(Poor baby. Since he is humiliated by doing his job, perhaps he would prefer to be appointed Supreme Rules of the Universe. — DM)
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Reinhardt’s intemperate language, said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge, suggests that the court’s decisions are political biased. “There is no ‘cold neutrality’ in the Ninth Circuit’s ruling,” Arthur wrote about the court’s preliminary ruling in the Hawaii case. “It is personal, visceral, and vindictive.”
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Judges are humiliated and dehumanized whenever they must enforce the nation’s immigration laws, according to a senior judge on the far-left Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The judge’s cry of outrage came when he could not block the orderly repatriation of an illegal immigrant who has two drunk driving convictions, plus a U.S. wife and three children.
“We are unable to prevent [Andres] Magana Ortiz’s removal, yet it is contrary to the values of this nation and its legal system,” complained Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who wishes to extend citizens’ rights to illegal foreign migrants. He said:
We are compelled to deny Mr. Magana Ortiz’s request for a stay of removal because we do not have the authority to grant it. We are not, however, compelled to find the government’s action in this case fair or just. …
The government’s decision to remove Magana Ortiz diminishes not only our country but our courts, which are supposedly dedicated to the pursuit of justice. Magana Ortiz and his family are in truth not the only victims. Among the others are judges who, forced to participate in such inhumane acts, suffer a loss of dignity and humanity as well. I concur as a judge, but as a citizen I do not.
The judge, who is married to a former top leader in the ACLU, also lamented the authority of ordinary DHS agents to enforce the law despite protests from well-paid, high-status “civil rights” lawyers:
On January 25, 2017, the President [Donald Trump] signed a series of executive orders dismantling the system of priorities that had previously guided Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol in determining whom to deport. The orders also gave far greater authority to individual agents and officers, who are now removing non-citizens simply because they are here illegally, regardless of whether they have committed any offense. In light of the breadth of these orders and the lack of any apparent limit on agents’ discretion, the undocumented must now choose between going to work, school, hospitals, and even court, and the risk of being seized.
In contrast, the new Supreme Court Justice appointed by Trump, Neil Gorsuch, has a more humble vision of his job as a judicial referee, saying in a 2013 award ceremony that:
As my daughters remind me, donning a [judicial] robe doesn’t make me any smarter … It serves as a reminder of what’s expected of us—what [Irish philosopher Edmund] Burke called the “cold neutrality of an impartial judge.” It serves, too, as a reminder of the relatively modest station we’re meant to occupy in a democratic society. In other places, judges wear scarlet and ermine. Here, we’re told to buy our own plain black robes — and I can attest the standard choir outfit at the local uniform supply store is a good deal. Ours is a judiciary of honest black polyester.
The judges on Reinhardt’s Ninth Circuit are expected to release soon a decision blocking Trump’s Executive Orders limiting the entry of people from six terror-prone Muslim countries. The decision is based on a Hawaiian case, in which an Egyptian-born Islamic cleric claimed his constitutional rights were infringed by Trump’s efforts to reduce Islamic jihad in the United States.
The court’s decision may have been delayed by the Islam-inspired bloody attacks in Manchester and London, at least one of which was conducted by the sons of Muslim refugees and migrants from Libya.
Reinhardt’s intemperate language, said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge, suggests that the court’s decisions are political biased. “There is no ‘cold neutrality’ in the Ninth Circuit’s ruling,” Arthur wrote about the court’s preliminary ruling in the Hawaii case. “It is personal, visceral, and vindictive.”
Protesters hold up signs outside a courthouse where a federal judge will hear arguments in the first lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order to withhold funding from communities that limit cooperation with immigration authorities Friday, April 14, 2017, in San Francisco. U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick has scheduled a hearing on Friday on San Francisco’s request for a court order blocking the Trump administration from cutting off funds to any of the nation’s so-called sanctuary cities. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)
William H. Orrick III is a Democrat campaign bundler and left-wing political activist. He has been known as “Judge Orrick” since 2013, when President Obama managed to get him on the federal bench — with the assistance of Republicans Senators Jeff Flake (Arizona), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), and Susan Collins (Maine). All other Republicans opposed Orrick’s nomination, except Bob Corker (Tennessee) who failed to vote.
