As an increasingly unhinged "resistance" confronts an increasingly unhinged Trump administration, some passing observations:
• That we have lost sight of the two questions that matter most regarding immigration: whether Americans have the right to determine who can and cannot enter their country and whether they can tell those who have entered it illegally to leave.
Unless the answer to both of those questions is an unqualified "yes," then there is nothing else to talk about, because America will have ceased to exist as a sovereign nation-state; with its borders only "cartographic illusions" and the privileges bestowed by citizenship therein of no consequence.
• That the long-discredited legal doctrine of "nullification" is being ironically resurrected by the "sanctuary city" movement.
The idea that states have the right to disobey federal laws was invoked by Southern states prior to the Civil War on behalf of the preservation of their "peculiar institution"; now it is being asserted by liberal mayors and city councils on behalf of the "rights" of illegal aliens.
In both cases, the important constitutional question remains--what happens to a nation when Palo Alto and Madison get to pick and choose which federal laws they will and won't be bound by? And if cities get to do that kind of picking and choosing, what argument prevents us as individuals from doing the same?
When encountering such claims, it is difficult to disagree with Andrew Jackson who said, in response to South Carolina's efforts to assert the nullification right, "I consider ... the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one state, incompatible with the existence of the union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed."
• That it is possible for something to be both stupid but also constitutional, to wit, President Trump's executive order on refugees. Plenty of arguments have already been put forth that Trump's order was poorly drafted, ineptly implemented, and probably counterproductive in its national security consequences.
But on the basis of what bizarre legal reasoning did the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decide it was potentially unconstitutional, to the point of upholding a stay of its implementation?
The relevant statute that has been invoked by many U.S. presidents over time to impose comparable moratoriums (1182 f), states that "Whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such a period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate."
Not a lot of wriggle room in that, but somehow the judges of the 9th Circuit found some, thereby substituting their own political preferences for a straightforward reading of the law.
The point isn't that there can be no conceivable constitutional challenges to the president's authority on such matters (or on any matter), only that such authority is remarkably clear in this case and thus due the kind of substantial legal deference that the 9th Circuit Court failed to extend.
For once, Trump was right when he said that even "a bad high school student could understand this."
For better or worse, the president not only has the legal authority to unilaterally impose a moratorium on entry from the seven Muslim-majority countries specified, but to ban entry from all other nations indefinitely as well, if he so wishes.
• That polls suggest a growing number of Californians favor seceding from the union.
The humor comes when considering that the rest of us might be in favor of it too.
Although the secession effort will likely grind to a halt once Democrats realize they'll never win the presidency again without California's 55 electoral votes, we can all still fantasize about liberals pulling up stakes, detaching themselves from their contemptible (i.e., non-liberal) fellow citizens, and heading west to create their very own "People's Republic of California," perhaps with Gov. Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown as Head Commissar.
And that then maybe we could get certain kindred chunks of the other coast, perhaps New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts, to follow suit.
• That, sticking with California wingnuts, those who used violence to shut down the speech of far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley get it precisely backwards--speech is never assault, and assault can never be speech.
More to the point, the First Amendment exists to protect political speech, however unsavory, while the police exist to protect us from totalitarian goons who use violence to suppress such speech.
• Finally, that Hillary Clinton might have said one of the more odious things in a particularly odious political season when she claimed that "the future is female."
So what, exactly, does that mean? That the future has no place for men?
And how appropriate would it be for a male politician to say that "the future is male?" How would that be received by our guardians of political correctness?
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 02/20/2017