The Corner

Jim: Later in the interview, President Trump brings Bolton back up himself. Here’s the exchange.

Mr. Bender: You’ve talked about holding China accountable for coronavirus. Do you think they sat on that information about the virus in order to tank other economies around the world?

Mr. Trump: They did something because if you look, they had very little outbreak, although now they seem to have an outbreak in Beijing, which is interesting, as of yesterday. But everybody knew they had it. I acted very early. I closed our country to China.

By the way, Bolton disagreed. He thought we shouldn’t do it, okay? He didn’t think and you know, I was in a room full of people. You were there. And of the people, I don’t know of anybody that thought I should do it. That was a decision I made because I was seeing and hearing that China has a big problem.

Bolton and Trump had a very public blow-up and Bolton either quit or was fired months before Trump partly closed traffic from China. Perhaps confused as a result, Bender asks a follow-up:

Mr. Bender: Did you consult with Bolton on coronavirus?

Mr. Trump: No. I lost respect for Bolton’s intellect fairly early in the process.

Perhaps the president’s memory is faulty, or perhaps he’s just making things up.

Yesterday I noted that if Trump’s numbers in every state rose by 6.6 percentage points, they would show him with an electoral majority.

Trump’s numbers as president have been famously stable, but it’s also worth pointing out that various polls about him have shifted that much in less time than this race has left. In 2016, Clinton’s lead over Trump shrank that much (or a little more than that much) three times.

Ezekiel Emanuel was a major architect of Obamacare, is currently an important adviser to the Biden campaign, and in my view, is a good chance for secretary of Health and Human Services if the former vice president is elected.

Biden has said he wants to add a public option to the existing Obamacare law. But I suspect the policy would go way beyond that. Here is Emanuel’s money-shuffling proposal for health-care reform. From a KCRW interview conducted by Warren Olney:

One of the important results of my book is that with single payer, we understand this to mean the government pays hospitals, the government pays doctors. But there’s also single payer where people pay into the government and then the government pays then private insurance companies. People get to choose their private insurance company and then that private insurance company is responsible for coordinating and organizing the care. That latter model where you have a choice of private insurance company exists in the Netherlands and in Germany and I think that kind of model could be well adapted to the United States.

That sure seems like an inefficient approach. And what kind of “choice” would we really have, since the government would clearly dictate coverage parameters as happened under Obamacare?

Emanuel is a health-care technocrat who wants to impose a one-size-fits-all system for the entire country. Considering his influence in Democratic circles generally and Joe Biden specifically, that is a fact worth knowing.

President Trump, in an interview with Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender in the Oval Office Wednesday evening, discussing John Bolton:

He had a lot of policy disputes, he and I. And after the first month or so, you know, I asked him one question. I said, “So, do you think you did the right thing by going into Iraq?” He said, “Yes.” And that’s when I lost him. And that was early on. That’s when I lost him. But no, I disagreed with much of the stuff he said. He was one of many people. I liked listening to many people, and then doing whatever is the right thing to do.

Mr. Bender: You didn’t ask him about Iraq before you brought him into the White House? If he regretted that?

Mr. Trump: No, but it didn’t . . . I knew all about his policy on Iraq. But that didn’t matter, frankly. Because he made a terrible mistake. And so did everybody else involved in Iraq and the Middle East, frankly. I never thought it was the right thing to do. And I’ve been proven right. But when he told me he still thinks it was the right thing to do, and was unable to explain it to me, I said, “Explain that to me, because I don’t think you can.” And he could not explain it to me. So I said, “Do you say that just to make yourself feel good? Or do you say that because you really believe it?” He said, “I really believe it.” I said, “Well, then you’ve lost me because it’s just wrong.”

This is a pretty remarkable exchange. John Bolton is not exactly shy about his views. If Bolton ever said or wrote anything that indicated or suggested he regretted the decision to invade Iraq, I missed it. It’s surprising that Bolton’s answer surprised Trump, and Bender’s incredulity that the issue never came up in the job interview is palpable. (What did Trump and Bolton talk about before he was hired?) And from Trump’s words, he lost faith in Bolton’s judgment in matters of national security about a month or so after Bolton took the job. Bolton served as national-security adviser for 16 months!