It was as Judge Orrick that the San Francisco-based social justice warrior issued a 49-page decision this week. His decision purported to invalidate President Trump’s executive order (EO) on federal funding for “sanctuary” jurisdictions — cities, counties and other municipal subdivisions that refuse to cooperate in federal immigration-law enforcement.
I say “purported” because Orrick’s screed is a ruling about nothing. The Trump Justice Department had argued that the EO did nothing to alter pre-existing law. Though Orrick tendentiously disputed this construction of the EO, he admitted that his opinion “does nothing more than implement” the Justice Department’s view. He further conceded that his ruling had no effect on the administration’s power to enforce conditions Congress has placed on federal funding (i.e., the very conditions Trump incorporated in the EO by telling his subordinates they could only act “to the extent consistent with law”). Meanwhile, the administration has not endeavored to strip any federal funding from any sanctuary jurisdictions.
So, in effect (or should we say, non-effect?), nothing has happened and nothing has changed. The ruling’s sole achievement is a fleeting star turn for its author. Actually, make that another star turn: In 2015, Judge Orrick thrilled the Democrat-media complex by carrying water for the National Abortion Federation, which wanted an injunction against a whistleblower’s release of videos showing Planned Parenthood officials selling baby parts — oh, sorry, I mean “fetal tissue.”
The ruling is instructive, though, as a measure of how politicized the judiciary has become. Consider the matter of executive orders.
Orrick’s opinion includes the following remarkable passage (at p. 16):
Government counsel explained that the [Executive] Order is an example of the President’s use of the bully pulpit and, even if read narrowly to have no legal effect, serves the purpose of highlighting the President’s focus on immigration enforcement. While the President is entitled to highlight his policy priorities, an Executive Order carries the force of law. Adopting the Government’s proposed reading would transform an Order that purports to create real legal obligations into a mere policy statement[.] [Emphasis added.]
Can it be that, after eight years of Obama’s usurpation of legislative power, judges have forgotten what proper executive orders are?
Contrary to Obama’s practice and Orrick’s apparent belief, executive orders do not carry the force of law — at least not presumptively. They are supposed to be policy statements that give presidential guidance to subordinate executive officials. That is because the president has no unilateral authority to decree law — it is for Congress to write the laws; the executive branch just enforces them.
Now, we have to qualify these principles with caveats like “presumptively” and “unilateral” because there are special situations in which executive orders may have the force of law. These occur when Congress delegates legislative authority to the president — a dubious practice but, alas, a familiar one.
Take, for example, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Under the IEEPA (which is codified in sections 1701 et seq. of Title 50, U.S. Code), the president is empowered to declare a national emergency due to a foreign threat to the United States, and to decree regulations and prohibitions on financial transactions pertinent to the threat, particularly transactions between Americans and hostile foreign powers.
But absent congressional authorization, presidents may not make pronouncements that have the force of law. In general, executive orders do not “create real legal obligations.” They can be said to create duties only in the sense that subordinate officials are supposed to obey directives from a superior. But that is a chain-of-command obligation, not a legal duty. Cabinet secretaries get fired if they defy presidential orders; they do not get prosecuted or sued. Legally, such defiance does not trigger a presidential obligation to terminate a subordinate – the president may fire executive branch officials for any reason, or no reason, for they serve at the president’s pleasure. Consequently, the president’s executive orders do not have the “force of law” even with respect to the subordinate government officials the president is legally authorized to direct. As for the rest of us, the president has no authority to impose legal obligations on us; only Congress may do that.
