The DACA political football is the kind of messiness that ensues when principles aren't adhered to from the get-go

In the last couple of days, layer upon layer of messiness has been heaped upon the unlawful program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, initiated by the previous administration. Quite simply, DACA instructs immigration authorities to refrain from taking deportation measures in the cases of people who had come to the US when younger. than 16 and had jumped through certain bureaucratic hoops.
The first layer of messiness arises from the fact that a good number of such people ('dreamers") understandably evoke our sympathy. Their educations, the friendships they've formed, any work history they've amassed, have all occurred on US soil.
The notion of bending principle - an illegal alien is an illegal alien - thus got a toehold. The discussion among everybody save for Ann Coulter consequently centered around humane ways to stem the tide of further illegal immigration.
Because Donald Trump started blathering about a "big beautiful wall" early in his campaign (in fact, during one Republican-candidates debate, it "just got a little taller"), his appeal was cemented for a swath of the voting populace that harbored resentment about the aliens' presence, particularly in the workforce, a resentment that was front and center among its public-policy concerns.
Of course, he was elected president, and the conversation between the two ends of Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue turned to options for compromising between humane treatment of "dreamers" and otherwise enforcing laws on the books.
There were some parameters around what kind of compromise was going to be possible, notably the Trump administration's intention to rescind DACA.
The bipartisan meeting Trump held with Congressional leaders the other day evoked a telling array of reactions. The above-mentioned Coulter has been in meltdown mode. Sane conservatives saw it as fairly typical behavior for a modern president: going into it with at least the public perception that he had strong views he was going to defend, but quickly demonstrating that "willingness to reach across the aisle" to hammer out something hopefully adequately palatable to everyone.
More about that meeting in a moment.
But on the heels of it came San Francisco federal judge William Alsup's ruling that the administration couldn't rescind DACA. The ruling reads more like an opinion piece in a left-leaning magazine than a legal document. Much of its position hinges on a tweet from Trump. Alsup called the rescinding move "arbitrary and capricious" even though it was based on conclusions reached by Attorney General Sessions.
The fact is that, even though Obama and Trump made moves in exact opposition to each other, they were each executive actions based on what the executive branch had determined about legality.
The administration quickly made it clear that it would take the matter to another court - SCOTUS, if necessary.
But back to the bipartisan meeting. This exchange between Trump and Senator Feinstein is causing unprecedented gnashing of teeth among DJT's populist base:

From the official White House transcript:

SENATOR FEINSTEIN: I think there needs to be a willingness on both sides. And I think — and I don’t know how you would feel about this, but I’d like to ask the question: What about a clean DACA bill now, with a commitment that we go into a comprehensive immigration reform procedure? Like we did back — oh, I remember when Kennedy was here and it was really a major, major effort, and it was a great disappointment that it went nowhere.

THE PRESIDENT: I remember that. I have no problem. I think that’s basically what Dick is saying. We’re going to come up with DACA. We’re going to do DACA, and then we can start immediately on the phase two, which would be comprehensive.

SENATOR FEINSTEIN: Would you be agreeable to that?

THE PRESIDENT:  Yeah, I would like — I would like to do that. Go ahead. I think a lot of people would like to see that, but I think we have to do DACA first.

The bold language was especially troubling, because Trump was agreeing to a clean DACA bill.

It gets juicier. That transcript has now been doctored to remove what you see in boldface.

Here's the essence of the matter: The wall is not a top-priority component of a workable (that is, firm yet humane) immigration policy. Enforcement of E-Verify is far more important. If the US doesn't hold the promise of providing a livelihood, folks are going to be far less motivated to come here illegally. Resolving the DACA matter in a way that ensures that there's no resulting chain migration is the next most important item.

There are those who hearken back to Reagan's 1986 granting of amnesty to illegal aliens, and they have a point. Dutch was a giant, but he was still a human being, which means that he got some things wrong as president.

The larger point is that the camel's-nose-inside-the-tent principle applies every time an immutable principle is treated as a malleable item on a wish list. It's the reason North Korea is now a nuclear threat. It's the reason the Supreme Court was able to make up a "right" to homosexual "marriage" out of whole cloth. It's the reason our government subsidizes the manufacture of solar panels.

