Sessions has been confirmed as Attorney General. This was a foregone conclusion, but it’s still newsworthy.
Parliament gives Brexit—and May—the green light.
Why did the Berkeley police hold back?
This does not bode well for the future.
Australians blame Turnbull…
About those seven countries and 9/11
[NOTE: Last night I wrote a draft for a new post about the 9th Circuit hearing concerning the TRO against Trump’s immigration EO. When I was finished, though, I found that it was enormous and contained enough material for about twenty separate posts on twenty separate related topics.
Well, I’m not going to be writing them today. And to top it all off, I’m extra-busy this afternoon. So I’m just going to dash off this one about one of those related topics, and it won’t be as thorough as I’d like it to be. I might add a few more of them this evening, depending on how inspired and energetic I’m feeling.]
One of the many issues raised by critics of Trump’s immigration EO is that it deals with seven countries, but those countries have not historically been the vectors of terrorism in the US. “Why not Saudi Arabia?” they cry. “After all, that was the country of origin of most of the 9/11 hijackers.”
True, but irrelevant. No one is claiming that the seven countries have been the origins of all or most of the terrorist attacks that have ever occurred in this country. Nor is that a necessary claim to make in order to consider the focus of the EO to be valid. 9/11 happened over fifteen years ago, and events—and the probable sources of present-day Islamicist terrorism, and probably future terrorism as well—have changed somewhat.
The seven countries were not chosen by President Trump. They were designated by President Obama and adopted by Trump, and no one (or very few people) raised an eyebrow at Obama’s choices at the time. And of course, those people who criticize Trump by pointing out that quite a few recent terrorists have been citizens are also mentioning something that isn’t particularly relevant, because our control over citizens is far less (we can’t deport a citizen we suspect of being a terrorist, for example). And the fact that some citizens are becoming terrorists does not mean that newcomers can’t be (or become) terrorists as well.
Trump’s EO is not just aimed at arrivals from the seven countries, either, it’s aimed at certain current legal residents who have recently visited any of the seven countries (which are places for terrorist training and ISIS connections), and those holding dual European citizenship as well as citizenship from one of those countries. In other words, the EO is designed to make sure that a dual French-Somalian citizen cannot come here for the moment; under Trump’s temporary EO he/she would be stopped for 90 days until new vetting rules are devised. At least, that’s my present understanding.
Those who advance the “include Saudi Arabia” argument are doing so for the most part with the knowledge that this isn’t going to happen, for practical reasons. Saudi Arabia is a country with which we have a completely different diplomatic and in particular economic relationship than we do with, say, Somalia. Now, you might think a Saudi ban would be a good idea, and perhaps Trump’s final vetting system will include a different type of vetting than at present for Saudis as well (I don’t know what the current vetting entails, or if it is inadequate). But, realistically speaking, Trump chose the 7 countries because they already had been designated by Obama and because our ties with them were not especially friendly.
However, there is one thing that is relevant about 9/11 and the Trump EO: the hijackers came here legally on visas:
All of them entered the country legally on a temporary visa, mostly tourist visas with entry permits for six months. Although four of them attended flight school in the United States, only one is known to have entered on an appropriate visa for such study, and one entered on an F-1 student visa. Besides the four pilots, all but one of the terrorists entered the United States only once and had been in the country for only three to five months before the attacks.
The four pilots had been in the United States for extended periods, although none was a legal permanent resident. Some had received more than one temporary visa, most of which were currently valid on September 11, but at least three of them had fallen out of status and were, therefore, in the United States illegally.
The terrorists had obtained U.S. identification that was used for boarding flights in the form of Florida, Virginia, California and New Jersey driver’s licenses/ID cards. One of the terrorists, Mohamed Atta, was detained in Florida for driving without a license, but subsequently obtained one. Thirteen of the terrorists had Florida driver’s licenses or ID cards, seven had Virginia driver’s licenses, at least two had California licenses and two had New Jersey driver’s licenses. According to the March 28, 2002 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Robert Thibadeau, director of Carnegie Mellon’s Internet Security laboratory, says that “the 19 terrorists on Sept. 11 were holding 63 state driver’s licenses for identification.”
(I’ve written a previous post about the visa issue and 9/11.)
