct incitement to violence can be grotesque and counter-productive, but it should not be blamed for the actions of disturbed people. It’s possible, if not likely, that this bomber heard Trump’s words and decided to take it upon himself to punish or eliminate Trump’s opponents. If so, that’s a reflection on the bomber’s evilness or mental illness, not Trump. Similarly, it’s quite likely that the Congressional baseball shooter heard the words of numerous high-profile leftists and decided he needed to save the country by assassinating Republicans. That was a reflection on the shooter’s evilness or mental illness, not the leftists he followed or favored.

(3) Demands that politicians and commentators calibrate their language in order to prevent depraved and insane people from engaging in depraved and insane conduct is more likely to harm free speech, or be exploited to disqualify legitimate political dissent as “dangerous,” than it is to achieve that ostensible goal. Crazy people find reasons and imagine “cues” to do crazy things; the argument that non-incitement speech might push someone over the edge strikes me as slippery and specious. Couldn’t something as simple as politician X alleging that politician Y is “hurting America” have this effect? The threshold for ‘triggering’ harmful impulses in the mind of a deranged person is unknowable, inconsistent and subjective. We therefore cannot shape our rules for discourse based upon that standard — even if we agree that our broader discourse needs serious rehabilitation.

(Read more from “Analysis: Trump Is Not Responsible for the Actions of a Mentally-Disturbed Supporter” HERE)

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Illegal Immigration Isn’t Just a Security Issue — It’s a Public Health Crisis in the Making

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The northern triangle of Central America is one of the most violent and impoverished regions in the world and is the prime hub for human and drug trafficking. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that bringing in hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from these countries within a few years will bring in crime, gangs, and drugs. Indeed, that is what has happened since 2014. But what is being overlooked by many, particularly those on the Left, is the strong likelihood that by not blocking illegal immigration, we are importing devastating diseases that we’ve worked hard and long to eradicate from our country.

This is how regressive progressives are. They turn back a century of indispensable health care progress and sacrifice it on the altar of political correctness.

Over the past century, Americans have successfully diminished and, in some cases, nearly eradicated certain infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, pertussis, rubella, malaria, hepatitis, polio, measles, and mumps. Over time, every American has been checked and inoculated (except for the few who refuse), and all the legal immigrants are screened for these diseases. This has been done since our first immigration laws and was a value as deeply embedded into the tissue of our immigration politics as any other issue.

But what happens when hundreds of thousands are enticed to come here illegally thanks to the endless incentives? And what happens when they are coming from the most impoverished areas that are a century behind us in medical progress in terms of combating infectious diseases? Well, while we’ve made enormous strides in improving public health as a nation, we are not keeping up with our policies on immigration from even one century ago. In fact, we are going backwards.

Here is why it’s inconceivable that the recent resurgence of many diseases we thought were on their way to extinction is not in large part due to illegal immigration. We know that the countries dominating these caravans – Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras – have high rates of infectious diseases. We know that it’s not the wealthy and well-to-do citizens who are migrating here. And here’s what else we know. As I reported earlier, while we’ve apprehended hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens every year, there are hundreds of thousands of others who come in undetected without any health screening.

For argument’s sake, let’s just assume that all those who are apprehended and then released into our country are inoculated and screened before being released, pursuant to the Centers for Disease Control’s protocol. What about those we never see but are able to get in because the Border Patrol is busy dealing with the ones we are amnestying? While the data is purposely being suppressed, no logical person can deny that there’s a serious public health concern with these migrant caravans and the thousands of others who come in undocumented as a result of the border officials being overwhelmed.

In general, this is a part of even the legal immigration discussion that our political class wants to ignore. As I’ve said repeatedly, immigration from the third world is fine when it’s done responsibly and gradually, but when it’s done in such large numbers so quickly and dominates our system, we will begin to bring in all its vices. Thus, along with poverty, we will bring in diseases.

As professor of economics at George Mason University Walter Williams observed in a September column, “Data reported to the National Tuberculosis Surveillance System show the TB incidence among foreign-born people in the United States (15.1 cases per 100,000) is approximately 13 times the incidence among U.S.-born people (1.2 cases per 100,000).” Moreover, Williams cites a 2002 CDC study that shows countries that have recently taken in a number of third world immigrants are seeing a relatively high prevalence of tuberculosis among the newcomers. “Today, the proportion of immigrants among persons reported as having TB exceeds 50 percent in several European countries, including Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. A similar proportion has been predicted for the United States.”

But let’s put the debate over numbers and origin of legal immigration on the shelf for a moment. Why can’t we all agree that incentivizing illegal immigrants from countries with a high prevalence of these infectious diseases is a colossal public health risk? Illegal immigrants are less educated than their legal counterparts and are even more prone to carry these diseases, in addition to never being detected, screened, and inoculated. Whereas TB prevalence among legal immigrants in America is 15.1 cases per 100,000, which is high enough, the prevalence of TB among Guatemalans is 106 per 100,000 people, according to the CDC. In other words, Guatemalans are 83 times more likely to have TB than Americans and 7 times more likely than legal immigrants.

The Centers for Disease Control, in its 2017 report, further found that dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses are either prevalent in or endemic to the three Central American countries. They also found that malaria is “endemic” to these countries, but bizarrely concluded that the “prevalence is not high enough to justify routine screening or presumptive treatment.” They further found that these countries are at “high risk for neglected tropical diseases,” with over one million children being treated each year for soil-transmitted helminths in Guatemala and Honduras. Central America experiences at least 200,000 cases of Chagas a year, a disease that is “the most common cause of nonischemic heart disease in Central America and may cause cardiomyopathy years after initial infection.”

