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Will Trump Defy Pressure to Betray Promises on Religious Liberty?

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The anticipation behind a Pres. Trump executive order protecting religious liberty within the federal government would appear to be all for naught, according to a recent report, leaving social conservative concerns out in the cold.

As Politico’s Annie Karni reported Friday:

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump helped lead the charge to scuttle a draft executive order that would have overturned Obama-era enforcements of LGBT rights in the workplace, multiple sources with knowledge of the situation told POLITICO.

A draft executive order on LGBT rights — which outlines how to roll back former president Barack Obama’s protections and expand legal exemptions based on religious beliefs has been circulating among journalists and worried progressive groups this week.

Put simply, the draft executive order is balanced, solid, commonsense, and worthy of immediate signage. Others in the White House, however, see things differently.

“There are some in Trump’s family that have some views on these things,” a source close to the discussions told Karni. “That’s where the decision is ultimately being made.”

If true, this is horrible news for the voters who helped bring Trump across the November finish line on his promises to protect religious liberty (among other social conservative concerns). In fact, such a blatant reversal would constitute nothing short of a betrayal of those coalitions.

“This president’s number one priority is demonstrating to the people that got him elected that he is doing the people’s business,” the Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano told Politico.

And Carafano’s right — the 2016 election was a referendum on Barack Obama and the Left’s criminalization of Christianity. And countless social conservatives were willing to look past a great many things of their GOP nominee in pursuit of those promises.

During his RNC acceptance speech in Cleveland, Donald Trump recognized that it was evangelicals who brought him to the ball. Right alongside the assuaging promises for a worthy successor to Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court were irrefutable promises to protect human life and the consciences of private-sector businesses to service ideas that violated their deeply held convictions rooted in our history and tradition.

The people elected a president who promised to 1) protect their religious liberty, by signing the First Amendment Defense Act; 2) abolish the Johnson Amendment; and 3) ending the taxpayer funding of the abortion giant Planned Parenthood. Had those voters really wanted a continuation of Obama’s extreme anti-religious zealousness, they could have easily voted for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton instead.

Overturning prima facie discrimination against anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the Left’s sexual identity agenda is more important than changing longstanding Johnson Amendment policy. And, in fact, administration officials promised conservatives this would be done. This is why conservatives backed off the legislative fight to overturn Obama’s discriminatory order in the national defense bill after the election.

While religious liberty opponents claim that because Trump made overtures to the sexual identity lobby during the campaign — and that this promise would contradict the other — is made on a patently false (albeit popular) assumption that rests on the gross mischaracterization that religious liberty protections are “anti-LGBT.”

Rather, as The Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson explains at The Daily Signal: “Opponents to the executive order misrepresent the order by claiming it would repeal an Obama-era executive order elevating LGBT status to a protected class in federal contracts … Rather, it protects the religious liberty rights of all Americans in very tailored ways that address problems of today.”

The notion that barring government contracts with businesses that believe in authentic marriage or don’t have men use female bathrooms in their corporate offices is somehow “anti-” anything is absurd. Quite the contrary. Doing business with any contractor irrespective of their views is the default position. Barring those who don’t have transgender bathroom accommodations is itself discriminatory and sets a horrible precedent in the private sector. Let liberty work.

Pres. Trump would be the best ambassador for this message; it would fit right into his branding. He could sign this executive order and say, “Look, I’m a businessman and I want to get the job done. If you are a contractor who gets the job done, you’re hired. If not, you’re fired! I don’t care about what you do in your offices, and I have no plans to discriminate against any side of social debates in this country. In order to get government out of this debate, I’m repealing Obama’s discriminatory and ill-conceived order that has only further divided this country.”

Trump must also remember that by catering to the sexual identity boycott lobby, he will never win a single new vote and will only divide and demoralize his own base. The same individuals and powers behind the immigration-related protests and boycotts are behind the boycotts against religious institutions.

In the first few weeks of the Trump administration, there have been some soundly fulfilled promises worthy of applause from conservatives.

This, however, does not look like one of them.Some might just call anything they read in Politico “fake news.” But this is not just coming from Politico. Everyone knows that these liberal forces are in the White House and conservatives will not win these policy fights by remaining complacent. Conservatives must remember: We can’t be like liberals and hope for change. We must ensure of change. Trust, but verify™.