We are indeed fortunate that there has not been any large-scale attack here subsequent to the 9/11 horrors. There are many theories as to why, but in this country most of the terrorists lately have been of the supposedly “lone wolf” type—and some of those arrested have indeed been from the seven countries (see this and this). It is also important and relevant to note that the seven countries feature in the history of many recent Islamicist terrorist attacks in Europe, and that although patterns there are somewhat different from here, they are not so very different than we can or should ignore that fact.
Boston Globe has a little “Dewey Defeats Truman” action
Here’s a photo of the classic jumping-the-gun press faux pas:
And this was the Superbowl story in an early edition of the Boston Globe, distributed in parts of Florida:
More from Astaire and Rogers
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers generated more human happiness than many do-gooders.
In the comments to the YouTube videos of their dance routines, you can find many people (some of them, I assume, young people) lamenting the death of this type of entertainment, class, style, grace, and romance:
Astaire and Rogers created their own world, their own atmosphere. Although it reflected something of the atmosphere of their times, it was a fantasy version of it. Their charm, their humor, their lightness, the poshness of their art-deco sets and Ginger’s sexy yet elegant gowns, the way they made it absolutely normal to break into song and dance as the best and most natural expression of themselves—no one else did it, and I doubt anyone else ever will. One of the most subtle and effective things that Astaire and Rogers did was to sing in a way that didn’t attempt to make their voices technically perfect (that would have been a futile endeavor, anyway) but only to be faithful to the words and tunes they were expressing. Note, also, the believable way each of them listened and reacted while the other was singing. You see Ginger doing it here, but sometimes it was the other way around.
Betsy DeVos confirmed
Pence casts the tie-breaking vote:
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer voiced his displeasure with the vote moments after she was confirmed, tweeting, “Today @VP Mike Pence did something no one else has ever done: cast the tie breaking vote on his own cabinet nominee.”
And of course, no Democrat would ever ever have done so if he or she had been in Pence’s shoes.
The legal question is not whether immigrants have a right of entry
Cornhead writes:
Foreigners who reside outside of the USA, don’t have a green card or a visa don’t have any constitutional rights. And especially they have no right of entry to the USA.
If it were otherwise, expect about one billion people moving here tomorrow.
Others in the same thread yesterday made similar points—for example, Chester Draws:
People with no right to live in the US are not covered by the Constitution. It’s mental to say non-US citizens have any US rights.
I’m also going to quote Yankee, who writes:
If a nation cannot decide whom it will admit into its country to become a citizen, then it is not a sovereign nation. Period, end of discussion.
The First Amendment is not an issue. Congress, as the legislative body, and the President, as the executive with enforcement, have the final authority. If the people, under the law, have chosen not to admit anyone, or any group of people, for any reason whatsoever, then that is their choice, and there is nothing to appeal to.
I’ve not seen anyone claiming—in the legal sense, that is, rather than the moral sense—that everyone has a right of entry to this country. The more valid question (as Yankee implies) is what branch of the US government gets to decide who is eligible and under what statutes with what restrictions (if any), and also whether the Constitution itself contains any limitations on this power to decide who to admit. As I wrote in my post:
And I agree with Andrew McCarthy that””if we wanted to do so””immigrants of a certain religion could be banned under certain circumstances without violating the Constitution.
So I think the argument asserting that the Establishment Clause (the one I discussed in yesterday’s post) pertains to Trump’s EO is extremely weak, perhaps non-existent.
However, another argument, based on the wording of an immigration statue passed by Congress in 1965, is somewhat stronger. Andrew McCarthy deals with it in this manner:
…[L]et’s consider the claimed conflict between the president’s executive order and Congress’s statute. Mr. Bier asserts that Trump may not suspend the issuance of visas to nationals of specific countries because the 1965 immigration act “banned all discrimination against immigrants on the basis of national origin.” And, indeed, a section of that act, now codified in Section 1152(a) of Title 8, U.S. Code, states that…“no person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence”…Even on its face, this provision is not as clearly in conflict with Trump’s executive order as Bier suggests. As he correctly points out, the purpose of the anti-discrimination provision…was to end the racially and ethnically discriminatory “national origins” immigration practice that was skewed in favor of Western Europe. Trump’s executive order, to the contrary, is in no way an effort to affect the racial or ethnic composition of the nation or its incoming immigrants. The directive is an effort to protect national security from a terrorist threat, which, as we shall see, Congress itself has found to have roots in specified Muslim-majority countries. Because of the national-security distinction between Trump’s 2017 order and Congress’s 1965 objective, it is not necessary to construe them as contradictory, and principles of constitutional interpretation counsel against doing so.