Elsewhere in the interview, Trump said, “The only thing I liked about Bolton was that everybody thought he was crazy.” Hopefully, the president sees more qualities he appreciates in current national-security adviser Robert O’Brien.

I read two stories this morning, back-to-back. The first:

President Kent Fuchs announced a decision that will not sit well with a lot of Gator fans Thursday and that includes the former player most often associated with the cheer of “Gator Bait.”

Lawrence Wright, who famously uttered the phrase, “If you ain’t a Gator, ya Gator bait, baby” after a 1995 win over Florida State at The Swamp, was livid after the announcement that UF will stop using the cheer.

“While I know of no evidence of racism associated with our ‘Gator Bait’ cheer at UF sporting events, there is horrific historic racist imagery associated with the phrase,” Fuchs wrote in a UF statement titled ‘Another Step Toward Positive Change Against Racism.’ “Accordingly University Athletics and the Gator Band will discontinue the use of the cheer.”

Wright, who was planning to launch a line of bobbleheads, shirts and No. 4 jerseys with the phrase he is well known for, said he was most upset that there was no discussion about it.

“The Gator Nation is a culture, too,” said Wright, who is Black. “It’s not about what happened way back in the past. How about our culture?

“Me and the president need to sit down and talk about this.”

Wright did receive a call from a University Athletic Association official to inform him of the decision.

“I’m not going for it,” said Wright, who won the Jim Thorpe Award for the nation’s best defensive back in 1996. “I created something for us. It’s a college football thing. It’s not a racist thing, It’s about us, the Gator Nation. And I’m Black.

The second:

OAKLAND, Calif. — Oakland’s mayor said five ropes found hanging from trees in a city park are nooses and racially-charged symbols of terror but a resident said they are merely exercise equipment that he put up there months ago.

Mayor Libby Schaaf said Wedesday that a hate crime investigation was under way after a social media post identified a noose at the city’s popular Lake Merritt. Police said they searched the area on Tuesday and found five ropes attached to trees.

The Police Department provided five photographs of trees, some of which showed knotted ropes and one that appeared to have a piece of plastic pipe attached to a rope, hanging from tree limbs.

They have been removed by city officials.

Victor Sengbe, who is black, told KGO-TV that the ropes were part of a rigging that he and his friends used as part of a larger swing system. He also shared video of the swing in use.

“Out of the dozen and hundreds and thousands of people that walked by, no one has thought that it looked anywhere close to a noose. Folks have used it for exercise. It was really a fun addition to the park that we tried to create,” Sengbe said.

“It’s unfortunate that a genuine gesture of just wanting to have a good time got misinterpreted into something so heinous,” he told the station.

Nooses have been associated with the lynching of black people and used as symbols to taunt or terrorize African Americans.

Schaaf said officials must “start with the assumption that these are hate crimes.” However, the mayor and Nicholas Williams, the city’s director of parks recreation, also said it didn’t matter whether the ropes were meant to send a racist message.

We have now hit the moral-panic stage in our ongoing “national conversation” about race. In both of these cases, the authorities have explicitly confirmed that there is no cause for alarm, and yet, in both, they have decided to continue anyway. Worse still, in both cases they have decided to cast their unnecessary actions as a “win” in the fight against racism. President Fuchs has confirmed that he knows “of no evidence of racism associated with” the “Gator Bait” chant — and, indeed, that he knows it was thought up recently by a black man. And yet he has also proposed that to ban the chant represents “Another Step Toward Positive Change Against Racism.” In Oakland, the mayor has confirmed that she knows that the ropes were put up as exercise aids — and, indeed, that they were placed there by a black man who wanted to do something useful for his community. And yet she has also proposed that this does “not matter.” The irrationality, it seems, is the point.