This is doubly true when it comes to social conservatives, who have essentially been relegated to the back of the bus in the Republican Party … even though their ideas are codified in the GOP platform that Trump praised.

This current situation could be very well be, as The Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano told Politico, the avoidance of an “unforced error” early in the administration. This could very well just be one piece of an “Art of the Deal” brand puzzle that will dazzle us all in due time.

But “hope,” warns Francis Bacon, “is a good breakfast, but … a bad supper.” (For more from the author of “Will Trump Defy Pressure to Betray Promises on Religious Liberty?” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

President Trump Should Speak at Berkeley

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If you are not chilled to the bone by the riots that college administrators and campus police allowed to erupt at the University of California at Berkeley on February 1, in response to the campus appearance of a single, mildly provocative conservative speaker, Milo Yiannopoulos, it is your civic duty to watch the videos below.

The power-addicted left has reacted to losing a single presidential election like a big, angry junkie thrashing and clawing for a fix. This national tantrum points up for all Americans just what a cyanide-soaked, exploding plutonium-anthrax bullet we dodged in Hillary Clinton. (NOTE: Raw footage and rough language.)

Progressive elites had soaked in the high-handed, lawless arrogance of Barack Obama, who swept in like a messiah and ruled like an absolute monarch — flouting Congress, falsifying the plain meaning of laws, and abusing executive authority with Nixonian abandon. The same elites had assumed that they would get to finish stuffing the U.S. Supreme Court with leftist judicial activists, and crown it once and for all as a permanent, sitting Constitutional convention. No conservative or Christian voters anywhere in America would really have any voice left after that.

The Left Has Abandoned Persuasion

And that’s the whole point: We’re not supposed to. Our views are illegitimate and evil, and don’t deserve the protection of law from violence and intimidation. It is up to the conscience of any given leftist to decide whether or not the views of a fellow citizen deserve to be tolerated. If they deem you too “offensive,” it’s fine to use force in shutting them down:

Government force, like California trying to yank routine federal funding to close or de-Christianize schools that followed the Bible on sexual ethics;

Corporate force, like Marquette University and Providence College acting to remove or harass conservative professors for expressing their views, or DePaul University banning conservative speakers;

Mob violence, which the “Antifa” thugs used at Berkeley to silence Milo;

Individual assault, like a punch in the face or a spray of pepper gas aimed at someone whose views are simply “offensive.”

That’s the left’s mode of operating these days: Not just defeating opponents, but stigmatizing, silencing and finally destroying its “enemies.” From Christian bakers and florists to highly accomplished executives like Brendan Eich of Mozilla and TV hosts like the Gaines family; from the Little Sisters of the Poor to wealthy philanthropist Betsy DeVos; no one is too small to escape being targeted, too innocent or eminent to avoid getting battered and smeared.

I’ll Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It

Now some of the views to which leftists object really might be offensive or wrong. We have no sympathy with a white separatist like Richard Spencer — except insofar as he is an American citizen speaking lawfully and civilly about political issues as our Constitution absolutely guarantees him the right to do — without getting sucker-punched by some passing coward.

If leftists decide that his views, or Milo’s campy provocations, or Christina Hoff Sommers’ thoughtful criticisms of feminism, are so dangerous and contemptible that they may use violence to silence them … let’s pause to ask: On that principle, what should pro-lifers do to abortionists?

We know that these people are directly killing Americans by the millions. To avoid civil war, we agree to proceed against these mass murderers within the law. Would the Left like us to abandon that policy? Have they forgotten which side in America’s culture wars joins the army, staffs the police, and treasures its right to keep and bear arms?

The fact that we have to even raise such an appalling prospect points up how hazardous the Left’s lawless use of force has become. Drunk on the self-righteousness of political views that they have never heard challenged — thanks to the tyrants or cowards who run their universities — young leftists are speaking and acting like Spanish anarchists in the early 1930s, whose mob violence and rejection of a democratic election sparked the Spanish Civil War. They might pause to reflect how that war turned out. (There’s a bumper sticker in that: “Act like a Spanish anarchist — expect an American Franco.”)

Time to Reinforce Fort Sumter

We cannot let things in America keep spiraling downward in that direction. We must insist on the perfect legitimacy of the outcome of our elections, and the absolute enforcement of Constitutional rights. Thugs cannot be allowed to shout down speakers at universities, or burn the streets of our cities. School administrators may not enable violent mobs that silence civic speech. State governors and city mayors may not rebel against federal immigration law and collude in flouting it.

