On Immigration and the Supreme Court, Democrats Are Snookered

by Conrad Black

Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren

It appears to have been the Supreme Court of the United States, the most unremitting and inscrutable center of government, that has been a deus ex machina in clarifying issues for the American voters in the run-up to the midterm elections. It is almost a mnemonic feat now to recall 17 months ago when Senator Schumer was weeping on the Senate floor, in emulation, he said, of the Statue of Liberty, over President Trump’s proposed curtailment of the rights of entry into America from a number of terrorism-plagued or sponsoring states.

We dimly remember the immense demonstrations, the lectures from the most gaseous Hollywood airheads, the interdiction by relatively peaceful mobs of demonstrators at major airports, as the Democrats got overreaching leftist federal district judges to strut their moment of national fame and presume to wrench control of immigration from the president, to whom the Constitution assigns it. President Trump sensibly resisted the temptation to ignore the federal district judges, imposed his policy with modifications, and was upheld last week by the Supreme Court.

(Justice Clarence Thomas rightly implied in his judgment that the district courts have to be put in their place.)

As it cleared the docket for its extended summer recess, the Supremes also decided that religiously based pregnancy counseling centers will not have to emphasize the speed and convenience of abortions by Planned Parenthood. This is the beginning of the lifting of the jack-booted official foot from the windpipe of anyone who believes in any version of the God whom the Deist Jefferson believed created us all (equal).

The high court completed the trifecta by affirming the right of public-sector employees who do not join the union not to have dues deducted from their pay anyway. All that is holding the discarded skeleton of organized labor together is the public-service unions and the craven predilection of governments to surrender to them. They should all be decertified, led to extinction by the teachers’ unions that have reduced much of the state education systems to unruly day-care centers.

The Supreme Court capped its action-packed week with the announced retirement of unpredictable swing judge Anthony Kennedy after 30 years. (He was appointed after the great Robert Bork was virtually assassinated by Teddy Kennedy, and by Joe Biden.) It is shocking that four justices apparently agreed that foreigners had a prima facie right to enter the United States, and the presidency surrendered its constitutional rights by this president’s ambiguous comments about criteria for entry into the United States.

After such a battering by the finely balanced court, it is small wonder that the next vacancy in the court became an instant call to arms (literally).

The Democratic hot-air balloon about separating illegally entering children from their parents was still hissing furiously when the Supreme Court spoke. The president’s press secretary, Sarah Sanders, was evicted, ex officio, from a Virginia restaurant that appeared to be named after its bellicose owner (The Red Hen), as she then stormed across the street and demanded a competitor not serve Mrs. Sanders either.

Maxine Waters, the egregious and inexplicably prosperous African-American foghorn of racist demagogy for decades from the Great Arsenal of Political Stupidity, California, called on the Democratic faithful to harass Trump supporters in all circumstances. The Homeland Security secretary was heckled and derided unmercifully in a Washington restaurant as she tried to have her dinner, and protesters then gathered in front of her house and shouted obscenities (because her department is in charge of immigration).

This was over the unmitigated nonsense about 2,300 children abandoned by illegal intruders into America, being “torn from the arms of their parents.” They are fed and sheltered better than they are accustomed to in the countries they fled, and their parents had no business putting them at this risk. The United States has 2,700,000 minors separated from parents in prison; 400,000 children in foster care; 760,000 separated from parents in the military, and there are over 16,000 children in insalubrious shelters in New York City alone.

This is all nonsense, like the claims after the prearranged Charlottesville riots last year over what to do with the statue of Robert E. Lee, when Trump was accused of favoring neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. The ne plus ultra of Democrats’ irresistible polemical silliness, likening Trump to the imperishable Adolf Hitler, empurpled the air as the floundering hacks of the Resistance filed through the Trumpophobic networks’ television studios, fulminating about the fate of the illegally transported and abandoned children. There were at least 100 protesters for every one of the well-fed and sheltered young people.

If the new Mexican president, López Obrador, adheres to his campaign proposal of not interfering with the drug cartels, he will not only be handing his northern provinces entirely over to the most vicious gangsters in the history of the Americas, he will oblige President Trump to take measures that will make the protracted debate about the wall, ICE, the immigration chain and lottery, and separation of children sublimely academic.

He will force the United States to secure the border with an adequate deployment of the U.S. Army. These units, perhaps a whole division, would be better employed in this role than in squatting in their bases. There would be practically no casualties, no illegal immigrants, fewer opioids, and the country could take its time with the wall. This entire enervating debate would end.

No one, not even Michael Moore as he demands a march of a million people to overturn the government, will commend the policy of allowing opioids and their purveyors to flow over the border completely unimpeded. If the new Mexican government abandons the Drug War, it will be the equivalent, in ending debate and uniting opinion in the United States, of Pearl Harbor. If the Democrats take abolition of ICE and de facto open borders to the voters in November, Mr. Trump will mow them down like sitting ducks.

President Trump is rising steadily in the polls, which report that, contrary to the Democrats’ favorite fairy tale, only 31 percent of his supporters are males who did not attend university, according to Pew Research. His sanctimonious press opponents who maintain their vigil of alleged falsehoods of the president take a great deal more liberties with the truth than he does, and the majority of the country is more impressed that by the principal criterion for judging a public office-holder’s honesty, whether he is doing what he promised prior to election to do. Here, Donald Trump has the best record of any president since Calvin Coolidge (who promised to do nothing).

One overconfident position of Trump’s enemies after another has been overrun, and now they are having to face the most blood-curdling horror of all: He may durably uproot and expel them from their incumbency and legitimacy as a permanent government, and he may actually succeed as a president. This is the explanation for the mushroom cloud of Democratic disconcertion about the ambivalent Anthony Kennedy.

Justice Kennedy provided the deciding vote on the three cases mentioned that closed this session of the Court, but he was pro-choice, pro the legality of Obamacare, and as liberal as he was conservative. All of the nominees on the president’s list of 25, from which the well-respected Justice Neil Gorsuch was chosen last year, are clearly qualified. All, when probed about abortion, will say something like what Circuit Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a practicing Roman Catholic with seven children, replied at her confirmation hearing, that no judge should allow personal views to get in the way of established law.

The Democrats are snookered. They won’t be able to sell their goal-line defense of Roe v. Wade. It is a very inadequate decision anyway — the preeminent issue isn’t the right of a woman to do anything she wants with her own body; it is when the unborn attain the rights of a person. The state should not aspire to require a woman to have a child who does not want to have one, but the only solution is a compromise on how late into a pregnancy abortions can be legal, barring extraordinary circumstances.

If Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), both Republicans, bolt the administration nominee, the Democrats from generally Republican states facing the voters in November may rally to defeat the president’s nominee, but he will just reap the benefit of the Democrats’ obstreperousness and resubmit the name in January to more strongly Republican Senate.

Donald Trump is not everyone’s choice, but calling him a sexist, racist, xenophobe, warmonger, fiscal profligate, much less someone who would betray his country to a foreign power in an election: All of this is bunk and always was. If the Democrats want to win, instead of just continuing on suicide watch, they will have to do it the old-fashioned way with real issues and a serious leader.

The only such leader who is now visible is Michael Bloomberg. He gambled on being Jeb Bush’s and then Hillary Clinton’s secretary of state, and now he is taking the only route open: placing his own money ($80 million), on the Democrats’ candidates this year, to put himself in position for a presidential race in 2020, when he will be 78. He is the best the Democrats have, and would be a competent president. A race between two flamboyant New York billionaires would be interesting, but evicting Trump from the White House will not be like falling off a log.

First published in National Review Online.