This thinking is not merely silly, it is dangerous. In isolation, these two incidents will not bring about the end of the republic. But the attitudes that have informed them could. Furthermore, if they are made regnant, those attitudes will be disastrous for precisely the people their champions believe they are helping. Who, exactly, do we think suffers the most in cultures that dismiss evidence and disregard intentions? What sort of racial justice do we believe can be achieved by allowing white authority figures to blame black men for transgressions that they vigorously deny? In whose name, exactly, are these decisions being taken?

Fanatical literalism of this sort is the sworn enemy of human understanding. Intelligent people are able to process information within its context and, thereby, to distinguish between superficially similar elements. A robot may struggle to distinguish between the N-word as thrown by a racist and the N-word as used in Huckleberry Finn, or between a noose of the sort that Ida B. Wells knew and a rope being used as a swing, but an adult should have no such problem — especially when that adult has put been in charge of a large city or of a major state university. Any idiot can scan his surroundings for naughty words and verboten signs; it takes a person of judgement and discretion to filter what he sees through his understanding of the world. In Gainesville and in Oakland, such people are sorely missing. And so the riot continues.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, leftist academics declared that they were “speaking truth to power” with their critiques of American government and society. Now that the Left has come to utterly dominate our education system, however, everything has changed. The Left is the power and so certain that it has a monopoly on truth that others should not be suffered to speak. There has never been a greater threat to the integrity of the academic enterprise.

The Martin Center has just released a paper on this subject. In today’s article, Anthony Hennen summarizes the work of the two authors, Sumantra Maitra and Joy Pullmann.

They focus first on a pair of recent feminist papers that make no effort at all to disguise their goal of controlling what students are taught to think. They advocate that leftist scholars should infiltrate all branches of our colleges and universities and act not as educators (in the traditional sense), but as insurgents.

“The transformative effect of this activist approach is great,” Hennen writes. “Political litmus tests, such as diversity statements for hiring, would become routine and mandatory at thousands of public institutions. The free speech culture on campuses would decline as more university rules to silence speech deemed rude or offensive would be approved. De facto peer pressure would fill in the gaps left by de jure campus rules to silence the tongues of non-conforming students and professors.”

Many recent campus occurrences where mobs of students and faculty have demanded the firing of professors who dare to disagree with them in even the slightest respect show how far along the takeover is.

The authors provide some ideas for higher education leaders who have the backbone to fight to retain the integrity of their schools. I’m afraid that there aren’t many like that.

Ian Holm, English actor of stage and screen, has died at age 88. Like Max von Sydow, the Swedish actor who died earlier this year, Holm had a long and varied career. He became perhaps best known recently for his role as Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptation of the early 2000s (he had played Frodo in a 1981 BBC radio adaptation). But he had already enjoyed a vast and successful career before that, with roles in Alien (1979) as the mysterious android Ash, in Chariots of Fire (1981) as real-life track coach Sam Mussabini, as Father Vito Cornelius in the bonkers yet enjoyable The Fifth Element (1997), and many more.

It can seem a cheap kind of memorializing of actors simply to list the roles they played, however famous they may have been. But in Holm’s case, there is an added reason to do so: They represent a triumph of more than just acting. Incredibly, given the skill of his performances, Holm contended with stage fright. According to the BBC:

For a time he had parallel careers in both theatre and cinema. But he had a history of depression and was finding stage appearances more difficult.

“The crack-up”, as he later termed it, came during a 1976 production of The Iceman Cometh, when a sudden attack of stage fright forced him to stop performing.

Apart from two brief appearances, one as Uncle Vanya in 1979, he did not return to the stage for 18 years.

Those who enjoyed Holm’s performances should be grateful he managed to overcome this in film and television. I was disappointed earlier this month when he failed to appear in a videochat reunion of virtually all the principal cast of the Lord of the Rings. He did send a letter to be read aloud by the chat’s host that, sadly yet perhaps fittingly, serves as one of his final appearances in public life:

Dearest friends from the Ring: I am sorry to not see you in person. I miss you all, and hope your adventures are taking you to many places. I am in lockdown in my hobbit home — or Holm. With all my love, Ian Holm.

