Tuesday, February 21, 2017

The New Travel Ban

by Douglas V. Gibbs
AuthorSpeakerInstructorRadio Host

Trump is a quick study, and listens.

A little over a week ago I suggested Trump rescind his first travel ban from seven Muslim-majority countries and reissue it with bulletproof language conceived by the lessons learned on his first executive order.  I am not suggesting that Trump reads Political Pistachio, or heeded my personal advice; but I was one voice of many making the recommendation to rescind and reissue.  Judge Napolitano comes to mind, among the many others making the same recommendation.  And, somewhere along the way, Trump listened, and learned and acted.

President Trump’s new and revised travel ban targets the same seven countries listed in his original executive order and exempts travelers who already have a visa to travel to the U.S., even if they haven’t used it yet.

Bam.  Now the sob stories at the airport will go away (but, then again, we can't underestimate the leftist insane resolve), and now the courts have a whole new animal to tackle with more unconstitutional rulings and opinions.

The executive order has not been issued, yet, but I am figuring it uses the same list of laws that the left somehow believes are not the law.

Even if the new order doesn't stop all dangerous characters, now that the bulletproof language has been added, it will likely slow down the pace of refugees entering the U.S. from countries where terrorists are likely to come from.

So far, this year, the U.S. has taken in more than 35,000 refugees.  Trump's cap is less than 15,000 spots away.  To keep from hitting Trump's cap, for the rest of this fiscal year, the number of refugees being let in per week will need to fall to a fraction of what it had been under the Obama administration's cap of 110,000.

Trump's original "extreme vetting" executive order, according to his team, was designed as a "temporary pause" to allow him to "see where our immigration and vetting system has gaps -- and gaps it has -- that could be exploited."

The biggest gap, it seems, is the unconstitutional activities of the federal courts.

Trump did not expect the federal courts to block the executive order.  The constitutional authority of the President to use executive orders to execute existing law, laws of which were listed in the original order, is not subject to judicial review (not that the idea of judicial review is constitutional in the first place, anyway).  The laws exist.  Where is the unconstitutionality of the order?

At what point is it the court's authority to say that executing laws that are on the books is illegal?

Yet, nobody said anything about Obama's refusal to execute immigration laws that are on the books, while it clearly states in Article II that the President will "faithfully execute the laws of the United States."

In short, the Obama administration was not the only lawless part of the U.S. Government over the last eight years.  The courts are also lawless, and they are continuing to be so.  It's time for Congress to put into play the "exceptions clause" in Article III, which gives Congress the authority to make null and void unconstitutional rulings and opinions; and then Congress needs to start impeaching judges who refuse to abide by their job to apply the law, not interpret it.  If Trump wants to drain the swamp, a great place to start is the federal court system.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

No comments: