Obama and the Australian deal

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Events move so quickly these days that I often do a whole bunch of research on something, but by the time I write the post the caravan moves on. This is one of those posts. But the issues remain important, even if our attention has shifted to other things.]

I have to say that until Thursday I had paid very little to attention to Australia’s immigration policy. But if you look at some of the history going back several decades, you’ll see that Australia’s struggles with the issues of illegal immigration and refugees highlight the problems faced by so many Western nations in the face of unwanted illegal immigration. Australia is somewhat atypical because it’s an island, but it exhibits the general tendency of a natural clash between a country’s desire to be magnanimous and to offer safe havens for the truly needy and the desire to protect itself from those who are perceived as a threat to overburden its resources and/or change its nature for the worse. There’s also the fear that letting in some people would unleash the floodgates to way too many others by providing an incentive for illegal immigration. And then there’s the difficulty of determining which arrivals really are true asylum seekers fleeing vicious persecution, and which are people one might call “economic refugees” who should be getting in line to be legal immigrants instead.

Which brings us to the deal Obama struck with Australia last November to accept some of the refugees that country holds in island camps administered by neighbor nations such as Papua New Guinea. Thursday the deal suddenly and belatedly became big news, but only because of reports of a supposedly contentious phone call between Trump and the Australian PM. That does not mean that the deal wasn’t reported on when it had first occurred; it was. It just wasn’t one of those viral stories everybody was talking about back then.

So what was the Obama/Australia deal? One of its peculiarities was that it was made after Trump’s election—in fact, right after his election (that’s another reason so many people were distracted at the time; so much attention was focused on the Trump win). One of the earliest articles I could find about the Obama deal was written on November 11, 2016, and was based on an unofficial report:

The refugees are primarily from the Middle East.

Coalition frontbencher Christopher Pyne said there is “plenty of time” to get an agreement in place before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January…

The refugees are currently placed in camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Australia has some of the harshest immigration laws in the world.

The government recently announced plans to put a lifetime ban on everyone trying to enter the country by sea.

So from the start it seems it was rather clear that this deal was made at that time in order to finesse Trump. Otherwise, the timing was just too too too coincidental.

Here’s how CBS reported the Obama deal on November 13, 2016, shortly after it became official:

The United States has agreed to resettle an unspecified number of refugees languishing in Pacific island camps in a deal that is expected to inspire more asylum seekers to attempt to reach Australia by boat, officials said on Sunday.

So, the deal was expected to encourage more refugees to come to Australia by boat, and Australia will refuse to take, them, too. More from the November 13 article:

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull would not say whether he had discussed the deal with President-elect Donald Trump during their telephone conversation on Thursday. The Obama administration had agreed to resettle refugees among almost 1,300 asylum seekers held at Australia’s expense on the island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Another 370 who came to Australia for medical treatment then refused to return to the islands would also be eligible.

“We deal with one administration at a time and there is only one president of the United States at a time,” Turnbull told reporters.

So everyone seems to have known at the time that this was a last-minute way to make a deal with Obama during the waning days of his presidency, and to get around president-elect Trump’s expected objections to the deal.

The refugees seem to have had pretty firm ideas about where they would prefer to go:

Australia pays Nauru and Papua New Guinea to house boat arrivals and has been searching for countries that will resettle them.

Few refugees have accepted offers to resettle in Papua New Guinea and Cambodia because most hope that Australia will eventually take them in.

Any refugee who refuses to go to the U.S. would be given a 20-year visa to stay on Nauru, a tiny impoverished atoll with a population of 10,000 people, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said.

It’s unclear from that article how many would have been allowed to go to Cambodia had they wanted to do so, or how many actually would have accepted Cambodia as a destination if offered. It seems from this article that Cambodian resettlement was planned to begin with only a very limited number of the refugees and then work up to a larger number.

And there’s this about the incentives created by the deal with Obama:

Refugees who arrive in the future would not be sent to the United States, [Turnbull] said.

“We anticipate that people smugglers will seek to use this agreement as a marketing opportunity to tempt vulnerable people onto these perilous sea journeys,” Turnbull said. “We have put in place the largest and most capable maritime surveillance and response fleet Australia has ever deployed.”

