Swamp of the Ineffectual Presumption

With all the celebration I’m seeing about the 9th District Court’s ruling this evening, I can’t help wondering:

Where was all this confidence in the separation of powers back on election day?

And can we maybe back off on the Hitler and fascism talk now?

I watched Sean Spicer’s press conference when I got home tonight, and one part struck me as information I had not heard before. He cited 8 US Code 1182 as the president’s authority to suspend immigration in his Executive Order (around 7:00 in the video). He read it out loud, and it sounded pretty clear-cut to me. It was the first time I heard any mention of where they derived their authority.

I couldn’t help but notice that I heard it first from the Press Secretary and not from any media outlet.

Anyway, I went to my Googles and looked it up to verify it. (I have to take it on faith that Cornell has the real and accurate text of the U.S. Code on their web site.) Here’s the whole section:

(f)Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President

Emphasis mine. I’m no lawyer but that sounds pretty clear to me. Sure looks like the President can basically do whatever he wants with immigration.

It’s official: I can’t keep up with Trump anymore.

Every day he signs new orders, says new things, writes new tweets, and I don’t have time to keep reading them and trying to figure out what the heck they mean or whether to push the panic button or not.

This was undoubtedly the plan, the way to keep us ordinary citizens from keeping an eye on the government, forcing us to rely on media organizations to distill it down for us, which they always do wrong.

P.S. I don’t think it’s time to push the panic button yet, but this Republican ideal carried forward from the Bush administration of creating a locked-down police state is very annoying.

By the way, there is much more to talk about regarding the Executive Order on Immigration and its impact over the past weekend (detainees at airports, ACLU, stays, etc.), but the news is flying around so fast and furious that it’s basically impossible to sort out what’s real and what’s fiction right now. Depending on who you listen to, everything is either back to normal, or there are armed stand-offs between all three branches of government. (That is an exaggeration for comedic effect, I have not actually heard that–either claim, actually.)

I’m fairly confident nobody is being taken to “black sites” though.

Here’s another beauty:

That’s completely preposterous. Pure fear-mongering. Throwing gasoline onto a fire. Whatever other metaphor I can think of.

I don’t believe these “rogue” government Twitter accounts are real for one second. I was instantly suspicious the moment I saw them.

Why?

Because real government whistle-blowers go to the press, where they get protection.

Also, you know, I read some of their tweets. Like the one above. They aren’t credible. They’re probably the same anarchists who protest in the streets regardless of who wins an election.

Tonight I’m seeing people circulate the idea that @RoguePOTUSStaff is a Russian disinformation campaign.

I believe RoguePOTUSstaff is a Russian disinformation account, and I'll prove it. (Bear with me)

— Ghost Ryder (@cateia97) January 30, 2017

I don’t necessarily agree with that either, but I’m at least happy to see the people who were enthusiastically ready to follow the rogue government accounts into battle, are now showing some doubts.

I guess the only way to kill one fiction is to invent an even bigger fiction. :)

UPDATE 10/28/2017

Snopes looked into the “rogue” accounts. I trust Snopes more than random people on Twitter. @RoguePOTUSstaff is, as expected, not on the list of trusted accounts. The account is still active and currently has 847k followers (including an alarming number of my friends who should be smarter).

Incidentally, to the best of my knowledge, that “anti-LGBT EO coming” never happened.

I’m not pleased with Trump’s Executive Order restricting immigration.

It runs contrary to the spirit of America.

I understand the need to vet immigrants, but a universal ban on immigration, particularly banning refugees from war-torn Syria, sends a really bad message to the world that I’m embarrassed to be a part of.

I’m particularly embarrassed by the priority given to Christian immigrants. That, in my opinion, is the work of Mike Pence, who I’m increasingly worried is pulling Trump’s puppet strings.

That being said, I cannot find the specific language in the Executive Order which prioritizes Christians over other faiths. I can’t help but wonder how you prove someone is a Christian or not anyway. Oh, here it is, it’s hidden:

“the Secretary of Homeland Security, is further directed to make changes, to the extent permitted by law, to prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.”

So it’s not “Christians” per se it’s “minority religions in the country of origin.”

Regardless, that is a direct violation of the American principle of religious neutrality.

Lest we give up hope, however, here is some good news.

The ban only lasts 90 days:

“I hereby suspend entry into the United States, as immigrants and nonimmigrants, of such persons for 90 days from the date of this order”

There is language in the Executive Order which allows exceptions:

“the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security may, on a case-by-case basis, and when in the national interest, issue visas or other immigration benefits to nationals of countries for which visas and benefits are otherwise blocked.”

And … well, there are elections coming up in 2020.

UPDATE

Saturday night a federal judge in New York ruled that people with valid visas could not be sent back to their country origin. That’s how separation of powers is supposed to work. It’s only temporary, though. The judge’s ruling is only going to help people stuck in airports, it won’t have any effect on future immigration.

Note: This is my first post after making some changes to the site’s infrastructure. I hope it’s still working.

Here’s another fun bit of conservative propaganda I found on Facebook:

Once again I have to point out that you can make any political point with data and statistics, liberal, conservative, or any variation between.

And here’s another reminder that I still don’t know the source for that picture of the National Mall or when it was taken. However, calling it “not accurate” is … not accurate, as I’ve discussed before.

Now about that voting map. First let’s point out that we can’t tell just from that Facebook post whether the map is real or not, since there is nothing showing the source. Some guy could have made that image in Photoshop for all we know. But let’s assume it’s true because I’ve seen similar maps from a wide variety of sources, and it’s consistent with voting patterns from the last three presidents.

The most obvious thing I can say about that map is that while it looks like the amount of red totally dominates the amount of blue, in reality there are probably more people in the blue places than in the red places. That’s because most of those blue areas are probably urban areas, and most of those red areas are probably rural areas where you might not see another person for hundreds of miles.

I have to caveat the above statements with “probably” because the map is colored only with red and blue. It should be colored largely in shades of purple. The map makes it look like everyone in the red areas voted for Trump. In reality, those counties are colored red if more than 50% of voters went for Trump. If you were to color the map in such a way that it only showed red in places where 100% of voters went for Trump, there would not be very much red on that map.

 

In case you think I only rag on liberal viewpoints, here I will passive-aggressively respond to a very conservative Facebook post:

The true purpose of The Wall is to create a government welfare program for construction companies.

Zing!

(Apologies if that person does happen to read this blog someday, but I don’t engage with politics on Facebook ever, for any reason.)

Here’s another tweet I saw going around:

Silencing of federal government
Gag rule
Actual Nazis
Threat of martial law
$20b border wall
Goldmann-Sachs cabinet
State Propaganda pic.twitter.com/Xu5hEsTo4P

— Mikel Jollett (@Mikel_Jollett) January 25, 2017

Again I’m all for keeping an eye on what the president is doing, but …

“Silencing of federal government” doesn’t even make sense.

“Gag rule” is wildly out of context.

“Actual Nazis” is actually not true because actual Nazis are registered with the actual NSDAP party which actually dissolved in 1945.

“Threat of martial law” is wildly untrue.

“$20b border wall” is … okay that is true except it will probably cost a lot more than that.

“Goldmann-Sachs cabinet” is … okay that’s also (partially) true but nobody is poor in Washington, DC.

“State Propaganda” is … I don’t even know what that’s referring to; I guess they were just two scary-sounding words to throw in at the end of a tweet, made up out of thin air.