In short, compromise is way overrated. There's really not much in the realm of public policy that doesn't hinge on principle, and any initial nibbling around the edges of it is going to eventually lead to its getting voraciously devoured.

Seven most important considerations pertaining to Judge Watson's ruling on the travel ban

1.) Where is any reference to previous cases, or the Constitution?

2.) Hawaii has no refugees from the six countries specified in Trump's executive order.

3.) It further obliterates the president's clear legal authority to decide what kinds of persons get to enter our country, and under what terms.

4.) It further obscures the plain fact that non-citizens have no rights that can be guaranteed by US law.

5.) What the hell does Hawaii's tourism industry or its university system have to do with the legal question being decided here?

6.) Ditto whether Hawaii has a "pluralistic and inclusive society"?

7.) How are statements by Trump from when he was a candidate legally relevant to this case?

Post-America, where psychotic children are in charge

Need substantiation?

Here tis:

An Oregon judge ruled Friday that a transgender person can legally change their sex to "non-binary" rather than male or female in what legal experts believe is a first in the United States. 

Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Amy Holmes Hehn legally changed 52-year-old Jamie Shupe's sex from "female" to non-binary.

Nancy Haque, a co-executive director for Basic Rights Oregon, called the ruling a "momentous day for genderqueer Oregonians."

"It's really exciting for the courts to actually recognize what we know to be true: gender is a spectrum," Haque said. "Some people don't identify as male or female."
Shupe, an Army veteran who retired in 2000 a sergeant first class, began transitioning in 2013 while living in Pittsburg. Shupe knew then that neither male nor female fit. Shupe chose "Jamie" as a new first name primarily because it is a gender-neutral name. Shupe prefers to be called "Jamie," rather than by a pronoun.
"I was assigned male at birth due to biology," Shupe said. "I'm stuck with that for life. My gender identity is definitely feminine. My gender identity has never been male, but I feel like I have to own up to my male biology. Being non-binary allows me to do that. I'm a mixture of both. I consider myself as a third sex."

 

It was five short years ago at the maximum that this would have been considered insane.

Weep. Pray.

While we're at it, why don't we change the definition of "blueberry" to include "pomegranate"?

Yet another federal judge concludes that the equal-protection and due-process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment apply to homosexual "marriage," thus adding Alaska to the list of states that are barred from retaining some sanity in their approach to the English language.

I have to hand it to the destroyers of Western civilization (the domestic Left branch, that is; the jihadist branch hates homosexuals).  They have found the perfect issue for working their foul designs.  Take a word that, while its definition has had some flexibility, has never, anywhere, had a scope that would include two people of the same sex, and dare people to point that out, with the assurance that they will be ostracized as bigots if they do.  And make sure it's a word that expresses the very most foundational relationship in a society, the basis for the next most foundational institution- namely, family.

Then couch arguments with people defending the sane view of language and societal organization by asking them how two homosexuals down the block getting married in any way affects the happiness or stability of their own marriages.

Here's how, you jackboots:  The person so asked finds ever-less reinforcement in society for the kind of family life he or she strives to foster at home.  Other couples and "families" with whom he or she and his or her family interact - at the park, at PTA functions, in sports leagues - hell, at church, in a lot of cases nowadays - are increasingly going to be distorted models of family, with whom bonds can never be as naturally and easily formed as they are between actual, normal families.  Who is an actual wife supposed to relate to when her family meets the adults in one of these "families?" The husband?  Are they going to plan a fishing trip, or a football-game tailgate party?  With which "spouse" does a wife swap recipes, or form a book club, or talk about gardening?

How far along is the cultural dare?  What kind of vitriol do you think anyone taking the opposite view from the one that Slate has about the new Cheerios commercial will come in for?

We already know what pustules of poison human-rights commissions, with their diversity-training programs, are.

No one - no one - in 1868, the year the FourteenthAmendment was adopted, had the remotest notion that the word "marriage" would ever be redefined to include people of the same gender.  Follow the line of reasoning in these recent judicial rulings, and the Freedom-Haters / West-Destroyers will be able to ascribe bigotry to the fact that people in the year 300 BC didn't provide classes in rhetoric and geometry for their dogs.