In addition, there are numerous other diseases for which they have no data, but it’s very likely they are endemic to the impoverished population in this part of the world.

It’s also important to remember that as bad as the health care is in these countries, “access to basic healthcare in Central America largely depends on socioeconomic status,” according to the CDC. On average, it is the most impoverished population coming here, given that we know they are coming for economic reasons, not primarily because of violence (which would, in theory, drive out the more wealthy population as well).

Obviously, we have our own problem with a small minority of people who don’t want to get vaccinated, but ultimately these new outbreaks, such as the recent measles outbreak, are originating from other countries. Certainly, even if we didn’t have illegal immigration, there’s always a risk of bringing in diseases from the cross-border travel of Americans. However, there is no denying that the 800-pound gorilla in the room is the fact that millions of illegals have come over the border this generation from very risk-prone countries without ever being screened in detention facilities because they were never apprehended. It’s simply unacceptable that our government refuses to study this issue further and consider this as a major factor when deciding policies that incentivize caravans and other invasions.

Have we become so political as a nation that political correctness will allow us to revert to the 18th-century health standards? Ironically, the Left is obsessed with creating a monopoly for the insurance cartel under the guise of promoting health care, but they seem to never care about the actual “care” part. This is why the government and the media have stifled any data on this issue and we never hear any concern about the resurgence in diseases very plausibly emanating from this gaping hole in our public health defense. One journal article from the Infectious Disease Society of America in 2009 agonized over the “ethnical concerns” that the “publication of the results would lead to increased stigmatization and discrimination of undocumented persons in the United States and to harsher measures, such as deportation, when these persons receive a diagnosis of TB.”

From our earliest colonial laws, through state regulations and our first federal immigration laws, our politicians always sought to protect this country from diseases brought in through immigration. Courts in the 1800s even ruled that states didn’t violate the foreign commerce clause by regulating the flow of ships in order to prevent those with diseases from landing on their shores (New York v. Milne, 1837).

Indeed, by creating new “rights” at the expense of the social compact right of Americans to sovereignty, we are neither more enlightened, advanced or more progressive than our forefathers. In fact, our robust knowledge about diseases and our deft ability to prevent them make our utter disregard for the public health concerns of open borders all the more regressive and benighted. (For more from the author of “Illegal Immigration Isn’t Just a Security Issue — It’s a Public Health Crisis in the Making” please click HERE)

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I’m an Immigrant, and Trump Represents My Views on Immigration Way Better Than Democrats Do

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. . .[T]he Democrats who want to abolish ICE and have open borders aren’t thinking it through: Would having millions of un-vetted people coming across the border really be a good idea? And how will Democrats’ push for “Medicare for all” square with unlimited immigration?

Many liberal Democrats are concerned about and troubled by their party’s affinity for illegal immigration. I read The New York Times regularly, and in the last several years, I’ve been surprised to see that, in the comments section of many articles on immigration, some of the most liberal readers in the country have expressed deep reservations. They just can’t voice their thoughts more openly because they’d be pilloried as racist, nativist and xenophobic.

Finally, there is the issue of how the public policies on illegal immigration have been emotionalized and sensationalized. Here again, it has been done deliberately and often dishonestly to tug at the heartstrings of fair-minded Americans. It’s also important to establish that talking honestly about illegal immigration and about enforcing our immigration laws doesn’t automatically establish personal animus against individual illegal immigrants.

I am an immigrant who finds herself thinking that the Trump administration officials are increasingly the adults in the room on immigration policies. I certainly don’t agree with everything this administration says and does on the issue, but I agree even less—or hardly at all—with the Democratic Party’s current stances. Also, some of Trump’s harsher policies seem to me as deterrent in nature. Democrats need to lose election after election until they see they see the light on immigration. (Read more from “I’m an Immigrant, and Trump Represents My Views on Immigration Way Better Than Democrats Do” HERE)

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Lame Ducks and Congressional Accountability

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The ranks of those writing about the state of American governance have swelled recently as more people are alarmed by its dysfunction. Their growing corpus on the subject has facilitated a much-needed debate about how our politics is broken and what reforms are needed to fix it.

Still, Congress’s decision last week to delay action on some controversial issues, including a decision over whether to fund President Trump’s border wall, until after the November elections, has received little attention from the good-governance crowd. Republicans claimed that punting the issue to a lame duck session helps them fully fund the wall. They feared a divisive debate over issues like funding the border wall would have led to a government shutdown just weeks before voters go to the polls. According to Tom Cole, R-Okla., “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to shut down the government, and we’ll fight that fight when it comes, but this isn’t the time to have it.” Republicans believe that waiting until a lame-duck session to fund the wall increases their odds of maintaining their majorities in the House and Senate. And a lame-duck session preserves the opportunity to act in December should the Democrats instead prevail in November.

But intentionally waiting until a lame duck session to pass legislation, especially dealing with controversial issues, violates the spirit of the 20th Amendment and undermines representative government by making it harder, if not impossible, for the American people to hold their elected officials accountable for their votes.

The Constitution initially required that Congress must meet at least once a year on the first Monday in December unless a different date was set by law. And from 1789 to 1933, Congress’s official start date was March 4 of every odd-numbered year. However, in practice, its members didn’t begin regular business until the following December, 13 months after they were first elected. Members would then work through to the following summer at which point they would adjourn until after the elections. Consequently, Congress’s second session did not usually begin until after the members for the next Congress were chosen. In short, it was a lame duck. (Read more from “Lame Ducks and Congressional Accountability” HERE)

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