And now he is quite ready for another adventure.

Every now and then, I start writing a Corner post and never get around to finishing it. Back at the end of May, I started writing a response to John McCormack’s assessment that Amy Klobuchar’s prospects of becoming Joe Biden’s running mate were quickly shrinking. I thought John’s assessment was sound, but that the political environment was frequently changing, and that if Biden thought Klobuchar was the best choice to take over as president and serve as vice president, he might still pick her anyway.

Good thing I never got around to posting that one! “Senator Amy Klobuchar said Thursday that she is withdrawing her name from consideration as Joe Biden’s running mate, saying a woman of color should be chosen as vice-presidential nominee instead.”

This morning, some political observers are concluding that Klobuchar could see the writing on the wall — as in, the writing on the wall was graffiti from Black Lives Matter activists declaring, “Don’t pick Amy Klobuchar.”

But let’s think through the absolute worst-case scenario for Klobuchar. Right now, the polls look golden for Joe Biden. Imagine that Biden picked Klobuchar, helping him among some demographics in the Midwest but largely disappointing African-Americans, and infuriating progressive activists who don’t like Klobuchar’s record as a prosecutor. Then imagine that on Election Day 2020, turnout among African-Americans is lower than expected in places like Florida and Pennsylvania and Ohio and North Carolina . . . and Trump emerged with more than 270 electoral votes again. The entire Democratic Party would be livid with the Biden-Klobuchar ticket, and the Minnesota senator would be known as that other woman who had a golden opportunity to beat Donald Trump and blew it.

If a Biden administration comes to pass, it will have plenty of other prestigious cabinet posts for Klobuchar if she wants one. Joe Biden may even feel he owes her a plum posting. If he wins, he will have been helped along by Klobuchar putting her personal ambitions aside and playing good soldier twice — once in the primary, and now in the running-mate selection.

And whatever goes wrong for the Democratic ticket in November, it won’t be her fault.

Dan’s piece on the home page nicely explains the absurdity of the Supreme Court’s DACA ruling. In his conclusion, he writes, “DACA repeal will still happen — if Trump is in office long enough for DHS to finish the task.” This is probably true, but not automatic.

The weak sisters in the White House may well have greeted this decision with secret relief, in that it could let the administration off the hook for acting on DACA before the election. But letting the issue ride and simply blaming bad judges would be a mistake. It’s true that letting DACA recipients stay is widely popular, as polls repeatedly show. But it’s just not that important to people who might vote for Trump. And the administration can make the perfectly reasonable argument to DACA-curious voters that any DACA amnesty deal would be irresponsible if it didn’t include measures to prevent a recurrence of DACA (measures today’s radicalized Democrats could never accept, even in the most watered-down and adulterated form).

The greater political danger for Trump would be not pushing forward to re-rescind DACA. As Dan wrote regarding today’s ruling, “for those who wanted Trump to repeal DACA, it also means that their votes have, thus far, counted for nothing.” If those voters are going to show up in November, they need to see that Trump is doing his best to push past the obstacles placed before him by his enemies.

But Trump has displayed remarkable weakness recently — in response to the riots and the Bostock transgender ruling in particular. Bin Laden’s strong-horse–weak-horse dynamic is a general rule in human affairs, and Trump has been a weak horse lately. He can’t turn that around merely by tweeting that such rulings are “shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives” — he needs to act where he can, and he has plenty of opportunity here.

And in any case, the administration may not have a choice but to push ahead with re-rescinding DACA. As my colleague Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and Hill staffer, noted on a livestream we did earlier today, Attorney General Bill Barr will likely feel compelled to issue another analysis of DACA’s illegality (supplementing Jeff Sessions’ 2017 letter on the matter). This is because today’s Supreme Court ruling implicitly acknowledged the illegality of DACA in noting that the program was reviewable by the courts precisely because it is not, as the Obama DHS claimed, merely a passive exercise in non-enforcement, but rather an affirmative grant of benefits (a work permits, Social Security number, and more).

