President Donald Trump fired the acting attorney general, Sally Q. Yates, after she refused to perform her duty to defend the legality of his temporary ban on immigrants from terrorist-spawning countries. The purpose of Mr. Trump’s executive order was to help protect Americans from terrorist attacks. Trump has said existing vetting procedures were flimsy and inadequate, and he wants to see strict vetting procedures in place before he lifts the ban.
Ms. Yates’s grandstanding for the media exacerbated her failure to do her job. Mr. Trump had elevated her to acting attorney general pending the drawn out confirmation of Jeff Sessions as attorney general. Instead of turning down Mr. Trump’s offer privately and civilly, she chose to accept his offer, then air out her disagreement with him on immigration policy publicly.
The Declaration states the People may institute a government built on the principles and forms of power “most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” The Constitution echoes and builds on that when it says its purpose is “to form a more Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity… .”
Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution grants the president “the executive Power”. Section 2 names him the Commander-in-Chief. Section 3 makes it the president’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”.
The president not only has the authority to see our duly enacted immigration laws executed, he has the duty to do so. Nothing in the immigration law and the president’s execution of it violates statutory or constitutional law. If a ban on immigration from violent or ideologically violent countries in the world obtains the defense, safety, and tranquility of the American people, then it is lawful.
When Ms. Yates complained she could not defend Mr. Trump’s ban, she had to defend her warrantless position by asserting she had “to do the right thing.” It’s an irony, because so many people have argued for the severance of law from morality. While I would agree that morality must be weighed when reflecting on law and policy in regard to fundamental questions, prudence and pragmatism play their roles in others.
Do citizens and foreigners own the same privileges, rights, and responsibilities under American law? No. That would be absurd. The government was instituted of the people, by the people, for the people, the people being the citizens. The only way for a foreigner to appropriate the rights, privileges, and responsibilities under American law is to become American, and that means rejecting what he or she was and his or her allegiances. It means accepting what an American is and what our way is as a body politic and as a culture.
Finally, let’s deal with the claim that we cannot ban Muslims from entering the country. The proponents of this position cite two reasons: first, it constitutes a religious test; second, it will inflame terrorist passions and make them terrorize more.
The answer to the first reason is a ban on Muslim entry into our country isn’t based on most of what Islam is but is based on one of its ideologies or tenets: that it is holy and just to kill people who reject Islam or Mohamed. That belief is not merely un-American, it is anti-American. It violates our law. It assaults our Constitution. It transgresses our culture and our reason. The laws of God, of Nature, of man, of our Constitution do not permit murder on religious grounds. Thanks to both our Rationalist and Christian perspective, we reject utterly any such principle. Similarly, we reject those people who bear such a perspective from entering our country and plying their bloody beliefs here.
We are absolutely under no obligation – moral, legal, constitutional, etc – to permit such individuals to enter our country. If the safeguards for preventing the entry of such individuals are defective or deficient, our president has a duty to ban such folks, even en masse, from entering our country and endangering our safety.
Ms. Yates doesn’t understand that simple, legally correct position. Addled by a foreigners first mentality, and having abandoned and lost sight of the people whom she swore to protect, Ms. Yates elevated her personal feelings to the pinnacle of consideration.
As citizens, the members of the Justice Department have the right to agree or disagree with this person or the other and this policy or that policy. They may express their agreement or disagreement among private friends or at the ballot box.
As members of the federal Justice Department, however, every attorney maintains an obligation and responsibility to do his job. They are not advocating for themselves or for a particular political persuasion, they are advocating for the people through the executive branch of the government. The lawyers in the attorney general’s office were not elected by the people; the president was. If for some particular matter the conscience of a member of the Justice Department has become so strained he cannot follow the directives of his chief executive, then he should do the honest and honorable thing and quietly resign.
Yates was warped. She was so warped that she could neither fulfill her duty nor act honorably. She chose to make a scene. The president acted swiftly and decisively: Mr. Trump fired her.
The second complaint, growled and whined by the likes of senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, states that in appearing to single out Islam or Muslims, Mr. Trump inflames their hatred and determination to commit more terrorism, serves as a recruiting tool, and because of those two points, will make Americans more unsafe and ultimately lose the war against terrorism.
One of many good ways to dissolve this line of thinking is to use the analogy of the man who says he loves his wife, so he stalks her and beats her for every real or imagined offense while he lives exactly the way he wants to live. She has to be “made” to love him. He does not really love her as a woman; he loves her as a thing to own and do with as he pleases. His real goal is domination, not love.
The wife develops a mentality that if she can just please him in everything, he will stop beating her. It’s her fault he loses control. She isn’t doing enough. Of course, she never will. And he’ll keep slapping and punching and kicking her, because that is who he is.
It’s the same thing for the Muslim who takes the errors of the Koran to heart. The infidel must be threatened, tortured, killed, or at least extorted for money. The infidels keep thinking it’s their fault. They aren’t diverse enough, they aren’t multicultural enough, they are too trapped in their own biases and prejudices, so they don’t want to make the Muslim mad, because he’ll just threaten, torture, and kill more. The reality is the Muslim will never admit to his own evil and his own problem, the propensity for the Mohamed-sanctioned inhuman violence which is the only commodity with which he trades. Convert or die. Be like me, or die.
The superficial way Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham approach Muslim terror will never solve the problem, which perhaps is not solvable anyway as long as human beings are sinners. The only way to obtain and to keep the upper hand, however, is a mix of force and construction. The United States must meet the violence directed at its citizens with the force necessary to defeat that violence and deter those who would think twice about renewing it. The United States must also take a more proactive approach to remedy the ills of the Muslim nations, if they will allow it. That does not mean abandoning a ban on Muslim immigration; such a ban should be enforced and maintained for as long as necessary. However, it does mean helping to relieve the poverty and oppression of Muslim areas through joint operations to create economic growth and an infrastructure of opportunity.
Nothing remedies misery like opportunity and profit. These should be sought for the good of all, and not just in Muslim lands, but in lands elsewhere around the globe where it is desired by the local people.
It is not the job of Americans or our government to make Muslims part of our country, nor to take on their burdens here. It can be our job, however, to help them take on their burdens in their own countries, to help them develop their own success and profit. Why Muslim countries have not been doing this but instead have wasted their time in religious and political war after war is beyond the ken of the rational mind. Had they channeled the same energy into building up instead of tearing down, who knows how successful those Muslim countries might have become?
Senators McCain and Graham think themselves clever with their superficially softer, more diplomatic approach. The truth is that it has not worked but has only inspired more Muslim mayhem. Former president Barack Obama applied the softer approach for eight years, yet Muslim butchery reached new heights in the United States and in countries around the world, and the Muslim Middle East and North Africa are more war-torn than ever. Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham think their clever artfulness will make the problem smaller. That is a lie, as are their disloyal denunciations of the Republican president.
The truth is, much like with Mrs. Clinton, neither McCain nor Graham, individually or with each other or someone else, has been able to even reduce the problem of Muslim violence, despite their decades of “service” in the Senate. To follow their “lead” is to follow the same ole same ole, which just keeps circling around back to more bloodshed.
A fresh approach, such as the one Mr. Trump is taking and which is placing Americans and America first, is long overdue.
Punditry Gone Wild! 