Each of these actions is a direct attack on the sovereignty of our government, and hence on every voter and citizen — just as surely as the “massive resistance” employed by Southern segregationists was in the 50s and 60s. It took the force of the federal government to defend the Constitutional rights of black Americans then. Those same rights demand a similar use of force today.

President Trump is right to threaten the cutoff of federal funds to universities that let hecklers veto or mobs attack American citizens lawfully practicing free speech. But he should go further. He should announce a presidential address, as soon as possible, at the University of California-Berkeley. He should inform the governor of California that the National Guard must cooperate with the Secret Service in guaranteeing order, and the right of the President to speak and citizens to listen.

Whatever use of legitimate force it takes to repress mob violence at Berkeley during that speech, the mob cannot prevail. President Trump should make it clear that anywhere in America where free speech is violently attacked as it was in Berkeley, he will make it his business to visit and insist that our Constitution is still in force.

He must act quickly and firmly, as Ronald Reagan did against campus terrorists back in the 1960s. Expect Americans of good will to unify behind him — and the enemies of freedom to learn their limits. It is the job of the president at times like these to say, as President Lincoln once had to say to a previous generation of thuggish Democrats afraid of losing power: “Thus far, and no further.” (For more from the author of “President Trump Should Speak at Berkeley” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

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)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

President Trump: America ‘Must Never, Ever’ Stop Asking God for Wisdom

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At Thursday morning’s National Prayer Breakfast, President Trump said the whole world has a duty to stop the “genocide” of Christians in the Middle East.

He blasted the terrorism that religious minorities face in some parts of the world, said we “must never, ever” stop asking God for wisdom, and declared that America will flourish “when religious liberty can flourish.”

“Freedom of religion is a sacred right,” President Trump said. He promised his administration “will do everything in its power to defend and protect religious liberty in our land” and around the world.

He outlined the severity of threats to religious freedom around the world: “We have seen peace-loving Muslims brutalized, victimized, murdered, and oppressed by ISIS killers. We have seen threats of extermination against the Jewish people. We have seen a campaign of ISIS and genocide against Christians, where they cut off heads. Not since the Middle Ages have we seen that. We haven’t seen that – the cutting off of heads. Now they cut off the heads, they drown people in steel cages…Nobody’s seen this for many, many years.”

“All nations have a moral obligation to speak out against such violence,” he said. “All nations have a duty to work to confront it and to confront it viciously if we have to. So I want to express clearly today to the American people that my administration will do everything in its power to defend and protect religious liberty in our land. America must forever remain a tolerant society where all faiths are respected and where all of our citizens can feel safe and secure. We have to feel safe and secure.” (Read more from “President Trump: America ‘Must Never, Ever’ Stop Asking God for Wisdom” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

With Gorsuch Pick and Sane Policy Towards Islamists, Trump Defends the Vulnerable

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I’m delighted to admit it: I was wrong. I was one of those Christian conservatives who never came around to trusting Donald Trump. I didn’t endorse him, and almost couldn’t vote for him. At the last moment, as I stared at the ballot, thinking of Clinton’s track record of pro-abortion extremism and reckless disregard for religious minorities in the Middle East, I managed to pull the lever.

How glad I am that I did. As I learn more and more about Neil Gorsuch, I cannot wait for him to fill Justice Scalia’s chair on the U.S. Supreme Court. Tens of millions of pro-life Americans should today offer prayers of thanks, and publicly praise the President for such a solid, courageous choice. We must get on the phones and social media, pressing our senators to confirm Judge Gorsuch.

Iraqis in Refugee Camps Danced for Joy When Trump Took Office

But I’d already seen an excellent reason to be thankful that Donald Trump won. On his inauguration day, I wasn’t in Washington, D.C., but in Iraq — finishing up a tour of refugee camps on the borders of ISIS territory, for a documentary I’m producing.

If you thought that Republicans in D.C. were celebrating Trump’s entry into office, you should have seen the Iraqis in those camps. Muslims, Christians, and Yezedis alike were cheering and dancing together. (So, as I learned from my friends there, were Christians down in embattled South Sudan.)