Australian Border Force Commissioner Roman Quaedvlieg said ships had been positioned to turn boats back to Indonesia if asylum seekers attempt to reach Australia in the hope of being sent to the U.S.

We also learn from this NY Times article on November 12 that the majority of the refugees involved are men, as is often the case: “About 410 men, women and children are held on Nauru, and 823 men are held on Manus Island.” I was also trying to get some idea of where the majority of these people are really from, and I found this at the Guardian (an article from just a few days ago):

A specific breakdown of nationalities among those determinations is unavailable, but according to the Australian parliamentary library, by far the largest group of detainees in Australia’s offshore centres are from Iran ”“ one of the seven listed countries.

In figures from 2014 and 2015, Iranians were the dominant cohort on both Manus and Nauru. On Manus there was also a large portion from Iraq and a number from Somalia, both among the seven “countries of concern”.

Because the Manus group is all male, we can assume that the male contingent of the refugee population is largely from Iran, Iraq, and Somalia. I would imagine that the vast majority really are fleeing trouble in their home countries; after all, all three countries have got plenty of trouble. But there certainly could be terrorists among that group, as well. And it’s a population that definitely needs more ideological vetting than the Obama administration was prepared to give it, because there is an excellent chance that quite a few would be terrorism supporters, sharia advocates, and extremely intolerant of various human rights (for women and gay people, to name just two) that are part of Western society

In my quest to find out more about the refugees themselves—are they mostly economic refugees, for example?—I came across this rather amusing tidbit from the Guardian on November 13, 2016, shortly after the deal was first announced:

The Greens initially dismissed the idea [of Australia’s deal with Obama right after the election], concerned about sending people to “Donald Trump’s America”, and continued its demand that people be brought to Australia and settled here.

Better a refugee camp than “Donald Trump’s America,” apparently—although the Greens later changed their minds and decided that Trump’s America would do. As for other countries:

Many asylum seekers and refugees long ago stopped wanting to come to Australia and had written letters to various world leaders pleading for assistance, including to the US, Canada, New Zealand and the Vatican.

Yes, indeed; what about Trudeau’s Canada, where last week the young PM proclaimed the following?:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a jab at President Donald Trump’s executive order on refugees Saturday, tweeting that Canada will welcome all those fleeing war and terror, regardless of their faith.

“Diversity is our strength,” he wrote, following up by posting photo of himself greeting a young Syrian refugee.

At the time Obama struck his deal with Australia, Trudeau had been Canada’s Prime Minister for a full year. Somehow, in that year, he couldn’t seem to find the time to take in any of the Australian refugees. Or perhaps he couldn’t find the inclination, despite his lofty words.

I’ll close with a quote from Australian Prime Minister Turnbull in a press conference Thursday:

Turnbull reassured reporters that the United States remains a staunch ally.

“I can assure you the relationship is very strong,” he said. “The fact that we received the assurance that we did, the fact that it was confirmed, the very extensive engagement we have with the new administration underlines the closeness of the alliance.”

So, what was this all about, anyway? (That question was rhetorical.)

Why didn’t the Trump administration make it clear whether Iraqis who helped the US would be affected by his immigration EO?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve said before that Trump and his advisors should have ironed out a lot of things and clarified them before releasing his immigration executive order. Sloppiness is wrong on two scores: it leads to bad outcomes for many people, and it opens the administration up to valid criticism. It forces officials to play catch-up, scrambling to correct misperceptions and revising the order as originally written. A little bit of this is to be expected; nobody’s perfect. But there’s been an unacceptable and needless level of it this time.

For example, as I’ve written earlier, why not allow people already in transit on airplanes to arrive under the old rules? Why not make it crystal clear at the outset that it doesn’t affect green card holders? Both would not only have made the order more well-thought-out, but would have deprived Trump’s opponents of countless talking points and illustrations of hardship and outright stupidity. For an example of both hardship and stupidity: why, of why, couldn’t the administration have stated that people who helped the US military in Iraq—and to whom we promised a safe harbor here—were exempted from the ban?

These are not esoteric categories, either. That last one is in the nature of an obvious no-brainer. It doesn’t take nit-picking lawyers to figure out most of the exemptions that needed to be covered and communicated. Trump himself wouldn’t necessarily have been expected to think of these details (although it would have been nice if he had). But what about the teams of advisors and lawyers who ordinarily help with these things?

