The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled to continue blocking enforcement of President Trump ’s travel ban. The unanimous decision means that a stay preventing a ban on on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries remains in place, at least for now. The ruling came after the three-judge panel heard arguments this week from the Justice Department and Washington state.
Trump issued the executive order creating a temporary ban on citizens from Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Iran, Sudan and Yemen entering the United States on January 27th. There were immediate protests at airports where people from these countries were being detained. Numerous lawsuits were filed including one by the attorney general for the state of Washington. That lawsuit was later joined by the state of Minnesota.
Appearing on Fox News, Marc Thiessen predicted that liberals are going to engage in “obstruction by litigation,” filing lawsuit after lawsuit to impede the Trump administration’s policies at every step.
If the Republican-controlled House of Representatives wants to do something about judicial overreach — a pet peeve of conservatives — they could start impeachment proceedings against this judge:
James Robart, the U.S. district judge in Washington State, offered little explanation for his decision to stop President Trump’s executive order temporarily suspending non-American entry from seven terror-plagued countries. Robart simply declared his belief that Washington State, which in its lawsuit against Trump argued that the order is both illegal and unconstitutional, would likely win the case when it is tried.
Now the government has answered Robart, and unlike the judge, Justice Department lawyers have produced a point-by-point demolition of Washington State’s claims. Indeed, for all except the most partisan, it is likely impossible to read the Washington State lawsuit, plus Robart’s brief comments and writing on the matter, plus the Justice Department’s response, and not come away with the conclusion that the Trump order is on sound legal and constitutional ground.
Beginning with the big picture, the Justice Department argued that Robart’s restraining order violates the separation of powers, encroaches on the president’s constitutional and legal authority in the areas of foreign affairs, national security, and immigration, and “second-guesses the president’s national security judgment” about risks faced by the United States.
Indeed, in court last week, Robart suggested that he, Robart, knows as much, or perhaps more, than the president about the current state of the terrorist threat in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and other violence-plagued countries. In an exchange with Justice Department lawyer Michelle Bennett, Robart asked, “How many arrests have there been of foreign nationals for those seven countries since 9/11?”
“Your Honor, I don’t have that information,” said Bennett.
“Let me tell you,” said Robart. “The answer to that is none, as best I can tell. So, I mean, you’re here arguing on behalf of someone [President Trump] that says: We have to protect the United States from these individuals coming from these countries, and there’s no support for that.”
Perhaps Robart has been briefed by the intelligence community on conditions in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and the rest. Perhaps Robart has received the President’s Daily Brief. Perhaps not. In any event, the Justice Department argued — reasonably but not successfully — that it is the president, and not a U.S. District Court judge in the Western District of Washington State, who has the knowledge and the authority to make such decisions.
“Your Honor, I think the point is that because this is a question of foreign affairs, because this is an area where Congress has delegated authority to the president to make these determinations, it’s the president that gets to make the determinations,” Bennett said. “And the court doesn’t have authority to look behind those determinations.”
(Via Memeorandum.) Think I’m joking about impeachment? I’m not. If the president’s executive order was legitimately a matter of national security (as his defenders have argued) then Judge Robart is giving aid and comfort to the enemy by impeding the Commander-in-Chief in the lawful exercise of his duties. Beyond that, however, how else can the constitutional separation of powers be enforced, if the judicial branch disregards its own proper limits and impedes either the authority of Congress to make laws or the authority of the President to execute the laws? Congress has the power to impeach judges, and it ought not neglect to use that power in defense of the Constitution itself.
Liberals have spent decades building up the mystique of the Supreme Court’s authority, and you can go back tot the Bork hearings to show how Senate Democrats have used their own power in attempting to control the court. What have Republicans done to limit the imperial judiciary? Not much. And so this judge in Washington State thinks himself immune to consequences for his bizarre decision to issue a restraining order. Republican members of the House could disabuse Judge Robart of his delusion of immunity. All it would take is for one House Republican to bring forward an impeachment inquiry, and no matter how far the matter proceeded — even if the rest of the House refused to take it up — this would at least make the point that judges who overstep their lawful authority may pay a price for failing to uphold the Constitution.
On Thursday afternoon a Texas Judge dismissed a lawsuit filed against Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro by Mohammed Mohammed, the father of “clock boy” Ahmed Mohammed.
Claiming defamation, Mohammed filed the lawsuit in October 2015 after Shapiro made an appearance on The Kelly File questioning Ahmed’s story and motives surrounding a clock he brought to school that looked like a bomb. Ahmed was detained by police for the “clock” and was suspended. His family, who has ties to foreign regimes sponsoring terrorism, and CAIR promptly accused the school of Islamophobia and racial profiling.