If you want a grimly objective measuring stick of the impact Trump’s election had in this war-torn region: The sex slave traders of ISIS are afraid that their supply of Christian and Yezidi women will soon dry up, so the price of a sex-trafficked girl in Iraq shot up from $8,000 to $20,000. So I learned from a Yezidi family that is trying to ransom back a daughter.

I stopped to ask some of the refugees why they were excited about Trump’s victory. One after another answered me: Because he knows how evil ISIS really is, and he really will “eradicate” it. The Muslims in these camps despised ISIS, which drew support from a fanatical minority and funds from outside the country, then went on to brutalize and destroy their ancestral villages.

“Obama Slit Our Throats with Cotton.”

Obama, by contrast, dismissed ISIS as a “junior varsity” organization. In fact, as every Iraqi whom I spoke with about this told me, it was Obama’s policies that let ISIS become such a monstrous evil. Even those who’d opposed George Bush’s invasion in 2003 — including one of Saddam Hussein’s former generals, whom I interviewed — blamed Obama for making things much, much worse in Iraq by pulling U.S. troops out and leaving a power vacuum, which ISIS filled with blood, tyranny, and terror.

I met with dozens of people, and spoke as the only American at an interreligious conference. From military officers down to ordinary people in the camps, I kept hearing the same conspiracy theory. These people believed that Obama must have somehow wanted ISIS to win. One high-ranking soldier in a Kurdish peshmerga told me how his soldiers saw long lines of ISIS-owned oil tankers streaming into Turkey. They wanted to attack, but the American military advisor whom Obama had sent forbade them — and threatened them with U.S. airstrikes if they disobeyed him. Another officer told me that U.S. advisors had ordered his forces not to defend Mosul from ISIS. The phrase these people kept using, an Iraqi expression, was: “Obama slit our throats — with cotton.”

I pushed the questions further. Weren’t they worried that Trump’s “extreme vetting” of potential refugees from Iraq, Syria, and other troubled countries would keep them out of America? To this they had two answers. First, they simply laughed — and explained that it would be easy to determine which refugees hated ISIS, since all of them did. But more important than that, one after another insisted: “We don’t want to come to America. We want to go home to our towns. We want the U.S. to get ISIS out of the way so we can go back to living our lives, as we were before Obama let ISIS destroy them.”

“We Don’t Want to be Refugees in America.”

Didn’t it bother them that Donald Trump was suspicious of admitting refugees from countries with large jihadi movements? To that they answered again, “What makes you think that the whole world wants to come live in America? We want you to stop blundering in and destroying our countries. Help us stay safe here in the region, and hurry up and defeat the extremists so we can go home.” They mentioned more than ISIS here, noting that they also hoped that other radical Islamist groups such as al Nusra and al Qaeda could be defeated. And they were confident that Donald Trump would do that.

What made them so hopeful? The fact that Trump speaks in plain, honest language about defending America’s national interests — a natural, human concept that people around the world can understand and appreciate. Instead of the Kantian flim-flam of liberal internationalists, or the empty promises of neocon democracy-mongers, Trump talks about fighting America’s enemies and trying to help its friends. To Iraqis brutalized by high-minded Americans for the past 16 years, Trump’s bluntness has the ring of simple truth.

So let’s recap. We have elected a man who during a presidential debate cut through the euphemisms and graphically described a partial birth abortion. A man who sent his Vice President and campaign chair to address the March for Life, and who has chosen for the Supreme Court a judge who believes that the words of the Constitution mean exactly what they say. Trump also believes that his duty to protect his fellow citizens comes first — and that our extremist enemies who say that they want to destroy us also mean what they say, and that we should act to destroy them first, and keep their infiltrators out of our cities and suburbs.

President Trump’s loudest critics on the left mostly said nothing at all when Barack Obama allowed the Middle East to descend into brutal chaos, when ISIS ramped up its genocide and sex-trafficking enterprise, when millions of religious minorities were ethnically cleansed or killed. These same people helped cover for Planned Parenthood’s human organ trafficking. But now they are treating the president’s simple (if perhaps badly implemented) safety measures on immigration as a crime against humanity.