…Federal immigration law also includes Section 1182(f), which states: “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 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”…Section 1182(f) plainly and sweepingly authorizes the president to issue temporary bans on the entry of classes of aliens for national-security purposes. This is precisely what President Trump has done. In fact, in doing so, he expressly cites Section 1182(f), and his executive order tracks the language of the statute (finding the entry of aliens from these countries at this time “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States”)…Trump’s executive order also expressly relies on an Obama-era provision of the immigration law, Section 1187(a)(12), which governs the Visa Waiver Program. This statute empowers the executive branch to waive the documentation requirements for certain aliens. In it, Congress itself expressly discriminates based on country of origin…So, not only has Congress never repealed the president’s sweeping statutory power to exclude classes of aliens from entry on national-security grounds; decades after the 1965 anti-discrimination provision touted by Bier, Congress expressly authorized discrimination on the basis of national origin when concerns over international terrorism are involved. Consequently, by Bier’s own logic, the 1965 statute must be deemed amended by the much more recent statute.
It takes a bit of patience to follow that. But the gist of it is that there are two statutes that appear to be relevant, although one appears to forbid Trump from barring people from certain countries while the other allows him to do so, especially if the ban is temporary and for national security reasons (Trump’s EO fulfills both of these criteria). McCarthy is arguing (very convincingly, I believe) that the section allowing Trump to do this controls. Those seeking to block Trump would argue that the prohibition listed in the 1965 statue controls.
But neither of these legal arguments is based on the assertion that everyone has a right to come here. They are based on settling a disagreement between statutes, and involve which branch of government has the power to do what, and what statute controls. The challenges as to whether the EO itself is unconstitutional involve a different issue.
The Constitution and Trump’s immigration EO: when is a religion not a religion?
If you want some good discussions of the legal niceties of the restraining order issued on Trump immigration EO, there are a number of posts you can read: this and this at Legal Insurrection, this at Powerline, and this at Althouse.
Judge Robart’s original opinion was unusually laconic, and so we are in the dark on what legal basis (if any) he ruled, although we do have the legal briefs that show what arguments were advanced (I have not read them). Althouse mentions that a recent NY Times article’s author emphasizes the Establishment Clause primarily, so perhaps that was it.
The Establishment Clause refers to a section of the First Amendment regarding religion (which applies to states as well):
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…
Attorney Jonathan Turley has this to say about the immigration EO and the Establishment Clause:
… I’m still skeptical about whether you could make a successful establishment claim. There’s a lot of cases that have to be moved aside to get from here to there if you want to strike down this law.
It is true there’s establishment issues, but there’s also plenary power in the hands of a president…
I don’t see a court, any court saying that what a candidate said on the trail is going to be material in terms of whether this law is struck down. And I’m surprised that Neal even suggests that.
I have been in cases where those types of arguments have been raised, and courts have shot it down. For example, what if – I mean, Trump clearly said that. But he then gave this law to someone to draft, and they came back with a law that is not a Muslim ban.
Now, I don’t like the law, but I don’t think any court is going to look at this law and say it’s a Muslim ban, because it’s not. There’s plenty to object about this law without making it something it’s not. It doesn’t ban all Muslims.
I could go on and on and on with the legal questions involved, because they’re actually very interesting. But that would be an enormous post, and I’m not going to be writing that at the moment. What I will say is that this law obviously is not a Muslim ban; I’ve argued that before, and it’s obvious on the face (as Turley indicates), for the simple reason that plenty of Muslims can still enter the country under it.
The EO (under a more general law passed years ago by Congress) temporarily calls a halt to visas and immigration from certain countries where Islamic terrorism is rife. Islamic terrorists want to kill us (not just us, of course; but us among many others). That’s not anyone’s imagination; it’s a fact. If we are going to let people into this country from those countries, we’d better make very sure we have a good way to screen them. But one thing we also know is that Muslim terrorists in those countries also have as their major targets—for murder and mayhem—the Christians who live in those countries. A distinction is being made by the US government between those who among a pool of people who are the possible victimizers and those who are their proposed (or actual) victims.