Judge Orrick seemed mystified by the notion that an executive order could be “a mere policy statement,” or a hortatory rendering of a president’s “policy priorities.” When the Justice Department’s lawyers explained — as if explanation were needed — that these were, in fact, the purposes of the EO, Orrick strangely claimed that Justice was reading the EO “narrowly.” (Apparently, “narrowly” is Ninth Circuit-speak for “accurately.”) Orrick then suggested that this “narrow” reading couldn’t possibly be what was intended by the president — i.e., that there was no way the EO could possibly mean what it says. Why? Because if it was just about announcing policy, the judge theorized, there would be no reason to issue an EO. From this asinine premise, Orrick leapt to the conclusion that Trump must instead be up to something sinister: a sweeping withdrawal of federal funding from sanctuary jurisdictions, heedless of any conditions Congress has attached to funding programs.
To the contrary, stating policy preferences and priorities is one of the basic and desirable reasons for issuing executive orders. It is an effective, transparent manner of communicating administration objectives to the executive branch and the public. It is not enough to say that Donald Trump is not the first president to use EOs this way. This is what EOs are for.
How have we gotten to the point where courts presume bad faith from the proper use of executive orders, and simultaneously imply that a normal executive order would have the force of law?
Of course, we are dealing with a “progressive” partisan here, so throw logic out the window. Can there be any doubt that, if Donald Trump were to issue an executive order that actually purported to create legal benefits and duties (like Obama administration directives on immigration did), Judge Orrick would write an equally indignant opinion about how executive orders must not have the force of law?
The irony is that Judge Orrick essentially did what he falsely accused President Trump of doing. Trump did not use his constitutional authority to issue executive orders as a pretext for usurping congressional power; but Orrick did use his constitutional authority to issue judicial opinions as a pretext for usurping executive power.
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
The first presidential “debate” was a farce. The next presidential “debates” will likely be as well. Rather than submit to biased mainstream media moderators (but I repeat myself), Trump should propose real debates, in addition to or as substitutes for those currently scheduled. The article is also a bit of a rant about Ms. Clinton.
In a real debate, one resolution is proposed. The candidate in favor of the proposition speaks first and gets a specified amount of time to say why it’s a good idea. Then the candidate against the proposition gets a specified amount of time for rebuttal and the other candidate a specified amount of time to respond. A timekeeper would alert the candidates when time is almost up and then up. There would be no moderator to help one debater and to trash the other; the debaters would be on their own. Both would know the issue in advance and could prepare to address it however they please and with or without prepared notes. Were our presidential debates so conducted, viewers might well learn about the candidates’ positions on the issues by how the candidates address them, rather than via the moderator.
Here are a few possible debate propositions, for illustrative purposes only:
that no other region in the world is “more important” for the prosperity and security of the United States than Latin America.
“There is power in our proximity, which means we are not only close geographically but also in our values, interests and in our common cultural heritage,” Clinton said, adding that the “interdependence” of the economies of the two regions, as well as the ties between communities and families, is a tremendous advantage.
“We shouldn’t build a wall between us because of that truth, but rather accept it,” she said, a clear reference to her rival, Republican candidate Donald Trump, who has promised more than once to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico if elected to the White House.
Ms. Clinton has disagreed with Trump’s assertion that “No one has the right to immigrate to this country.”
A real debate grounded on the following resolution would deal with the matter raised by Ms. Clinton. Hillary could take the affirmative and Trump the negative:
Resolved: no other region in the world is more important for the prosperity and security of the United States than Latin America.
There is power in our proximity, which means we are not only close geographically but also in our values, interests and in our common cultural heritage. The interdependence of the economies of the two regions, as well as the ties between communities and families, is a tremendous advantage.
We shouldn’t build a wall between us because of that truth, but rather accept it. The wall along our southern border would keep our the good immigrants we need and there is a right to immigrate to America.