We should be very, very glad that these people lost the election, and aren’t running our country, picking our judges, or deciding the fate of the helpless in the refugee camps of Iraq. (For more from the author of “With Gorsuch Pick and Sane Policy Towards Islamists, Trump Defends the Vulnerable” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Trump Should Rescind Obama’s Transgender Agenda and Protect Religious Liberty

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The media was abuzz yesterday with rumors that President Donald Trump was preparing an executive order that would protect religious liberty in the aftermath of the redefinition of marriage.

Trump should issue such an executive order, and he should rescind former President Barack Obama’s executive actions on sexual orientation and gender identity that created many of these problems in the first place.

While a candidate, Trump promised to sign the First Amendment Defense Act into law. He needn’t simply wait for Congress. While legislation provides the best long-term protections, Trump can lawfully enact many of those protections through an executive order right now.

Such an order would instruct agencies of the federal government that they may not penalize certain individuals and institutions for acting on the conviction that marriage is the union of husband and wife.

Such an executive order, like the First Amendment Defense Act itself, should strike a careful balance as to whom and when these protections apply. Under the First Amendment Defense Act, protected entities include individuals, nonprofit charities and privately held businesses.

The act, however, would not apply to federal employees and contractors with respect to their job or contract duties. It does allow reasonable accommodation of federal employees’ religion, as under current law, but it makes clear that it does not relieve the federal government of its duty to provide government services, medical care or benefits to all who qualify — it must simply respect conscience in doing so.

Trump’s executive order should do the same.

An executive order on religious liberty should also include protections found in the Russell Amendment. This would prevent the federal government from discriminating against faith-based social service providers who maintain staffing policies that accord with their faith.

Religious charities shouldn’t have to give up their mission and identity simply because they partner with the government in serving the public.

In addition to proactively protecting the rights of Americans to hire for religious mission and to act on the conviction that marriage is the union of husband and wife, Trump should also rescind the various Obama executive actions that caused these problems.

A statement from the Trump administration notes that Trump was the “first ever GOP nominee to mention the LGBTQ community in his nomination acceptance speech, pledging then to protect the community from violence and oppression.”

Trump can and should protect all Americans from violence and oppression, but he should not go along with Obama’s policies of elevating “sexual orientation and gender identity” to a protected class.

The First Amendment Defense Act and similar religious liberty provisions oppress no one — they protect Americans from government-sponsored discrimination and coercion.

For example, in 2014, Obama issued an executive order barring “discrimination” on the basis of “sexual orientation and gender identity” in the private employment policies of federal contractors.

But according to liberals advocating such policies, “discrimination” on the basis of “sexual orientation” can be something as reasonable as an adoption agency preferring married moms and dads for orphans.

And “discrimination” on the basis of “gender identity” can be something as simple as having a bathroom policy based on biological sex, not gender identity.

Indeed, the Obama departments of Justice and Education instructed school districts throughout the country that they would interpret a 1972 law, Title IX, to require schools to allow students to use the bathroom, locker room and shower facility that accords with their self-declared “gender identity.”

They did this by saying the word “sex” would now mean “gender identity.”

Similarly, the Obama Department of Health and Human Services claimed a provision in Obamacare that forbids discrimination on the basis of “sex” means “gender identity” — and thus all health care plans have to cover sex reassignment therapies, and all relevant physicians have to perform them.

Parents and citizens across the country were astonished at this stunning overreach by Washington bureaucracy into local school bathroom policy and delicate medical decisions.

All of this can be undone right away. Trump can rescind Obama’s executive orders, and he can instruct his secretaries of education and health and human services and his attorney general to interpret the word “sex” as Congress intended it — as a biological reality, not as “gender identity.”

Trump can lawfully undo much of the damage that Obama caused, and he can provide immediate protections to all Americans through lawful executive orders.

Congress can then make these orders permanent by passing the First Amendment Defense Act, the Russell Amendment and the Civil Rights Uniformity Act (which specifies that the word “sex” in our civil rights laws does not mean “gender identity” unless Congress explicitly says so).

Whether it be harassing an order of nuns, forcing doctors to perform sex reassignment therapies, or preventing local schools from finding win-win compromise solutions that would respect all students’ bodily privacy, the Obama administration waged an aggressive and unnecessary culture war.

Because it has done so almost exclusively through executive action, a Trump administration can quickly undo this damage. And Congress can then ratify it permanently in law.