Initial reports claimed that Trump and his closest advisors didn’t run this by the Office of Legal Counsel at the DOJ. Allahpundit at Hot Air commented:

Dropping an EO of this magnitude on DHS at the last minute, with little notice and little regard for its legality, on the say-so of Bannon and Miller is…not something you’d do if your top priority is rolling out a clear, well-tailored reform to immigration policy. It’s something you’d do if your top priority is making a nationalist splash to show that “Trump means business” or whatever. If he gets sued over it ”” and he will, a lot ”” well, then, that only proves the depth of his commitment to nationalism. Trump’s politics has always been a politics of confrontation. Signing a vague, sloppy order over which the left was sure to go berserk is thus a feature, not a bug, of the new system.

A feature to many of Trump’s most fervent supporters, that is. But not to me. I’ve said I’m going to call them like I see them. I will give praise when I approve of what he does, and criticize him when I don’t. This is one of those latter times. And let me add once again that I am in favor of more rigorous vetting for immigrants, in particular the inclusion of some sort of ideological test, and I think visas should be somewhat more restrictive as well. But do it in a smarter way.

It doesn’t seem as though the situation of those Iraqis who helped us has been cleared up even now. These people would be very unlikely to need extra vetting; they are well known to those Americans who served there and whom they risked their lives to assist. However, one category of these immigrants seems to have been cleared up after initial confusion—those who already hold Special Immigrant Visas:

Department of Homeland Security officials initially did not respond to requests for comment on whether Trump’s executive order represents a blanket ban on Iraqi nationals with Special Immigrant Visas, or SIVs, who served as interpreters for the U.S. military; on U.S. service members who are citizens of the seven Muslim countries; and on Iraqi pilots and officials who come to the U.S. to train with the U.S. military.

DHS spokeswoman Gillian Christensen later told Foreign Policy that under the order, Iraqi SIV holders are to be treated essentially the same as legal permanent residents, such as green card holders.

But the exemption should not just apply to people holding visas at the moment (although that’s certainly important). It’s about the future, and keeping promises to people in the general category of helpers. And from the following statement, found in the same article as the Christensen quote, it appears that even those who had already been approved for SIVs remain somewhat uncertain of their status:

Fred Wellman, a retired Army officer who served for 22 years, including four combat tours, said the executive order blocking those who served with the U.S. military is “very personal to me.” One interpreter he worked with is struggling to get by in Erbil, Iraq, while another, who was approved for an SIV, was due to come to the United States this spring but is now in limbo.

“My first interpreter was murdered by Al Qaeda and we were able to get his family here very quietly in 2005,” Wellman told Foreign Policy Monday. “Now we have thousands stuck, and it will make it incredibly difficult to get local help now and in the future if we don’t keep our promises to those who risked their lives and now pay a price for it at home.”

This is a rare issue on which Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree. I can see no excuse for any delay on the matter. Prior to January 30, Trump’s Secretary of Defense Mattis requested that the administration act on this, and a bipartisan letter from some members of Congress was sent as well:

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers have sent a letter urging President Donald Trump to honor a request by Secretary of Defense James Mattis to exempt Iraqis who served as “interpreters, aides and other allies who risked their lives alongside U.S. personnel in Iraq” from the recent national security executive order.

As far as I can see, members of Congress are still making the same request. Another letter has been sent, the content of which was announced yesterday. This one was signed by 15 Republicans and one Democrat.

One of Trump’s big selling points was his supposed devotion to the military. I doubt that most military people, particularly those who served in Iraq, would be in favor of this sort of unexplained foot-dragging. This was the time for Trump to have shown people that he could be tough and firm in protecting the American people and yet careful to also protect others to whom we promised protection, and clear about the intent of the EO towards all relevant classes of person it might have affected. He failed (rather dramatically) to do so, and the consequences have been to give the left a great deal of ammunition—not to mention sowing alarm and fear among people who don’t even fall under the rubric of the EO but have are needlessly panicked because of all the confusion.