Trump would probably point out that his wall would prevent not even one legal immigrant from coming to the United States. He might also suggest that were our immigration laws and procedures more rational (like those of Mexico?) and reflected American interests as well as those of the immigrants, it would be much easier for the immigrants we want to come, legally: those who haven’t committed significant law violations, can soon become self-supporting instead of relying on welfare, do not have serious contagious diseases and appear likely to accept American values rather than, for example, joining gangs and/or importing drugs. Trump could easily provide legal support for the proposition that there is, in fact, no legal right to immigrate to America.
Islam, the religion of peace, tolerance and women’s rights
There has been substantial discussion in the few media outlets providing an “honest discussion” of Islam about the extent to which Hillary and her colleague Huma Abedin have similar views on Sharia law. Under a Clinton presidency, Huma would likely have a high place at the White House, if not as Secretary of State.
Even if Huma were to state that she disagrees with her father, mother and other close relatives about Islam and Sharia law, would she tell the truth or engage in Al-taqiyya (lying to non-Muslims to advance Islamist doctrine)?
worked on an Islamist journal for 12 years, beginning the year she became a White House intern. She hasn’t commented on that job.
. . . .
In 2012, Rep. Michele Bachmann and four other members of Congress requested information about the influence of Muslim Brotherhood-tied groups and individuals in the U.S. government, including Abedin, who worked for 12 years as an assistant editor of an Islamist journal that spewed extremism.
Abedin’s tenure at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs began in 1996, the year she began working as an intern at the White house.
While it is certainly possible to disavow the ideology of one’s parents, Abedin has remained silent on their extremism as well as her work with on journal. It remains to be seen whether or not she will repudiate these new findings.
. . . .
Syed Abedin, Huma Abedin’s father who died in 1993, was a Muslim scholar connected to the Saudi Arabian government. According to exclusive video footage from 1971 recently obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, Syed Abedin advocated the following:
As Muslim countries evolve, he said, “The state has to take over. The state is stepping in in many countries … where the state is now overseeing that human relationships are carried on on the basis of Islam. The state also under Islam has a right to interfere in some of these rights given to the individual by the sharia.”
In addition, he is quoted as saying, “The main dynamics of life in the Islamic world are still supplied by Islam. Any institution, as I said before, any concept, any idea, in order to be accepted and become a viable thing in the Islamic world has to come through … Islam.”
Abedin’s mother, Saleha, has an especially strong Islamist ties. She is a member of the female counterpart of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Muslim World League. She leads a group called the International Islamic Committee for Women and Child, a subsidiary of a Muslim Brotherhood-led group that is banned in Israel for its links to Hamas.
In 1999 and three years after Huma began working for the journal, the journal and Saleha Abedin’s group published a book in Arabic titled “Women in Islam: A Discourse in Rights and Obligations.”
The book states that man-made law is inherently oppressive towards women, while sharia law is liberating. According to the text, Muslim women have an obligation to contribute to jihad, apostates are to be put to death, adulterers should be stoned or lashed, freedom of speech should be conformed to the boundaries set by sharia and wives must have sex with their husbands on command, “even if she is not in the mood.“
In addition, the organization led by Huma Abedin’s mother “advocates for the repeal of Mubarak-era prohibitions on female genital mutilation, child marriage and marital rape, on the grounds that such prohibitions run counter to Islamic law, which allows for their practice,” according to an analysis by the Center for Security policy.
The book advocates against laws to assure equality of women, saying, “Man-made laws have in fact enslaved women, submitting them to the cupidity and caprice of human beings. Islam is the only solution and the only escape.”
In terms of women working in high positions, the book states, “Her job would involve long hours of free mixing and social interaction with the opposite sex, which is forbidden in Islam. Moreover, women’s biological constitution is different from that of men. Women are fragile, emotional and sometimes unable to handle difficult and strenuous situations. Men are less emotional and show more perseverance.”