Today, they were defeated in their quest to silence those who exposed them as activists, terror sympathizers and politically motivated.
“Ben Shapiro has always been a steadfast advocate of the First Amendment and there was never any doubt he was going to stand up for his right to speak freely,” Shapiro’s attorney Kurt Schlichter of Schlichter & Shonack LLP in Los Angeles tells Townhall.
(Via Memeorandum.) Where did Mohammed Mohammed get this idea that people who make news can sue commentators who share their opinions about the news? Where did he get this bad legal advice? Isn’t it true that during the Obama administration, the Left engaged in an attempt to silence its critics through such “lawfare” harassment? Isn’t it fair to presume that Mohammed’s lawsuit against Shapiro was encouraged by the same people who have tried to stifle Pamela Geller? The only way we can defend the First Amendment is with an Army of Davids, so that there are so many people loudly proclaiming the truth that the liars cannot hope to silence us. And we need to beat these people in court every time they try this tactic of bogus lawsuits. The Texas judge has awarded attorneys’ fees and court costs to Shapiro. Let’s hope this teaches the enemies of freedom a lesson.
That ad comes to mind reading Noah Rothman over at Hot Air as he surveys a few recent URLs concerning the Convention of States notion. Rothman makes a fair point: there is no risk-free way to revisit our founding document:
For conservatives who ostensibly venerate the Constitution, it is odd to see so many of them fail to acknowledge that proposing it’s[sic] complete revision undermines their political position dramatically. Displaying respect for the Founders’ ideals and creating the conditions whereby their work might be entirely demolished are mutually exclusive.
Do you mean the way Wilson planted the IED in the form of Amendments 16 & 17, plus the Federal Reserve Act back in 1913? Or do you mean the way the size of the House froze in 1910, making our government substantially less representative?
Many on the right have contended that a Convention of States is distinct from a constitutional convention. What’s more, they might say, that process could be the only way to rein in the unelected elements of the federal government, like the judiciary or the nation’s unwieldy and proliferating regulatory agencies. Some on the right contend that the Constitution has been so perverted that it is already essentially defunct. But these same conservatives, who often lament the fact that Republican lawmakers are so regularly rolled by left-wing organizations and liberal politicians, would be foolish to vest in these GOP officeholders the authority to remake the system entirely. They would quickly find that conservative politicians who regularly fail to outmaneuver liberals in Congress don’t find their luck has improved on the convention floor.
From a conservative perspective, the ideals and priorities of those who came of age in the Enlightenment are vastly superior to the self-obsession that masquerades as political principle today. The document that emerges from a modern convention would not look anything like the 18th Century accord that harnessed human imperfection and utilized one man’s basest impulses to check another’s. That divinely inspired document, while perhaps flawed and frequently misinterpreted, remains preferable to the technocratic, anti-federalist charter that would emerge from a 2015 convention (presuming that anything at all could possibly pass such a body).
Perhaps I’m putting too fine a point on it, but I wouldn’t go further than “divinely informed”, and even that’s a stretch. The Constitution is a secular product. Full stop. “preferable to the technocratic, anti-federalist charter that would emerge”
Again, that’s precisely where Wilson’s Folly has taken us. The guy at the table is choking. Technology is seeing progressively oppressive use. Technology should liberate, instead.
When liberals like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gush over national charters like South Africa’s 19-year-old constitution, they are often only fetishizing the new and the foreign. That’s a nagging and unattractive trait that conservatives laudably fail to entertain. The right’s frustration with the current state of affairs cannot be satisfied by attempting to change the rules of the game. To convene a Convention of States is to open a Pandora’s Box.
And you, young apprentice, are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis.
It’s time for some bold, Tea Party-driven Heimlich action to dislodge the Progressive projectile currently choking our politics. Lead, follow, or get the focaccia out of the way, Noah.
In the world today, it is universally accepted that hate speech is not free speech. International human rights law . . . mandates legal protections against hate speech. . . . Every single human rights group in existence strongly supports hate speech laws and continually works to have them expanded. All countries now have laws against hate speech.
All countries, that is, except for the United States. In the US, all manner of hateful and discriminatory expression is permitted under the guise of “freedom of speech.” . . .
(Permit me to interrupt here to exercise my First Amendment freedom to say damn “the world today” and damn “human rights.”)