Immigration was one of the main centerpieces of Trump’s platform. He began his presidency run about a year and a half ago. He’s got a lot on his plate, but the substance of the EO should have been well-chewed and digested before the announcement occurred.

[NOTE: There’s also the fallout from the temporary halt issued by a judge:

President Donald Trump’s government moved swiftly Saturday to comply with a federal judge’s order halting his immigration ban — even as Trump denounced the judge.

The Department of Homeland Security announced it has suspended all actions to implement the immigration order and will resume standard inspections of travelers as it did prior to the signing of the travel ban.

William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection has quite a bit to say on the matter of two court rulings on this; I recommend reading the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt:

How can we have such different decisions out of two separate federal courts [in Seattle and one in Massachusetts that reached the opposite conclusion]? It’s because the people seeking to overturn the Executive Order only need to win once, the government needs to win in every district court. That is why an appellate court needs to weigh in on this.

The Seattle TRO is outrageous. As of this writing, there is no indication in the 9th Circuit electronic PACER docket that an application for relief has been filed by the government.

Hopefully the government will be in front of the 9th Circuit quickly to obtain a stay of the TRO, and if that fails, the U.S. Supreme Court. In addition to the merits, there are serious issues of whether a state has “standing” to challenge the refusal of the federal government to allow entry into the U.S. of foreigners who themselves have no legitimate claims as to visa denials.

The issue is not whether the Executive Order is wise, it’s over who gets to make the decision on what constitutes necessary security procedures with regard to foreigners wanting to enter the U.S. That decision in the past always has been reserved to the executive branch.

I hope that the administration expected these court challenges. If not, they were incredibly naive. Again, this back-and-forth oscillation gives the impression—and probably rightly so—of a chaotic rollout (remember that phrase from Obamacare?), and of amateur hour.

I know people on the left who believe that the chaos was intentional, and the goal was to discourage travel and immigration to the US. I don’t happen to agree, but I admit that it’s a real possibility. And I’ll add my old mantra: we’ll see.]

Caroline Glick on Donald Trump and the Middle East

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s Caroline Glick on Trump and the Middle East:

The PLO is disoriented, panicked and hysterical. Speaking to Newsweek this week, Saeb Erekat, PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas’s chief conduit to Israel and the Americans, complained that since President Donald Trump was sworn into office, no administration official had spoken to them…

Erekat’s statement reveals something that is generally obscured. Despite its deep support in Europe, the UN and the international Left, without US support, the PLO is irrelevant.

All the achievements the PLO racked up under Obama ”“ topped off with the former president’s facilitation of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 against Israel ”“ are suddenly irrelevant. Their impact dissipated the minute Trump took office.

Israel, in contrast, is more relevant than ever.

While Trump occasionally pays lip service to making peace in the Middle East, his real goal is to win the war against jihadist Islam. And he rightly views Israel as a woefully underutilized strategic ally that shares his goal and is well-placed to help him achieve it.

During the electoral campaign, Trump often spoke derisively of Obama’s nuclear pact with Tehran. And he repeatedly promised to eradicate Islamic State. But when asked to explain what he intended to do on these scores, Trump demurred. You don’t expect me to let the enemy know my plan, do you?

Trump’s critics dismissed his statements as empty talk. But since he came into office, each day signals that he does have a plan and that he is implementing it. The plan coming into focus involves a multidimensional campaign that if successful will both neutralize Iran as a strategic threat and obliterate ISIS.

Glick’s article is worth reading in full. I have no idea whether she’s correct, but Glick is always interesting.

[NOTE: And here’s a discussion of Trump’s recent statements on settlements, and how it was twisted by the MSM.]

Milo Yiannopoulos, Berkeley, free speech, riots, and Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Riots in Berkeley, California resulted in the university’s decision to cancel a scheduled speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, and the incident has been characterized as a blow against freedom of speech and/or First Amendment rights. In a very technical sense it wasn’t, because the First Amendment isn’t really involved here [emphasis mine]:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

In other words, “freedom of speech” does not guarantee a person the right to address a group as official speaker in a particular venue such as Berkeley. But Berkeley itself has a commitment to what we might instead call free speech—the presentation of speakers with a diversity of viewpoints, even controversial ones. But it is a mark of where universities are these days, ideologically speaking, that allowing someone with the viewpoints of Yiannopoulos to speak on the campus as an official speaker (he was invited there by the Berkeley College Republicans, a student group) represents a show of (relative) courage by the administration.