That’ll go a long way toward protecting peaceful coexistence, making American truly great again. (For more from the author of “Trump Should Rescind Obama’s Transgender Agenda and Protect Religious Liberty” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Trump Makes Unannounced Trip to Honor Fallen Navy SEAL

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Assuming the somber duties of commander in chief, President Donald Trump made an unannounced trip Wednesday to honor the returning remains of a U.S. Navy SEAL killed in a weekend raid in Yemen.

Chief Special Warfare Operator William “Ryan” Owens, a 36-year-old from Peoria, Illinois, was the first known U.S. combat casualty since Trump took office less than two weeks ago. More than half a dozen militant suspects were also killed in the raid on an Al Qaeda compound and three other U.S. service members were wounded . . .

Trump’s trip to Delaware’s Dover Air Base was shrouded in secrecy. The president and his daughter, Ivanka, departed the White House in the presidential helicopter with their destination unannounced. A small group of journalists traveled with Trump on the condition that the visit was not reported until his arrival. (Read more from “Trump Makes Unannounced Trip to Honor Fallen Navy SEAL” HERE)

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Separating Fact from Sickening Media Fiction on Trump’s Immigration Executive Order

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There is a lot of confusion swirling around the events that transpired this weekend as a result of Trump’s executive order on immigration. Make no mistake: every word of Trump’s executive order is in accordance with statute.

It’s important not to conflate political arguments with legal arguments, as many liberals and far too many “conservatives” on social media are doing. While the timing and coordination of implementing this order might have been poorly planned, we shouldn’t allow that to undermine the broader need to defend our sovereignty. For courts to violate years’ worth of precedent and steal our sovereignty should concern everyone.

What the order actually does

Among other things, the key provisions at the center of the existing controversy are as follows:

It shuts off the issuance of all new immigrant and non-immigrant visas for 90 days from the following seven volatile countries: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Any non-citizen from those seven countries (not “all” Muslim countries) is excluded from entering the country during this time-period (which usually means they won’t be able to board a direct flight to America). After 30 days, the secretary of state and secretary of homeland security must submit a report to completely revamp the vetting process going forward.

Within 60 days, countries will have to submit any information that the administration determines necessary, pursuant to the findings of this report, in order to adjudicate a visa application and ensure they are properly vetted. Any country that fails to submit this information will not be able to send foreign nationals to our country. All the while, the ban can be extended and expanded at any time.

In addition, the entire refugee resettlement program is suspended for four months pending a complete investigation of the program and a plan to restructure it and prioritize those who are truly in danger of religious persecution. After 120 days, the program may resume, but only for those countries Secretaries Kelly and Tillerson determine do not pose a threat. The program from Syria is completely suspended until the president personally gives the green light.

With regards to refugees and those who seek to enter from the seven countries temporarily excluded, the order gave discretion to the State Department and DHS to admit individuals on a case-by-case basis for important reasons, even during the temporary moratorium.

Statement of principles on the right of a country to exclude non-citizens

Those who want to immigrate: There is no affirmative right, constitutional or otherwise, to visit or settle in the United States. Period.

Based on the social contract, social compact, sovereignty, long-standing law of nation-states, governance by the consent of the governed, the plenary power of Congress over immigration, and 200 years of case law, our political branches of government have the power to exclude or invite any individual or classes people for any reason on a temporary or even permanent basis – without any involvement from the courts. Congress has already delegated its authority to the president to shut off any form of immigration at will at any time.

Immigrants already here: Those already admitted to this country with the consent of the citizenry have unalienable rights. They cannot be indefinitely detained. However, they can be deported for any reason if they are not citizens. In Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), which is still settled law, the court ruled that Congress has the same plenary power to deport aliens for any reason as it does to exclude them and that the statutory procedures and conditions for doing so are due process. Congress has established the process for deportation of those already here. However, as long as a legal permanent resident leaves the country he has no affirmative right to re-enter. Either way, they have absolutely no right to judicial review other than to ensure that statutes are properly followed.

But can Trump prevent those with green cards from re-entering the country?

The statute is clear as day. The Immigration and Nationality Act (§ 212(f)) gives the president plenary power to “by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants.” Clearly, the president has the authority to block any non-citizen – including refugees, green card holders, and foreign students – from entering the country. Also, for purposes of deportation, there is no difference between a green card holder or a holder of a non-immigrant visa. No foreign national who has not yet obtained citizenship has an affirmative right to re-enter the country.

