Tag Archives: responsibilities

“Impose Boundaries on Immigration Law”

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That’s the title of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s op-ed in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal.  In it, he decried the lack of uniformity of our immigration laws and associated judicial rulings on those laws.

…US immigration law is far from uniform. Inconsistent rulings by the 12 federal appellate courts have created a hodgepodge of jurisprudence, in which the applicable legal precedents depend on the location of the immigration court that heard a case.

He proposed a solution.

Congress can and should restore uniformity and promote efficiency by consolidating all immigration appeals in a specialized court of immigration appeals.

Whatever the merits of Rosenstein’s proposal, though, before any immigration law—any law—can have legitimate, and predictable, effect, boundaries have to be imposed on activist judges.  Before any specialist court—any court—can have legitimate, and predictable, effect, boundaries have to be imposed on activist judges.  This is particularly critical given the judge-centric nature of his proposal.

Judges cannot be allowed to place their personal views of societal need or “fairness” above what the law they’re applying actually says.  Judges cannot be allowed to violate their oaths of office with their imposition of personal views in place of imposing the text of the law(s) before them in cases, including immigration cases.

Failure requires consequences, else judicial failure will continue, to the increasing detriment of our republic.  Those consequences must include, in the most egregious instances or when particular judges demonstrate an especial predilection for activism, removal from the bench.

Pseudo-Journalism

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Terry Moran and Devin Dwyer, of ABC News, decided it would be cool, to make fun of President Donald Trump’s future funeral arrangements. In the middle of President George HW Bush’s funeral proceedings.  To draw attention away from the occasion of the death of an American President who oversaw the collapse of one of our post-war most powerful enemies.

They pretended to joke about an ego-driven funeral process.

Then there’s Don Lemon, of CNN.

I don’t think I would’ve shake hands with him. I would just—no, couldn’t do it. I’m not that big of a person. I would hope that I would be, but I don’t—I can’t fake the funk, as they say. And I’m not saying that the Obamas did that [when they shook hands with Trump at the funeral].
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I’m not petty and small.  That’s real, brother. That’s real.

Therewith, Lemon showed himself to be every bit as small and venal as he claims Trump to be.  With that, he’s showing how basely hypocritical he is.

And neither one of these crews could stand to cover Bush’s funeral without bringing out their Trump-bashing commentary.

Together, these two examples illustrate how far what passes for modern journalism has sunk. It’s become an insult to the intelligence and the character of honest Americans throughout our great nation.

A Stiff Sentence

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Recall that Jean-Claude Arnault was convicted in a Swedish court for rape in a case that also so implicated the Nobel Prize facility that it chose not to award a Literature prize that year.  For the crime, Arnault was sentenced to jail for an interminable two years.

Now a Swedish court has convicted Arnault of a second rape.  It sentenced him, for that crime, to an additional…six months.

Sweden surely takes a dim view of rape.

Sure.

Oh, and one of the items being considered in the US Congress this week is the Violence Against Women Act, which provides funding for battered-women’s shelters and other programs to prevent domestic violence and bolster its prosecution.  Here is a chance for us to draw some contrast with that European nation—or will the Progressive-Democrats succeed in making us a bit more like them as that Party insists on lighting up the Act like a Christmas tree with add-on froo-froo having little to do with the subject matter of the bill and thereby make it impossible to pass?

Desperation

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With his legacy mostly erased, and more of it on the way after the current temporary interruption—an outcome ex-President Barack Obama (D) will thank us for in the fullness of time and his clearer understanding—Obama is desperate to preserve such of it as he can with his revisionist history.

Former President Barack Obama on Tuesday took credit for the boom in US oil and gas production, saying, “That was me, people.”

Of course, it was.  His sequestration of Federal lands and offshore fields from oil and gas exploration with his slow-walking of the necessary permits were instrumental in triggering the boom.

You wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president. That whole—suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas….

Never mind that those year-on-year increases—small as they were—were driven by exploration and exploitation of those fields on private and other non-Federal lands.  The increases didn’t get serious until Obama and his administration were out of the way, but we’ll not mention that.

Another bit of history that the revisionist Obama carefully elided was provided by ex-Shell Oil Company President John Hofmeister:

…he tried to remake the power generation industry without involving Congress, and the Paris accords—again without involving Congress.

That remake was his threat—which he tried most enthusiastically to carry out—to eliminate our carbon-based (mostly coal, but oil and gas, also) electricity production industry, along with the wholesale destruction to our overall economy that acting on his Paris Accord would have wreaked.

The extent of Obama’s desperation is sad.

A Thought on Elitists and Common Sense

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Not mine; Thomas Sowell’s, from his The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy:

The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?

 

h/t Seawriter at Ricochet