What happened next was the problem:

The event began as a peaceful protest. Some students reported on Facebook that things turned violent when masked individuals not affiliated with the school turned up, though the details of what happened are still unverified. Images on Twitter depicted violent protests with damage to local business.

So apparently there was some sort of peaceful protest by students, who were exercising their free speech rights to protest. There’s an inherent and ironic paradox there, of course, because they (at least, to the best of my knowledge) were advocating the banning of Yiannopoulos from speaking on campus, not just protesting his policies or the content of his speech. In this manner, they were in line with recent trends displayed by students on many campuses all around the country to attempt shut down or ban speech they don’t like rather than merely argue with it on the merits. But at least they were doing this in a peaceful way initially, and the Berkeley administration seems to have intended to let Yiannopoulos speak.

Enter the “outside agitators.” They were certainly “agitators”; it’s not clear if they all were really “outside” or whether many were Berkeley students. Clearly, however, they meant to cause exactly the result that ensued: the cancellation of the Yiannopoulos talk at the university. Whether they were mainly leftists, anarchists, or some combination of the two, if one is inclined to throw around epithets such as “Nazis,” the “outside agitators” were the ones who fit the term the best of all the players in this incident.

Who was most at fault? The police (or rather, whoever gave them their orders), for not controlling the riot and violence with greater force and more arrests? To me, that is the answer. Why should law-breaking thugs get their way? I’m not the only one asking that question:

Police officers came prepared in riot gear and about 100 outside agitators aimed at causing chaos came armed with sticks and rocks. Some set off fireworks in the middle of Sproul Plaza. Others threw objects at UC police.

And as the violence escalated, officers pulled back.

Susan Walsh was stuck on the second floor of UC Berkeley’s student union building where she was waiting to hear Yiannopolous speak when protests outside turned violent.

“It was a riot. It felt like a war zone,” said Walsh. “Absolutely felt like a war zone.”

Police gathered on the balcony demanding that the crowd disperse, but made no moves against the protesters.

“They were equipped to shoot rubber bullets or what have you, and they really didn’t do anything. And, I thought, ”˜We are sitting ducks,’” said Walsh.

When asked why police didn’t move in and stop the rioters, UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof replied, “Police tactics are driven on a campus by need, the non-negotiable need to protect our students and ensure their well being.”

University officials said police decided to stay back to prevent injuring innocent protesters and bystanders who could have been hurt if officers waded into the crowd.

And what about who could have gotten hurt if they didn’t wade into the crowd? What about the danger of letting rioters have their way? What sort of message of weakness and chaos does that deliver?

Despite the destruction and violence, there was only one arrest by university police. City of Berkeley police, who monitored the demonstration once it left the university, said they made no arrests.

University police said that some members of the crowd were attacked by protesters and then rescued by police. UC police said there were six reports of minor injuries.

Berkeley police said once the protest moved into city streets, rioters vandalized 15 buildings. Again, police did not move to take the vandals into custody.

The article does not make it clear whether most of the policing was done by university or by city police, and who set the policy. Is this sort of thing standard operating procedure for policing riots in Berkeley? That wouldn’t be surprising, considering the politics of the city.

And then there was the reaction of President Trump, who tweeted:

If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?

Well, Trump did write “if.” But U.C. Berkeley doesn’t seem to have done that. A few Berkeley students may have; we don’t even know whether students were involved in the violence (we would have known more if the police had made more arrests, but they didn’t). The university administration was planning to allow “free speech”. The talk by Yiannopolis was scheduled to go forward until safety issues arose, and that’s when the prospective speaker was ushered out of there—for his own safety and for the safety of students, not because the university wasn’t giving him a platform. Nor did the university “practice violence on innocent people with a different point of view.” So Trump’s threat is most likely mere theater, but if he really did cut off Berkeley’s funds for this particular incident (I don’t think he will) he would be abusing his power.