If Barr does that, acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf will be hard-pressed not to re-rescind the program, despite the likelihood that he’d rather not (since he’s merely the latest Trump DHS secretary not to agree with the president’s immigration agenda). And if the White House has any sense, it will pressure Wolf to act sooner rather than later, and avoid diluting the rescission measure with lots of special-interest exceptions.

As everyone on both sides agrees, this is ultimately Congress’s problem, because it’s the legislature’s job to, y’know, legislate. But until there’s a deadline, Congress isn’t going to do anything. And the only way to impose a deadline is to rescind DACA.

1. Hartford Courant: New data show COVID-19 deaths in Connecticut nursing homes represented 80% of all deaths over past week

2. N.J. doesn’t have the ability to hold nursing homes accountable for thousands of avoidable deaths

3.

Nursing home residents unavailable for comment https://t.co/iPLTRvJsAT

— Daniel Darling (@dandarling) June 17, 2020

4. Reuters: U.S. emergency trafficking hotline says calls spiked under lockdown

5. This Family Lost Everything. A Catholic School Rescued Them. Now It’s Gone, Too.

6. Naomi Schaefer Riley: America Needs to Open the Schools

7.

Pope emeritus Benedict XVI left the Vatican today to fly to Regensburg, Germany, to be with his brother, Georg, who is sick.

According to the press office, he will stay in Germany "for as long as necessary." pic.twitter.com/52556uh9VW

— Ines San Martin (@inesanma) June 18, 2020

8. Russell Moore: Just How Secular Should America Be?

Continue reading “Twenty Things that Caught My Eye Today: Open the Schools & More (June 18, 2020)” →

When I heard about the reasoning in Chief Justice John Roberts’s decision concerning the DACA case, I had a real deja vu experience. Roberts applied arcane administrative law jurisprudence to obtain a particular policy result he favored — and without creating a policy precedent that would bind future court rulings on the substance of the issue.

Here’s the deja vu part: During the George W. Bush administration, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a guidance that prohibited federally controlled substances from being used in assisted suicide. The lawsuits flew predictably, and the case ended up in the Supreme Court.

Just as Roberts did today, in 2006 Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a 6–3 majority in Gonzales v Oregon, ruled that the government could indeed prohibit controlled substances from use in assisted suicide. But awww, gosh darn, too bad — Ashcroft went about it the wrong way. From my analysis published here back then:

The general media spin about the case has been that, as Reuters put it, the Supremes issued a “stinging rebuke” to the administration and endorsed the assisted suicide as a legitimate public policy. But this isn’t true. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority decision even acknowledged that the Justice Department was “reasonable” in its assertion that “medicine’s boundaries” preclude assisted suicide. The majority also explicitly agreed that the federal government possesses the inherent power to prevent narcotics from being prescribed for assisted suicide, for example, by amending the federal Controlled Substances Act. The case provided neither a sweeping assertion of the validity of assisted suicide nor a ringing endorsement of its legality being strictly a matter of state’s rights.

So if the federal government can, in theory, preclude controlled substances from being used in assisted suicide, why did it lose? The majority believed that former Attorney General John Ashcroft went about that task in the wrong way. Specifically, it ruled that Ashcroft exceeded his authority when he determined that assisted suicide was not a “legitimate medical use” of controlled substances without obtaining any information about the practice of medicine, assisted suicide, or other relevant matters necessary to come to that conclusion from outside the Department of Justice. Consequently, the Court found, Ashcroft’s interpretation, while reasonable, was not persuasive because it exceeded his “expertise.”

See how that works?

You have to admire the elegance. Administrative law offers a great sleight of hand opportunity for “conservative” judges and justices to block policies with which they disapprove — and without leaving any incriminating ideological fingerprints.

. . . and many other things on the website for my documentary John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court. I’m the host. The producer and director is Leo Eaton; the executive producer is Thomas Lehrman. Filmed over the course of a year in a dozen states, we interview an array of historians and legal experts, including two justices of the Supreme Court, to cover the life of John Marshall and eight of his most significant cases.