Honor killings of their own maimed and maltreated women. Forced conversions and kidnappings and abductions of whole school-loads of girls and women. Selling these captives on the open market as slaves for the slugs who then abuse the women and girls unto death. Not to mention torture as a rule, not exception, for captured women. Nor, of course, the overall banning of women from driving, traveling alone, working outside the home, or suing for their own lives, domestic arrangements, or unheard-of gay right to not have a male husband/overlord.
For all these, the “Ms. Piggy”- quoting smartest woman in the world has done and said…nothing.
What do Muslims worldwide believe?
How about,
Resolved: America is not merely a Judeo-Christian nation and Islam is no less peaceful and tolerant than Christiany and Judaism. To become more diverse, we need more Muslim refugees and should strive to accommodate them by making our laws less offensive.
Hillary could take the affirmative and Trump the negative.
Conclusions
Trump should offer Ms. Clinton an opportunity to provide additional resolutions for debate which he might support.
Were Trump to propose supplemental or replacement debates along these lines, Hillary would very likely reject his offer because she needs support from the moderators and would understand the dangers a real debate would present. If Ms. Clinton declines Trump’s offer, he should feel free to decide whether to participate in the partisan “debate” farce as currently established.
The Pentagon and US army are not following the orders of their Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama in the execution of the military cooperation accord in Syria concluded by US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva on Sept. 12.
Five days after the truce they agreed would go into effect Monday, fighting was still raging Saturday, Sept. 17.
DEBKAfile was the only Western publication to foresee this eventuality in an article published on July 18.
It was already evident then that any military cooperation agreement between the two powers would be contingent on America exposing its intelligence-gathering methods to Russia – not just in Syria but worldwide.
As our military sources predicted, this new intelligence sharing arrangement would necessarily extend to the Syrian Air Force as a third partner.
In advance of the deal, Moscow deployed its aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kutzenov, post haste to Syrian waters, to make sure that the Joint Implementation Center set up by the Kerry-Lavrov deal for intelligence-sharing would also apply to the warplanes and cruise missiles on the carrier’s decks and its escort of missile cruisers.
This deal was perceived in Moscow as an opportunity to study the combat methods and tactics practiced by the US Navy and Air force in real battlefield conditions.
But this eventuality was far from the intentions of US security and intelligence chiefs at a time of deepening adversity between Washington and Moscow.
The remarks of State Department spokesman Mark Toner on Thursday, Sept. 5 hinted at these conflicting perceptions: “I don’t think anyone in the US government is necessarily taking at face value Russia’s – or certainly not the Syrian regime’s – commitment to this arrangement.” He went on to say: “What really matters here is that the president of the United States supports this agreement, and our system of government works in such a way that everyone follows what the president says.”
Is that really so?
The fact that Kerry’s spokesman found it necessary to emphasize that “everyone follows what the president says,” strongly indicated that not everyone in Washington was in fact obeying the president.
Such disobedience is almost unheard of and would never be admitted publicly. In this case, it is being kept carefully under wraps.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Chairman of the US Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph F. Dunford will never on any account admit that, in the execution of military collaboration with Russia in the Syrian conflict, they are not exactly carrying out the president’s precise instructions.
But Washington sources report that Defense Secretary Carter maintains that he can’t act against a law enacted by Congress. He was referring to the law that prohibits all military-to-military relations with Russia as a result of Moscow’s annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine.
According to DEBKAfile’s military sources, they are simply dragging their feet in ground operations. This is driving Vladimir Putin and his generals into fits of rage.
Friday, Sept 16, Lavrov accused the US of “stalling on its promise to separate moderate rebel groups in Syria from terrorists,” adding, “US progress in delivering on the promise is slow.”
Saturday, Putin himself burst out that the rebels were “regrouping under the ceasefire.” He put the blame on those “rebels” for the failure of the agreed truce to take effect after five days.