However, there is also no question that Berkeley (university and town) has one of the most extreme and unrelievedly leftist atmospheres of any college campus, and that’s saying something. University leftists these days are often advocates of shutting down speakers with whom they disagree, particularly speakers on the right. This is one of the many ways in which discourse in this country has degenerated in recent years.

The police let these riots get out of control, but the Berkeley administration wasn’t exactly a profile in courage, either. I don’t have enough information to say whether or not they really needed to cancel the talk or whether they caved prematurely. But I do know that their capitulation was in line with a process that’s been going on at universities for at least fifty years, and which Allan Bloom discussed in his book The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987.

I’ve written a great many posts on the subject of the universities’ cowardly responses to pressures of the mob (and about its devotion to PC thought), but I’ll just highlight this post right now, which I hope you’ll read. Again, what happened at Berkeley regarding Yiannopoulos was not the same, but it sends a similar message of university weakness and lack to resolve, a message received by thugs who would dearly love—and who definitely intend—to exploit those weaknesses to their own advantage.

Here’s a quote from my older post:

…Bloom describes the moral collapse of the faculty and administration of so many universities during the 60s, their abject and craven failure to defend their own principles, and their eager willingness to cave to threats and intimidation.

The Cornell incident that Bloom describes in the book was quite different in its details than what happened at Berkeley; it involved the administration’s capitulation to students’ threats of violence. But both incidents and others show that university administrators have become unable to defend their own supposed principles against the pressures of the mob.

A real feel-good story

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a great, great story:

When Roseann Sdoia was laid up with an amputated leg in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, love was the last thing on her mind.

But her mother, ever the matchmaker, saw a perfect opportunity as handsome firefighter Mike Materia hovered nearby.

“In the hospital, my mom tried to set me up with him,” Sdoia said.

“She was like, ”˜Oh, did you see that firefighter? He’s so cute.’ And I was like, ”˜Mom, I just got blown up.’”‰”

But Mom’s persistence paid off. The victim and her hero struck up a romance that will soon lead to marriage.

More background can be found here.

The French race

The New Neo Posted on by

The elections in France are described as a “roller-coaster”:

An already unpredictable contest has taken a new turn with mounting accusations that conservative candidate Francois Fillon had used public funds available to MPs to pay his wife and children hundreds of thousands of euros for “fake jobs”…

The main beneficiary of Fillon’s woes is centrist Emmanuel Macron, the photogenic 39-year-old former investment banker who served as economy minister in Hollande’s cabinet — and irritated some colleagues with his raw ambition.

Macron is rising fast, but his programme remains short on detail.

It is early days, but the survey published Wednesday, of 1,053 people by the Elabe group, showed Macron would reach the second round and face Le Pen in a runoff.

Le Pen, however, is the main reason that Europe is holding its breath ahead of May’s presidential result…

She senses her chance to seize power, riding a wave of suspicion of mainstream politics.

Le Pen wants to pull France out of the EU — a potentially mortal blow for the ailing bloc — and her proposals to give French nationals priority over housing, for example, still raise hackles for many.

France may have its own version of Brexit—Frexit? Whatever it’s called, I would imagine that people in France who oppose Le Pen are shaking in their boots, after what happened in Britain and the US.

Writing about the Trump administration

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not quite two weeks into the Trump administration and already I’m weary of a repetitive pattern: Trump says or does A, the MSM and the opposition responds B, and those of us who purport to write about these things have to scramble to quickly sort out the truth.

It’s tedious and time-consuming (witness today’s effort), and it’s beginning to get quite repetitive (but I repeat myself).

And it’s early yet.

I think the exercise has value, because I believe there’s a great deal of importance in attempting to get at the truth as best as humanly possible under the circumstances. But I don’t think I’ll be dealing with the Trump-was-awful story du jour every day for the next four years, or even for the next year. After a while it becomes not only repetitive (there I go again), but it reaches a point of diminishing returns. We get the picture; we get the pattern.

Blogging is sometimes like that. After all these years, what more do I have to say? So far, plenty.

[NOTE: Here’s a good piece by Piers Morgan (with a few caveats, such as a paragraph railing against Bush II):

…[T]he further away you get from the hysterical liberal elite conclaves of places like New York, Los Angeles and London, the more calmer common sense prevails.