As I say, the Freedom-Haters picked a dandy.  There are plenty of folks on the right willing to say that this one is lost, that it's time to move on to issues on which we can win - tax reform, rolling back EPA regulations, doing something about socialized health care, fighting jihad, whatever.  But the ultimate softening-up of our civilization will have been completed, and any victories on these other fronts will be meaningless, because we won't be a society that understands the difference between up and down, light and dark, male and female, right and wrong, profane and Godly, anymore.  And we'll deserve the defeat we'll get.  By the way, these new-fangled "families" won't be spared.

Activist judges' out-to-lunch views on the Constitution

The MEC appointee who has found Texas's voter ID law unconstitutional bases his decision on demographic considerations, likening voter ID requirements to Jim Crow-era poll taxes.  It's the same mentality that spurred SCOTUS justice Ginsberg to bring in the women angle in her Hobby Lobby dissent. You go that route and you are getting into the realm of people's choices.  There's no reason to assume an inherent link between someone in a minority demographic and an inability to get a damn picture taken. It's highly offensive that this judge ascribes overt discrimination to the motives of the legislators who crafted the law.  Same with the Ginsberg situation.  If a woman - or a man, for that matter - is interested in procuring a contraceptive, that is completely within the realm of that person's personal choices.  The person is not entitled to contraception, nor is it necessary to continuing drawing another breath in one's mortal shell.

So glad to hear Texas intends to appeal. The timing on this (weeks before the election) stinks.

Because federal judges are enlightened in ways Hoosiers and Utah residents can't begin to understand

A federal district judge in Indiana declares the universally recognized and old-as-the-human-species definition of marriage, as codified in Indiana law, unconstitutional.

As my astute sister points out:

Love the part where the judge says if you ignore the gender and sexual orientation, they are just like the couple down the street.  Sure, and if you ignore the feathers and fur, the bird and dog couple are just like down the street.  Some things can't be ignored out of existence.

And a three-judge panel in Utah acts likewise.

Another activist judge shreds another state's constitutional government as well as the foundation of our civilization

US District Judge Michael McShane and a federal appeals court have struck down a clause in an amendment to Oregon's state constitution that got a 60 percent vote a decade ago - a clause affirming the normal-people definition of marriage.  And Oregon's attorney general wouldn't lift a finger to defend those voters.

This is why this issue has to be addressed with state constitution amendments

Here in Indiana, there is a front in the culture war that is particularly divisive and heated.  A piece of legislation, HJR-3, will be voted on by the general public this fall.  It would amend Indiana's constitution to affirm the definition of marriage as one man and one woman.

You can't go a day without your Facebook newsfeed being clogged up with messages to the effect that you either oppose HJR-3 or you're a hater.

Folks with that viewpoint say that such affirmation is already in our statutes, so therefore an amendment would be redundant.  Several major universities, colleges and corporations have said it would send the wrong signal about Indiana to the rest of the world and curtail the state's economic advancement.

So why is HJR-3 needed?  To prevent what just happened in Virginia: the usurpation of state law by an activist federal judge.

State Attorney General Mark Herring and Governor Terry McAuliffe, both Democrats, have said they won’t defend the state’s constitutional ban.

Herring’s office issued a statement a couple of weeks ago saying they hope it “will be a landmark ruling in Virginia on one of the most important civil rights issues of our time.”

The judge concluded that prejudice is behind Virginia’s same-sex marriage ban. “Justice has often been forged from fires of indignities and prejudices suffered,” said Wright Allen.

“We have arrived upon another moment in history when We the People becomes more inclusive, and our freedom more perfect.”

The opinion also states that former directives issued by former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, to eliminate the state’s non-discrimination protections of sexual orientation,  gave rise “to suspicion of prejudice sufficient to decline to defer to the state on this matter.”

An excerpt from  the judge’s conclusion reads:

“The Court is compelled to conclude that Virginia’s Marriage Laws unconstitutionally deny Virginia’s gay and lesbian citizens the fundamental freedom to choose to marry. Government interests in perpetuating traditions, shielding state matters from federal interference, and favoring one model of parenting over others must yield to this country’s cherished protections that ensure the exercise of the private choices of the individual citizen regarding love and family.”