If we cannot make such distinctions under the law, we are in trouble. Because this problem will not go away. It is as though, if we had wanted to, we could not have made exceptions during the Holocaust for Jews to come to this country, despite the fact that Jews were the Nazis’ central (although not only) targets.
The entire issue shines a spotlight on the question of what happens when a religion (let’s call it religion A) becomes a mechanism for a significant number of its adherents to murder members of another religion (let’s call it religion B) who live in their countries. Can we not offer the latter group some sort of preference under our immigration system? And what if those same murderous adherents of religion A want to kill us, too? Don’t we have a duty to examine a bit more closely anyone from religion A who might want to come here, through some sort of ideological vetting? And what of other adherents of religion A who might not be killers at all, but who support their cause?
This is not an easy problem to solve, when we also know that there are large numbers of adherents of religion A who also are fleeing persecution and strife and who would like to come here.
As far as Islam goes, I have already written a post on the subject of whether it is a religion. My answer: it is. I have also written about Islam’s vulnerability to interpretations that support terrorism. If you want to understand where I’m coming from on the subject, please read those two posts. But for the purposes of the present, I’ll just say that Islam is a religion—and it also is a religion that has most of the world’s terrorists claiming to be part of it, and has another much larger number of co-religionists who support the destructive activities of those terrorists around the world, as well as another very large group who do not approve of or share those activities.
Is it realistic to treat this religion as though these things were not true? Is it realistic to consider that because Christians—who do not represent a vector of terrorism in the world, and in Arab countries are among its most common victims—are also followers of a religion, that adherents of each religion pose equal risks? Is the Establishment Clause applicable? Is it even applicable to screening immigrants or visitors to this country at all?
Andrew C. McCarthy has this to say on the matter:
…[I]t is specious to claim that the Constitution forbids a religion test in matters of immigration. This is not merely because the Constitution has nothing to say on the matter (for, as we’ve also noted before, the original presumption was that immigration enforcement would be left to the states, with the federal government limited to prescribing the qualifications for citizenship). It is also because Congress has long expressly made inquiry into religion part of immigration law, specifically, in determining what aliens qualify as “refugees,” and whether aliens qualify for asylum…
Of course, the fact that the Constitution does not forbid a religious test for immigration does not mean the imposition of one would be prudent policy. We have Muslim friends and allies who embrace the West; who reject fundamentalist sharia-supremacism, resist Islamists, and help us fight jihadists. It would be costly to adopt a policy that slams our doors on them. Neither, however, can we remain willfully blind to the fact – and it is a fact – that as Muslim populations grow in Western societies, sharia supremacism and the formation of insular communities where jihadism flourishes grow with them…
Promotion of assimilation and fidelity to the Constitution have been historical bedrocks of immigration policy. Indeed, before immigrants are naturalized as citizens, they must swear what is pointedly called an “oath of allegiance.” It calls on them to renounce any foreign sovereigns by whom they have been ruled, and to honor our Constitution ”” principles that are inimical to sharia supremacism. We should resist a categorical ban on Muslim immigration; but nothing in the Constitution prohibits the commonsense vetting of immigrants for beliefs that are antithetical to our principles, regardless of whether the immigrant perceives such beliefs as religious or political in nature. We should welcome immigrants who embrace our principles, seek to assimilate into our society, and are value-added for – rather than a strain on – our economy. But if, in an era of jihadist violence, we cannot seriously vet immigrants to determine whether they fit this bill, it would be better to have a categorical ban. And if, based on an illiterate construction of the Constitution, the political class insists that its fictional “no religious test” rule forbids not only a categorical ban but the heightened scrutiny of Muslim aliens, it would be better to prohibit immigration across the board.
I don’t support an outright religious ban. I do support temporary differential scrutiny based on national origins, as well as a preference for those who are under direct and imminent threat (that would naturally be the Christians in Arab countries). I absolutely support a more long-term approach that features ideological screening for all (which I believe is the ultimate goal of Trump’s temporary EO, although time will tell). And I agree with Andrew McCarthy that—if we wanted to do so—immigrants of a certain religion could be banned under certain circumstances without violating the Constitution. But I don’t think that’s necessary or desirable, nor do I think it is what Trump’s EO is doing or his immigration policy is going.
