image credit: wisegeek
The media is going wild. President
Trump fired Sally Yates, the Obama-appointed acting Attorney General, because she
would not enforce Trump’s temporary suspension of immigration from seven Muslim
majority counties known to aid, abet, and finance terrorists. The legality of
President Trump’s EO is at issue, and if you are listening to any of the TV news
analyses, his temporary ban is not legal, it’s not American, etc., even though it was reviewed and approved by the Dept. of Justice Office of Legal Counsel.
One can debate
the policy wisdom of the executive order, which is plainly a temporary measure
while a more comprehensive and thoughtfully tailored policy is developed. The
seven countries the president has singled out are surely hotbeds of radical
Islam; but he has omitted other countries – e.g., Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of
the 19 suicide-hijackers who attacked our country on 9/11 – that are also
cauldrons of jihadism.
Furthermore,
as I have argued, the real threat to be targeted is sharia-supremacist
ideology, which is inherently hostile to the Constitution. Were we to focus our
vetting, unapologetically, on that ideology (also known as “radical” or
“political” Islam), it would be unnecessary to implement a categorical ban on
Muslims or immigrants from majority-Muslim countries. That is critical because
non-Islamist Muslims who can demonstrate loyalty to our constitutional
principles should not be barred from admission; while Islamists, on the other
hand, are not found only in Muslim-majority countries – other things being
equal, a sharia supremacist from the banlieues of Paris poses as much of a
threat as a sharia supremacist from Raqqa.
Yet, all that
can be debated as we go forward. For now, there is no doubt that the executive
order temporarily banning entry from specified Muslim-majority countries is
both well within President Trump’s constitutional authority and consistent with
statutory law.
But read the whole thing here.
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