Those people see a travel ban portrayed as a ”˜racist Muslim ban’, then work out for themselves that 85% of the world’s Muslims aren’t actually banned, and shrug their shoulders…

To date, Donald Trump’s most monstrous act is to enforce a campaign pledge to suspend travel for people from seven very dangerous countries until a new, stricter VISA system can be established.

I don’t personally agree with the way he’s gone about it, and I’m glad to see he’s already reined back on banning any green card holders, but I absolutely respect his right to do it given that is what he promised to do.

This is how democracy works. You listen to election campaign arguments, you vote, and the winner gets to do what he or she said they would do if it’s within the law.

Amid all the furore over the travel ban, Trump has also unleashed a blizzard of other executive orders and statements that deserve bigger headlines.

Yesterday, he said he was supporting an Obama EO protecting LGBTQ rights in the workplace…

Nobody’s talking about this today because it doesn’t suit the ”˜MONSTER!’ label…

In some respects, though, I accept that Trump IS a monster.

America has never seen someone like him bulldoze his way like this into the White House through sheer monstrous force of personality.

He’s done it with an undeniably monstrous ego, monstrous determination, monstrous chutzpah and monstrous doses of political incorrectness.

Now he’s applying the same tough, uncompromising strategy to his presidency.]

Trump and the Australian PM—and those refugees

The New Neo Posted on by

Today’s brouhaha du jour is about a fight Trump allegedly had over the phone with the Australian Prime Minister.

Before I get to the substance of the disagreement, let me say that I’ve come to the point where I immediately distrust all reports about Trump. This one seems extremely plausible—after all, one of my repeated concerns about the man during the entire campaign was/is his volatility, what I have referred to time and again as his tendency to be a loose cannon. This story is completely in line with the sort of thing I was talking about, and it would be disconcerting and disturbing if in fact Trump had been exhibiting that kind of behavior in a phone call with the leader of a country that is basically an ally of ours.

But I have come to the point described so well by Allahpundit in the first sentence of this piece at Hot Air:

American politics increasingly feels like a novel whose events are retold by two unreliable narrators, Trump being one and the media being the other.

I would merely change it to “Trump and his supporters and spokespeople…” rather than just “Trump.” But the sentiment is the same.

And at this point, I have come to trust the Trump forces more than I trust the MSM. That’s a sad, sad reflection on my lack of trust of the MSM. But in these skirmishes, the Trump forces have come closer to the truth in the majority of cases (so far, anyway) than the initial reports in the MSM.

Which brings us to the Australian call. First, let’s look at the WaPo headline: “”˜This was the worst call by far’: Trump badgered, bragged and abruptly ended phone call with Australian leader.”

You read that headline and you think “What a bully!” And that’s what you’re supposed to think. Now, the content of the article. It begins this way:

It should have been one of the most congenial calls for the new commander in chief ”” a conversation with the leader of Australia, one of America’s staunchest allies, at the end of a triumphant week.

Who knew that, according to the WaPo, the week had heretofore been “triumphant”? And all ruined by Trump! [emphasis mine]:

Instead, President Trump blasted Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refu­gee agreement and boasted about the magnitude of his electoral college win, according to senior U.S. officials briefed on the Saturday exchange. Then, 25 minutes into what was expected to be an hour-long call, Trump abruptly ended it.

At one point, Trump informed Turnbull that he had spoken with four other world leaders that day ”” including Russian President Vladi­mir Putin ”” and that “this was the worst call by far.”

Trump’s behavior suggests that he is capable of subjecting world leaders, including close allies, to a version of the vitriol he frequently employs against political adversaries and news organizations in speeches and on Twitter.

Trump, who one day earlier had signed an executive order temporarily barring the admission of refugees, complained that he was “going to get killed” politically and accused Australia of seeking to export the “next Boston bombers.”

Trump returned to the topic late Wednesday night, writing in a message on Twitter: “Do you believe it? The Obama Administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!”

That’s it? That’s the awful thing he did? That’s the terrible badgering, that’s the vitriol, that’s the loose cannon? I agree that it’s not full of diplomatic nicety, and it’s not the sort of thing I’d like to see. But it’s nowhere near as bad as what I expected from that headline. It seems to be directed mostly against Obama for making the deal, rather than the PM.