We’ll see.
So, was it the best catch ever?
Or just the best catch in Superbowl history?
The dog gets more excited here than the guy on the left of the screen. My reaction was more like the guy on the right:
Of course, these feats don’t matter so much if the timing isn’t right. This one had the right timing. In fact, I think it was the game’s turning point. And boy, did that game turn! 180 degrees.
In the comments last night, “GRA” asked the following:
Question about the New England Patriots. Do all (really in general) of New England actually support the Patriots as their football team? Say if Boston Red Sox or the Boston Bruins won their respective league would New England be celebrating or just mainly Boston, granted they don’t have the qualifier of “New England”?
My answer was that all of the Boston sports teams belong to New England, not just the Patriots. The Red Sox, the Bruins, the Celtics; everyone in New England roots for them.
There’s one exception, though. Hartford, Connecticut is the great sports dividing line. South of Hartford a lot of people are fans of the New York teams. But north of Hartford, it’s all Patriots, all Red Sox, all Bruins, all Celtics, all the time. Intensely so, rabidly so.
But “Gringo” pointed out that there’s also an east/west divide in Connecticut, with the Connecticut River being the dividing line. I agree that this divide exists, too. And in fact, I don’t think of Connecticut as part of New England at all. I think of it as New York North. And I think of Rhode Island as New York Northeast. To me, New England begins with Massachusetts.
If you look at a New England map you’ll see exactly why this sports divide exists:
Superbowl thread
[See postgame UPDATE below.]
I can’t pretend I care all that much.
But the Patriots are playing, so I’m rooting for them. And I’m watching—sort of.
So here’s a thread for those of you who have something to say about this particular institution. There’s always the ads, too. And Lady Gaga—oh, whatever will Lady Gaga do or say?
Another thing I don’t much care about.
UPDATE 11:35 PM
I take it all back. It’s not so much that I suddenly care about football—but that, THAT was a game. Everyone says it was the greatest game in Superbowl history. Since I’m no Superbowl expert I don’t know, but I can easily imagine it. I think it was one of the greatest upsets, greatest performances by greatest number of people, greatest come-from-behind victory, and other superlatives too numerous to mention.
New England’s going crazy with joy.
For me, the turning point of the game was the catch by Julian Edelman. The terrible performance by the Patriots in the first half only made their stunningly great performance in the second half that much sweeter.
Funny comment from Ace’s: The Patriots won fewer quarters, therefore their victory is illegitimate.
Nepenthe
Wordsworth wrote: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…”
Now researchers indicate that sleep itself is a forgetting:
In 2003, Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposed that synapses grew so exuberantly during the day that our brain circuits got “noisy.” When we sleep, the scientists argued, our brains pare back the connections to lift the signal over the noise.
In the years since, Dr. Tononi and Dr. Cirelli, along with other researchers, have found a great deal of indirect evidence to support the so-called synaptic homeostasis hypothesis…
Luisa de Vivo, an assistant scientist working in their lab, led a painstaking survey of tissue taken from mice, some awake and others asleep. She and her colleagues determined the size and shape of 6,920 synapses in total.
The synapses in the brains of sleeping mice, they found, were 18 percent smaller than in awake ones. “That there’s such a big change over all is surprising,” Dr. Tononi said.
The second study was led by Graham H. Diering, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Diering and his colleagues set out to explore the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis by studying the proteins in mouse brains. “I’m really coming at it from this nuts-and-bolts place,” Dr. Diering said.
In one experiment, Dr. Diering and his colleagues created a tiny window through which they could peer into mouse brains. Then he and his colleagues added a chemical that lit up a surface protein on brain synapses.
Looking through the window, they found that the number of surface proteins dropped during sleep. That decline is what you would expect if the synapses were shrinking.
(A window into mouse brains? Reminds me why I never became a medical researcher.)
Shakespeare described sleep well (he described most things well):
Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast,–
[NOTE: The title of this post isn’t just a restaurant in Big Sur with an astounding setting, it’s “a medicine for sorrow, literally an anti-depressant ”“ a ‘drug of forgetfulness’ mentioned in ancient Greek literature and Greek mythology, depicted as originating in Egypt.”]