[T]he US steadfastly refuses to protect vulnerable minorities from even the most extreme forms of hate speech. In the landmark case of Brandenburg v. Ohio, the United States Supreme Court even ruled that KKK members have the right to advocate violence against minorities as “free speech.” . . .
(Violence is illegal. However, proving that Hateful Statement A led to Violent Felony B can be problematic, which is what Brandenburg was really about. Please continue, Ms. Silverstein.)
Human rights groups have complained for decades about America’s failure to enact laws against hate speech and the UN Human Rights Council has repeatedly expressed deep concern about America’s refusal to protect vulnerable minorities from hate speech, but nothing has ever been done to remedy the problem. . . .
(Even “human rights” whiners are protected by the First Amendment.)
What many Americans don’t seem to understand is that failing to pass laws against hate speech not only violates fundamental human rights, but also explicitly violates international law.
(And while we’re at it, damn “international law.”)
More recently, racist hate speech against Muslims inspired Anders Behring Breivik to slaughter 77 people in Norway, while hate speech from the likes of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh incited right-wing extremist Jared Lee Loughner to go on a shooting spree in Arizona.
His apparent inspiration was a 9/11 Truther conspiracy film.
Read “Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist Obsession” if you want to learn about the anti-Christian, anti-capitalism paranoid cult “documentary” that evidently “incited” the Tucson massacre:
“I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in,” Zach Osler, 22, told ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield. Osler’s father confirmed that influence in an interview published Sunday by the Arizona Republic. “He wanted to watch [Zeitgeist] all the time,” George Osler told the Phoenix newspaper. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”
Please read the whole thing. I spent about three or four days in January 2011 researching the background on Loughner and the Zeitgeist cult. As I complained at the time, once evidence emerged that Loughner was not a “right-wing extremist” — rather quite the opposite — everybody in the major media mysteriously lost interest in his motives. Hey, if they couldn’t promote hatred of Christianity and hatred of capitalism, what would liberal journalists do for a living?
The world if full of “international law” and “human rights” and every other species of dishonest evil, and if America alone stands against this dangerous tide of tyranny, so be it.
“Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself . . . she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 1786
If any lying “human rights activist” thinks they can stop me from telling the truth, they’d better bring a damned army.
On Thursday, December 4, the Convention of States Project sponsored the breakfast session at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) meeting in Washington, D.C. Convention of States Project legal board member, nationally syndicated radio talk show host, and Constitutional expert, Mark Levin, spoke on behalf of Article V and the project.
I was just watching The Daily Ledger on One America News Network and was intrigued by a guest who seemed to think that, with 3 states having applied for a Convention, and the results of the November mid-terms being what they were, the remaining 31 States needed for the magic 34 might be obtainable in 2015.
This is deeply interesting. As an opinion, I’m about 60% in favor of an Article V convention. The Vichy GOP are useless, and that’s the good news about the status quo. But I 40% think the Article V skeptics are quite correct: the enterprise is fraught with peril. I do happen to think that Farris and the Convention of States folks are putting in the time and playing it straight.
This is going to be a topic to follow up on at CPAC 2015, indeed.
The Creepy Uncle Clause is probably right there in the Constitution next to the Emerging Awareness Doctrine that Justice Kennedy used to legalize sodomy in the Lawrence v. Texas case.
However, sophisticated ideals of social progress haven’t made much headway in Louisiana where, believe it or not, it is still considered illegal to have sex with dogs or 3-year-olds on video.
Louisiana: All the pedophile/dog-sex voters are going for Landrieu http://t.co/nEbgbrMjNV A key Democrat constituency! @g56yu :
“The restraining order was granted for a period of three years, this was August 2011. . . . He found me at Dartmouth, at my sorority, he found me at my family’s new home that they moved to. He found me through LinkedIn, Facebook, everything. I tried to delete things, he still found me. He hired a private investigator. . . . I got back to my parents’ house at 1:30 a.m. flying in from Dartmouth and at 8:30 a.m. the next morning he was knocking on my front door. . . When he was arrested by the police, they found what they like to call a rape kit in the back of his car. It consisted of a sweatshirt, firewood, maps of the area, duct tape, a rope tied into a slip noose, hunting knives and various other items.”
Liberal feminists don’t give a damn about the rights of women like Dartmouth student Taylor Woolrich. Liberals want to deprive her of the only real security for women like her whose lives and safety are jeopardized by violent criminals. You see, Taylor Woolrich told her story yesterday at the annual conference of Students for Concealed Carry, and liberal feminists hate the Second Amendment.