Sign up at the website for info on distribution, TBA.

Whenever the relationship between the president and the military comes up, people bring up what President Harry Truman allegedly said about General Douglas MacArthur: “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a b****, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.” The veracity of this quote is sufficiently widely accepted that it appears on Wikipedia.

But did he say it?

The source is Merle Miller, who in 1973 described remarks that Truman had allegedly made to him in interviews in 1961 and 1962. In 1974, Miller came out with an “oral biography” based on the interviews.

In a 2006 book, however, historian Robert Ferrell said that he had listened to the tapes and concluded that Miller’s book was “a gross literary fraud.” Miller, Ferrell wrote, “changed Truman’s words in countless ways, sometimes improving the literary effect. Adding or subtracting words, he thoughtfully added his own opinions. He inserted his favorite cuss words. . .”

Miller presented Truman as having made very similar disparaging remarks about Tom Clark, whom Truman had appointed attorney general and later a Supreme Court justice. In 2013, Clark biographer Alex Wohl shed more light on Miller’s methods:

In 1963, Miller sent Truman a draft of an article he had sold to The Saturday Evening Post, to which the president composed a response saying “I am not in favor of such articles, especially this one which has so many misstatements of fact in it. I am sorry that that is the case and if you publish it I shall make that statement public.” The president subsequently retained a lawyer and threatened to sue, which led to the article being pulled. . . .

A former Clark law clerk who saw the two men together the same year Miller interviewed Truman recalled, “it was obvious that any disappointment the President may have had with some of Justice Clark’s earlier decisions had long since been forgotten. There was a great warmth between these two great men.”

Israel Shenker, in his 1973 New York Times report on Miller’s purported revelations, precedes the quote about MacArthur by noting, “Mr. Miller has not found this on his tapes.” NRO readers might be able to correct me if they have more information, but I bet I know why Miller didn’t find it.

“Coronavirus has come to Trump country . . .  After being centered in blue states, cases are now being added faster in red ones,” the headline above a Philip Bump article declares in the Washington Post.

Measuring both political preferences or coronavirus cases by state results leads to some pretty broad generalizations. For example, New York City is perceived as deep blue for good reasons, but Staten Island voted for Trump, 56 percent to 41 percent. The coronavirus swept through Staten Island and had 13,748 cases and 1,026 deaths, as of Wednesday afternoon. New Jersey is a blue state that almost always elects Democrats statewide. But Trump carried Hunterdon, Morris, Sussex, and Warren counties in the northern part of the state in 2016, and those counties have 1,049, 6,652, 1,170, and 1,205 cases respectively, and 67, 638, 151, and 139 deaths respectively — fewer than the bluer counties closer to New York City, but hardly unscathed.

Do these areas not count as “Trump country” because they’re red patches in states that generally vote Democratic statewide?

The same phenomenon works in reverse. Arizona is a red state that usually elects Republicans statewide; right now Maricopa County is getting hit hard, with almost 24,000 cases as of this writing. But Trump carried this county by just three points in 2016.

Bump writes, “Coronavirus cases spiked in blue states but were generally more limited in states Trump won in 2016. That’s no longer the case.” I suppose if you squint and hand-wave away data that doesn’t fit the narrative, yes. Didn’t Trump win Michigan, and wasn’t that one of the states hit harder early on? It still ranks ninth in the country. Pennsylvania ranks eighth, and Florida ranks seventh. Ohio had one of the fastest-spreading spikes in April — does it count as one of those blue states? Is our measuring stick for red or blue based upon who won in the presidential race in 2016, or the current the party of the governor? If that’s the case, is Maryland a red state or a blue state?

Bump writes, “Texas, Florida and Arizona all saw highs in the number of new daily cases this week.” Yes . . . and so did California, more than 4,000 cases in a single day. Oregon and Nevada set records, too. If someone wanted to point to those states, and say, “These blue states that voted for Hillary Clinton and are run by Democratic governors are experiencing record numbers of cases,” that would be equally accurate. It’s not because of the governors they have, it’s because the process of reopening society and the economy to any degree was inevitably going to lead to more people spreading the virus.

