Trump versus the Judge

Donald Trump won the presidency fair and square, but there’s a well-funded movement to resist his victory and defy the new president’s authority over the executive branch of our government. One federal judge, who sits nearly 3,000 miles away in the “other” Washington, has raised the stakes by ordering federal bureaucrats to disobey a lawful order by President Trump.

Judge James L. Robart’s reckless ruling shocked legal scholars because in so many previous decisions, courts have recognized the president’s power to keep aliens out of the United States. If taken literally, the judge’s ruling gives everyone in the world the right to sue in our courts for the right to enter and remain in our country.

“Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril,” Trump tweeted from Mar-a-Lago. “If something happens blame him and [the] court system. People pouring in. Bad!”

A few minutes later, he tweeted again: “I have instructed Homeland Security to check people coming into our country VERY CAREFULLY. The courts are making the job very difficult!”

“What is our country coming to when a judge can halt a Homeland Security travel ban and anyone, even with bad intentions, can come into U.S.?” read another Trump tweet. “When a country is no longer able to say who can, and who cannot, come in & out, especially for reasons of safety & security - big trouble!”

In the most offensive part of his ruling, the judge accepted the crazy argument that Washington State has the right to protect its own “residents” (not citizens) against the legitimate enforcement of federal law. The Supreme Court rejected that idea in the 1960s, when South Carolina tried to escape the federal Voting Rights Act, and it should do so again in this case.

While the President’s executive order works its way through the courts, the Syrian-born mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, signed his own executive order that prohibits the use of “any Borough funds or resources to assist in the enforcement of federal immigration law.” The defiant refugee from Aleppo proves the truth of Ann Coulter’s recent comment: “We let in one ethnic group out of compassion, then they form an ethnic power bloc to demand that all their fellow countrymen be let in, too.”

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