 What's at stake here is whether having state legislatures means a damn thing.

Of course, we've been obstructionists; these judicial nominees are bad news

Arnold Ahlert at Front Page gives us a glimpse of the DC Circuit Court nominees that the regime really want confirmed:

[Nina] Pillard is a radical feminist who wrote a 2007 law review article contending that abstinence-only sex education is not only “permeated with stereotyped messages and sex-based double standards about acceptable male and female sexual behavior and appropriate social roles,” but that it isunconstitutional. She defines ultrasounds as “deceptive images of fetus-as-autonomous-being that the anti-choice movement has popularized since the advent of amniocentesis.”

Yet perhaps the best example of her radical mindset was her discussion of the Supreme Court case “Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC” at a September 2011 press briefing for Georgetown’s Supreme Court Institute. The case was about the right of the Lutheran Church to choose their religious ministers. She characterized the Church’s position as “a substantial threat to the American rule of law,” and predicted the Court would be unlikely to uphold it. The Court ruled 9-0 in the Church’s favor. Thus, it would not be unreasonable to assume Pillard is to the left of even the most leftist judges on the Supreme Court.

Robert Wilkins’ press release reads like a dream. He received his B.S. from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1986 and his  J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1989. The Legal Times has named him one of the 90 Greatest Washington Lawyers of the Last 30 Years, and he currently practices “corporate defense/white collar, technology, and commercial litigation.”

What Wilkins’ press release fails to mention is that he led an illegal occupation of a Harvard law school building. He and his fellow students demanded a commitment from Harvard to hire 20 women or minority group members over the next four years as tenured or tenure-track professors. Seven of the professors, including four women, were to be black. That protest was undertaken in support of radical bigot Derrick Bell, whose Critical Race Theory posits that America is, and always has been, an intrinsically racist society. 

This is the future of post-America.

The embodiment of all that's wrong with our educational system, our court system, and our culture generally

Lee C. Bollinger is supposed to be quite the muckety-muck.  He's president of Columbia University and former dean of the University of Michigan law school.  That's scary, given the guy's views on the function of legal opinion.

On the NYT op-ed page today, he weighs in on the Supreme Court's decision to kick the affirmative-action case back down to the appellate level to re-examine the "strict scrutiny principle."  He then offers some pretty ripe pronouncements:

The court is as much an educator, a moral instructor, as an interpreter of the fundamental law of the land. In construing the constitutional issues so narrowly, the decision can be read as taking a reluctant, even begrudging, stance toward affirmative action.

Part of this hesitance is, no doubt, a product of judicial compromise. But for ordinary Americans, the linkage between race-conscious college admissions and the larger project of social justice is at risk of being lost amid the minutiae.

"Larger project of social justice."  Chew on that a while.

He cites disparities school-population patterns  as something it is proper for courts to address.  Hey, buddy, are you a jurist or a stinking sociologist?  Are you sure you know for certain the myriad reasons for these disparities?

Then he gets all gooey in the BVDs over the opportunity for legal decisions to make for dramatic moments in American history:

The greatest moments of jurisprudence have never been merely dry legal analysis, but have been linked to broader principles — and historical and social realities — from which they derive.

Look pal, you want some high drama to make the heart swell and the skin tingle?  Read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

I hope I see lots of other outlets taking down this dog vomit as the day goes on.

We already know one thing that's gonna get sequestered: Christianity

US District Judge Joe Heaton says that Hobby Lobby can't get out of the HHS mandate that private businesses have to provide insurance coverage for drugs that exterminate embryonic Americans.

His line of reasoning is getting way too much traction in post-American society.  It goes like this: the business in question is not an explicitly religious organization.  Indeed, it exists for a decidedly secular purpose: making money.

This dangerous blurring of the lines between what constitutes an entity comprised of citizens freely associating with each other and the realm of the state's purview is becoming a precedent.  If a person's faith really means anything, he must be free to have it inform his conduct in all areas of his life.

There is no right to health care, but there is a right to worship God in a biblically informed way, which means adhering to those principles in all situations.

That Judge Heaton is not capable of thinking this through to that truth does not speak well for our current juncture.