The very least we should expect from one of the two major political parties is a minimal pretense of upholding the laws of the United States. After all, that is what our elected representatives and judges swear to do when they take office. And yet, as things stand now, this isn’t a sure bet. As President Trump attempts to reassert American national sovereignty through the simple expedient of enforcing current immigration laws, the Democratic Party has decided to thwart him at every turn, primarily via its control of the lesser federal judiciary. It’s a move they’ll come to regret.
Take for example, the recent ruling by two federal judges that Trump has no right to countermand an executive order issued by his predecessor regarding the lifelong illegal aliens and non-American citizens the Left has touchingly decided to sentimentalize as “Dreamers.” These foreign-born illegal-alien children of illegal-alien parents were brought to this country at some point in their minority and, while many of them are long since old enough to have joined the Army (and thus have the legal path to citizenship they claim to want), are still referred to as “children,” in the same way that the European media calls “children” the bearded Muslims in Sweden who swear they were only 12 when they gang-raped a native schoolgirl.
The first “order”—as if a federal judge, whose entire job both in its creation and in its continuance, is dependent on Congress’s power under Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution, has any authority to interfere with the proper functioning of the executive branch—blocked the president from ending the “DACA” program, which had been conjured into existence via Barack Obama’s pen and phone back in the founding prehistory of 2012. The second order, issued just the other day, took issue with Trump’s reasoning and motive behind his executively ordered end to the executively ordered program; “arbitrary and capricious,” opined the solon regarding Attorney General Jeff Session’s defense of the order.
The administration’s proper response to this latest judicial power grab should be to echo Andrew Jackson’s possibly apocryphal but apposite retort to the chief justice back in 1832: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” (Although I prefer Alec Baldwin’s rejoinder to Ed Harris in “Glengarry, Glen Ross“.) Like the Muslim “travel ban,” which was held up by a couple of activist federal judges before the Supreme Court allowed it to stand, the end of DACA will eventually be upheld; the administration has fast-tracked its appeal of these delaying tactics to the court, bypassing the Ninth Circuit and barreling straight to the only federal court specifically established by the Constitution.
The Democrats and their “resistance” allies on the poetaster Right keep complaining that we are headed for a constitutional crisis with Trump in office, and in fact they are more correct than they understand. It’s not Trump, however, who’s precipitating the crisis but the Democrats themselves, who have seemingly modified their old motto—“dissent is the highest form of patriotism”—into something even more extreme: sedition as true love of country.
Consider the weakness of their case, which is based entirely on sentiment and linguistic obfuscation. First, the “Dreamers” are de facto criminals, and in no legal sense “Americans.” True, it was their parents who were guilty of the initial crime, but just because you were an accomplice without agency in a bank robbery doesn’t mean you get to keep the money or take up permanent residence in the bank.
As to the complaint that shipping DACA recipients back to their legal countries of origin would somehow be “separating families,” this is nonsense. It was the parents who voluntarily separated themselves from their families by coming here in the first place, and a repatriation of the DACA “children” is simply the delayed consequence of that “act of love.” This is also a point that speaks to the current defense of chain migration, whose partisans complain that by ending preferred-entry treatment for parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and third cousins once removed, the president is somehow “separating families.”
But—as all previous generations of legal immigrants understood—the very act of leaving your own land coming and to America meant that you were voluntarily separating yourself from your family, with little to no expectation of ever seeing them again. When my own immigrant great-grandmother, Mary O’Brien, left the County Clare for Boston around 1880, her family held, as Irish families back then did, a farewell party for her: they called it an “American wake,” because henceforth she would be as good as dead to them. Her brief return visit to Ireland in 1932 with her eldest daughter was a surprise; my acquisition of her birthplace and its rebuilding half a century later was practically unheard of. And today I have an Irish son-in-law and an Irish granddaughter. Full circle—which ought to be one of the models of American immigration policy, so as not to permanently rob poor countries of their best and brightest—has been achieved. Sending the children of Mexicans back to Mexico might just be the best thing for them—and for Mexico, which can use all the help it can get.
The Third Amendment to the Constitution reads: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” A clever lawyer, such as exists in profusion on the Left, could easily make the argument that the United States is the house, and that the owners, the American people, are being unlawfully forced to provide shelter to the illegal aliens—a stunningly high percentage of whom are criminals and thus could be viewed as enemy combatants in a war on the nation as founded. Hey, creative lawyering worked with Roe v. Wade, didn’t it?
So don’t fall for the sob stories; the whole point of our statue of justice is that she is blindfolded, so as not to be swayed by extra-legal emotions as sorrow and pity, in her weighing of the evidentiary scales. This is, as Jeff Sessions might say, not only a core principle of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, but goes back all the way to the ancient Greeks.
President Trump will win this battle, as he has won all previous skirmishes with #TheResistance. Further, he’s already made his last, best, and final offer to the Democrats, which also happens to have been his first offer. That was designed to flush out the Democrats’ crocodile-tear compassion and reveal it for what it really is: a full-throated defense of criminality disguised as the moral high ground, and designed to boost their political power at the expense of the nation-as-founded. Why, it’s positively satanic.
We owe the president a debt of gratitude for forcing the seditionists to show us who they really are. Now all real patriots have to do is act on that realization. By putting a permanent stake through DACA—comically but fittingly rescinded by executive order on a Taco Tuesday—America will show the rest of the world that the defense of our national sovereignty is not a dream, but their worst nightmare.
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