Big cities on the coasts got hit first and hardest because they have a lot of international air travelers, high population density, and, particularly in the case of New York, a lot of people riding the subways and buses — enclosed places and circumstances where it is hard to socially distance. The virus took longer to reach more rural states — but once it arrived, it could spread quickly, as we saw at the meatpacking plants.

There’s little evidence that blue states are handling the virus one way and red states another. Blue state governors want to get their economies moving too, and red state governors want to prevent further infections and deaths, too. Everybody’s trying to manage the risk as best they can and are hoping that their state’s citizens are making good choices. As much as some people might really want to see a “blue states are good and handling the pandemic better, while red states are bad and handling the pandemic worse,” the evidence to support that conclusion just isn’t there.

I understand that procedural arguments are boring, ineffective, and passe, and that fewer and fewer American are moved by them. But we might want pollsters and media outlets to understand the difference between policy outcomes and constitutional process.

Take a look at this non sequitur:

The Supreme Court's rejection of Trump's attempt to end the #DACA program aligns with findings from @Pewresearch survey showing that Americans broadly support legal status for immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children https://t.co/6O04yxzhK4

— Neil G. Ruiz (@neil_ruiz) June 18, 2020

As with the Supreme Court’s recent re-imagining of Title VII protections, the media are acting as if the recent decision preventing Trump from immediately ending DACA was a referendum on values, empathy, and the intrinsic value of “Dreamers,” rather than on the ability of the president to simply fabricate laws by fiat.

There are a number of persuasive economic and moral arguments for legalizing the children of illegal immigrants. Indeed, as it happens, I support the goals of DACA. But, if they are to become law, they need to . . . well, become law. I also support dropping the corporate income tax to zero. That doesn’t mean I would approve of Donald Trump asking the IRS to stop collecting certain revenue streams by decree.

If you don’t believe that DACA circumvents the proper constitutional process, just hear out Barack Obama, who, on numerous occasions, admitted as much.

In October of 2010:

“… I am president, I am not king. I can’t do these things just by myself. We have a system of government that requires the Congress to work with the executive branch to make it happen.

In March of 2011:

“With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case . . . . for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.”

In July of 2011:

“Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own. And believe me, right now dealing with Congress, believe me, believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you. Not just on immigration reform. But that’s not how; that’s not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy functions. That’s not how our Constitution is written.”

In Sept of 2011:

“And I think there’s been a great disservice done to the cause of getting the DREAM Act passed and getting comprehensive immigration passed by perpetrating the notion that somehow, by myself, I can go and do these things. It’s just not true . . . . We live in a democracy. You have to pass bills through the legislature, and then I can sign it.”

Obama didn’t lie about all the small things, only about all the big ones. And after signing the executive directive on DACA, Obama claimed it was just “a temporary stopgap measure.”

Should presidents be able to “bypass Congress” and “change the laws” using “a temporary stopgap measure,” and simply wait a few decades until his party has enough votes to pass it through the prescribed constitutional manner? Seems to me that undermines the entire purpose of having a Congress.

For years Democrats argued that Obama was impelled to act because Congress wouldn’t do its “job.” I’m sorry, but if you can’t elect enough people to pass your priorities, or you’re unable to find a compromise, that’s your problem. Congress is under no edict to pass liberal priorities. And Dreamers are not predestined for protection.

Anyway, if SCOTUS is going to endorse executive abuse, it should, at the very least, have the decency to allow both sides to engage in it equally.

“Eight years ago this week,” Obama wrote today, “we protected young people who were raised as part of our American family from deportation.” We didn’t do anything. You did, by yourself, without any congressional authorization, and against your own stated positions.

The question pollsters should be asking isn’t whether the Supreme Court’s rejection of Trump’s attempt to end the DACA “aligns” with Americans support for legal status of illegal immigrants, but rather if it aligns with the idea presidents can “bypass Congress and change the laws.”

Well, some presidents.