Is this a ban on Muslim immigration?

No, it’s a moratorium on immigration or re-entries from seven individual countries and a temporary moratorium on refugees from all countries, subject to case-by-case exceptions.

Why didn’t Trump place restrictions on immigration/visas from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries?

That’s probably a good idea. But this was actually a judicious and cautious approach from Trump to start with low-hanging fruit. These seven countries are failed states or enemies of the U.S. (in the case of Iran). As such, there is absolutely no way to share data with the host countries and properly vet them. Somalia has been one of the biggest trouble spots. The other countries are marred in Islamic civil wars. Moreover, these are the countries that existing law targets for travel restrictions, and that Obama’s own DHS listed last year.

Why would Trump include green card holders in the ban on re-entry?

Both liberals and conservatives expressed concern over hundreds of individuals going over to fight for ISIS. We are already limited in how we can combat this growing threat among U.S. citizens. Given that it is completely legal to exclude non-citizens upon re-entry, Trump extended the ban to legal permanent residents as well.

If a Somali refugee is travelling back to Somalia (so much for credible fear of persecution!), government officials should have the ability to prevent that person from coming back when necessary. Obviously, there are some individuals from these seven countries who already have green cards and we might not want to exclude. That is why the order grants discretion to the State Department to issue case-by-case exemptions for “religious persecution, “or when the person is already in transit and denying admission would cause undue hardship.” A CBP agent is always stationed at any international airport from which these individuals would board a direct flight to the United States (Paris and Dubai, for example). That individual would not allow anyone covered by this ban onto a U.S.-bound flight unless he grants them a hardship exemption.

Indeed, it appears that green card holders returning yesterday from those seven countries were all granted entry.

What’s with the chaos at the airports and the courts?

Henceforth, CBP agents will not allow individual aliens from those seven countries to board a flight to the U.S. So the chaos will end.

The problem arose from the 100 or so individuals that were already in transit when the order took effect. When they arrived at American airports, they were detained at customs. Standing at this point is not tantamount to being on American soil.[4] However, a federal judge in New York issued a stay and prevented the feds from sending two individuals back on a flight. Other judges have prevented officials from even detaining such persons. It’s unclear if federal agents might have made a mistake and released some of these individuals before ordering them to leave the country. Once they are released onto American soil, any effort to remove them is treated as a deportation, not an exclusion, and is subject to the due process afforded them by congressional statutes (not the Constitution).

Thus, it’s unclear if the stay even applied to any element of the order or whether it applied to anomalous circumstances or particular actions taken by federal officials that overstepped the order.

It’s also confusing because many contemporary judges have no respect for our sovereignty and have been gradually chipping away at the plenary power of Congress (or the president, pursuant to statute) to exclude aliens re-entering the country, despite years of settled law. If courts are indeed violating our sovereignty, this is the very grave danger I warned about in Stolen Sovereignty. Either way, it should not affect the ability of the administration to enforce the order against those who want to prospectively board flights to return. (For more from the author of “Separating Fact from Sickening Media Fiction on Trump’s Immigration Executive Order” please click HERE)

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Acting Attorney General’s Defiance of Trump Shows Politicized Nature of DOJ

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The kerfuffle on Monday night over former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates’ statement criticizing President Donald Trump’s executive order requiring better screening of travelers from failed countries that are the biggest sources of terrorists in the world shows the difference between a Justice Department guided by politics versus the rule of law.

In the statement that Yates circulated inside the Justice Department, she said the department would not defend the executive order against the proliferation of lawsuits being filed against it because she was not “convinced” that that it was “legally defensible.”

Furthermore, she claimed that in addition to her legal responsibilities, she has an obligation to “stand for what is right” and she obviously does not believe this executive order is “right.”

But Yates is wrong.

As the deputy attorney general and acting attorney general, her obligation is to defend federal law and actions taken by the president pursuant to the law when there is a valid basis for doing so, regardless of whether or not she agrees with the president from a public policy standpoint or thinks his action is the “right” thing to do.

There is no question that the president’s executive order is eminently defensible and that he is entitled to have the Department of Justice defend it in court.