Our military and intelligence sources see a connection between Putin’s angry outburst and the rising tensions on the Syrian-Israeli border in the past week, culminating in the two Syrian rockets that were shot down Saturday over the Golan by Israel’s Iron Dome batteries.
For some time, the Russians and Syrians have made no bones about their objection to Israel’s policy of supporting a motley assortment of Syrian rebel groups in southern Syria close to its border. Among these groups is Al Qaeda’s Syrian arm Jabhat Al-Nusra (the Nusra Front) that has renamed itself Jahat Fath Al-Sham.
Whatever Assad, Iran or Hizballah may accept or reject, President Putin utterly refuses to tolerate Israel allowing the Nusra Front to control parts of this border sector.
Therefore, the rockets and missiles apparently “straying” across the border onto the Golan may well multiply in the coming days.
Yet another complication raised its head over the weekend when the US-backed rebel militia, the Free Syrian Army, vented its fury over the Kerry-Lavrov truce deal by driving away American Special Operations troops helping them in the battle for Al-Rai and abusing them as “infidels.”
The US blames the Russian leader for failing to force Bashar Assad to hold his fire and to let emergency supplies reach the beleaguered population in Aleppo, thereby undermining their ceasefire accord.
But it is becoming evident that the brutal standoff in Syria will be sustained until Putin is satisfied that the US is cooperating with Russian forces in Syria and the Mediterranean region in all spheres.
Before he decides to lean hard on Assad to cease hostilities, he will want to see the White House twisting the arms of the Pentagon and US forces to play ball in the most sensitive spheres.
U.S. Official Bemoans Russian Destruction Of “Our” Terrorists
Some U.S. official is whining because his flock of bastards gets hurt:
“Putin is deliberately targeting our forces,” a U.S. official, who is disappointed in the U.S. response to Russia, told Fox News.”Our guys are fighting for their lives,” said the official, estimating up to 150 CIA-trained moderate rebels have been killed by the Russians.
“Our forces”, “our guys” – hmm. The official is referring to the CIA-mercenaries who are fighting under al-Qaeda’s command:
Advancing alongside the Islamist groups, and sometimes aiding them, have been several of the relatively secular groups, like the Free Syrian Army, which have gained new prominence and status because of their access to the TOWs.Even in smaller quantities, the missiles played a major role in the insurgent advances that eventually endangered Mr. Assad’s rule. While that would seem like a welcome development for United States policy makers, in practice it presented another quandary, given that the Nusra Front was among the groups benefiting from the enhanced firepower.
It is a tactical alliance that Free Syrian Army commanders describe as an uncomfortable marriage of necessity, because they cannot operate without the consent of the larger and stronger Nusra Front.
The “official” should go to jail for, at least, indirectly arming and supporting the terrorists of Jabhat al-Nusra aka al-Qaeda in Syria.
Under U.S. domestic law Obama justifies his attacks on the Islamic State in Syria (which is illegal under international law) with reference to the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists as passed by the United States Congress on September 14, 2001. According to that AUMF:
That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist …
If that is the relevant legal code to fight the Islamic State then this even more so applies to Jabhat al-Nusra as it is loyal to the original al-Qaeda organization.
What Russia does, fighting on behalf of the legal government of Syria after having been asked to do so, is not only legal under international law but it is also easily justifiable by the same U.S. domestic law which the U.S. president applies to fight the Islamic State.
That whining official should recognize that a. what “his forces” do is illegal under U.S. law b. what Russia does with “his guys” is legal even under U.S. law and c. that there is always a moral hazard when using such proxy forces.
When the CIA send some idiots to invade Cuba where they were killed or capture it could do nothing and did nothing to protect them because that would have started a much bigger war. This is the same case here. These forces will be destroyed and there is nothing the U.S. can or will do about that. If you are sentimental about the fate of mercenaries and if you do not want this to happen do not use proxy forces but be man enough to go yourself.
Posted by b on October 15, 2015 at 01:51 PM | Permalink
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