In his executive order, the president cites a provision of federal immigration law, 8 U.S.C. §1182(f), which gives him almost unlimited discretion to suspend “the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States” if, in his judgment, their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

Since Congress has absolute authority under the Constitution to determine our immigration policy, its delegation to the president of this authority is perfectly constitutional.

Yates’ decision appears to have been primarily motivated by politics, not law, which, no doubt, prompted the action Trump took in firing her almost immediately.

The constitutionality and legality of the executive order is bolstered by the fact that, as even Yates was forced to acknowledge, the order was reviewed by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which concluded that it was “lawful on its face and properly drafted.”

It has long been the job of the Office of Legal Counsel to analyze laws passed by Congress and executive orders issued by the president to determine their constitutionality and determine whether they can be defended in the courts when they are challenged.

As its own website explains, it is Office of Legal Counsel “by delegation from the attorney general” that “provides authoritative legal advice to the president.”

So Yates’ claim that the immigration executive order is legally indefensible flies in the face of the Office of Legal Counsel’s legal opinion—which constitutes the Justice Department’s legal opinion—that the president’s executive order is, indeed, “lawful.”

As a statement released by the White House said, by her refusal to carry out her duty to defend the executive order, Yates “betrayed the Department of Justice.”

It is clear from her statement that Yates took her action because she doesn’t like the executive order as public policy. As the White House statement says, that is because she “is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.”

As former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith says, if Yates didn’t like this executive order, the proper course for her would be to resign—not tell Justice Department lawyers that they would not be allowed to defend a lawful action of the president.

There is no doubt that Yates is going to be portrayed as a martyr by progressives and the media who don’t like the executive order because she was fired. But she allowed her political views to interfere with her basic professional obligation to enforce the rule of law and to defend an executive order issued by the president that her own department had already concluded was lawfully issued.

She failed in her duty as the acting attorney general and is certainly not a martyr.

Yates has also provided the final confirmation of how politicized the Justice Department became under President Barack Obama. It is going to take a long time and a lot of work for Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions to restore the department’s professionalism and its reputation. (For more from the author of “Acting Attorney General’s Defiance of Trump Shows Politicized Nature of DOJ” please click HERE)

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Newt Gingrich: Trump Is Doing Exactly What He Said He Would Do

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Two weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump has been successful in fulfilling many of the promises he campaigned on, but he’s nowhere near finished, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said.

Speaking Monday at The Heritage Foundation for the final installment in his six-part series on understanding Trump and Trumpism, Gingrich described the president as “the new presidential”—delivering on what he said he would.

Gingrich also addressed those on the left who question Trump’s legitimacy as a president.

“By definition, whatever he does is presidential, it’s just a new presidential,” he said. “So the new presidential tweets. That doesn’t mean he has to give up tweeting and start writing in longhand with a quill pen to think he’s presidential.”

Political elites and left-leaning news media refuse to understand Trump because he isn’t a politician, according to Gingrich.

“He is a business leader who became president. He never became a politician in between,” Gingrich said. “He has no interest in learning how to be a politician. He has every interest in getting things done.”

Gingrich cited Trump’s recent executive order, which will halt individuals from seven countries from entering the United States for 90 days, as yet another incident to infuriate the liberal news media.

“He’s been saying it for 10 months. You would think at some point in the 10 months they would have gone, ‘Oh, what if he actually means it?’” Gingrich said.

The news media’s reporting of the executive order, describing it as a “Muslim ban,” was a “total, dangerous lie,” Gingrich said.

“Every newspaper and every television reporter who said it should be ashamed of themselves,” he said.

According to Gingrich, the media’s irresponsible “lie” sent a signal to over a billion Muslims about something that is “totally false.”

“The largest Muslim country in the world is Indonesia; it’s not touched,” he noted. “The second-largest Muslim country, by the way, is India, it’s not touched. Go down the list.”

While the order was not flawless, Gingrich said, the left would still be outraged, regardless of the timing.

“Do any of you doubt that if he’d done this six weeks from now with prior notice that there would have been demonstrations for days leading up to it?” Gingrich asked.

Trump’s favorability and poll numbers will reflect the media’s biased coverage, Gingrich predicted.

“I guarantee you, for a while, Trump’s poll numbers will be bad. And they’ll be bad because every element of the elite media will lie about him every day.” (For more from the author of “Newt Gingrich: Trump Is Doing Exactly What He Said He Would Do” please click HERE)

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