You might even think “No wonder Trump wasn’t keen.” His predecessor committed the US to a deal that arguably runs counter to one of the most basic platforms Trump ran on. Later in the article (no doubt after a lot of people have stopped reading, having gotten what they think is the gist of it) the WaPo explains the deal and who these refugees are:

The friction with Turnbull reflected Trump’s anger over being bound by an agreement reached by the Obama administration to accept refugees from Australian detention sites even while Trump was issuing an executive order suspending such arrivals from elsewhere in the world.

The issue centers on a population of about 2,500 people who sought asylum in Australia but were diverted to facilities off that country’s coast at Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Deplorable conditions at those sites prompted intervention from the United Nations and a pledge from the United States to accept about half of those refugees, provided they passed U.S. security screening.

Let’s pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that these are immigrants from the Muslim world that Australia has rejected. These are immigrants from the Muslim world that have been kept by Australia in camps under “deplorable conditions.” Obama said he’d take them in after they passed screening, but of course it’s that very screening that Trump has vowed to study and perhaps tighten.

More on the story:

Many of the refugees came from Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Somalia, countries listed in Trump’s order temporarily barring their citizens from entry to the United States. A special provision in the Trump order allows for exceptions to honor “a pre­existing international agreement,” a line that was inserted to cover the Australia deal.

Those officials reporting to the WaPo (who are they?) describe the content of the call further:

“I don’t want these people,” Trump said. He repeatedly misstated the number of refugees called for in the agreement as 2,000 rather than 1,250, and told Turnbull that it was “my intention” to honor the agreement, a phrase designed to leave the U.S. president wiggle room to back out of the deal in the future, according to a senior U.S. official.

Oh, so now Trump said it was his intention to honor the deal, but that same “official” says that’s just a weasel phrase. So Trump gets no credit even for that. I never knew the word “intention” was only a screen for its opposite.

More:

During the phone conversation Saturday, Turnbull told Trump that to honor the agreement, the United States would not have to accept all of the refugees but only to allow each through the normal vetting procedures. At that, Trump vowed to subject each refu­gee to “extreme vetting,” the senior U.S. official said.

Seems quite reasonable to me.

Now, let’s look at the elephant in the room that the WaPo mostly ignores: why on earth should we accept refugees that Australia won’t accept? The Guardian explains Australia’s policy:

The deal relates to 1,250 refugees held in Australia’s offshore detention camps on Nauru and Manus Island, including many from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran and Iraq. The refugees, some of whom are stateless, have spent years languishing in the offshore detention camps, which the United Nations has repeatedly criticised as cruel and illegal. The refugees are unable to go home, but cannot come to Australia ”“ even when their right to protection as refugees is confirmed ”“ because they travelled to Australia by boat. The vast majority of those in Australia’s offshore detention regime have been confirmed to have a valid claim to refugee status, meaning they are legally owed Australia’s protection. On Nauru, 983 of the 1,200 refugee status determinations were positive, while 217 were negative. On Manus Island, 78% of 859 the people finally assessed were found to be refugees, while 190 have been found not to have a claim for protection. The deal was also to include hundreds of refugees previously held on Manus or Nauru, who were in Australia receiving medical care, provided they had been found to be refugees…

The deal was seen as a significant win for the Turnbull government. Australia has searched in vain for a sustainable plan for refugees. For more than three years Australia has consistently maintained it will never settle asylum seekers on the Australian mainland that arrive by boat, a position that has been popular with voters and is still supported by both main parties. But the policy has led to regular reports of human rights abuses, many of them documented in the Guardian’s publication of the Nauru files, and is bitterly condemned by refugees advocates inside and outside Australia.

At the time of the US agreement, only 24 refugees had resettled in PNG, and a handful in Cambodia. The Manus detention centre had been declared illegal by the PNG supreme court, and Australia was under pressure over allegations on Nauru of sexual abuse on women and children, assaults of children, rape, widespread mental harm and epidemic rates of self-harm and suicide attempts…

On Sunday, a phone call between Turnbull and Trump took place. Turnbull maintains that, during the call, Trump committed to honouring the refugee resettlement deal. That was later confirmed by the US state department and US embassy in Canberra. But a report in the Washington Post cast the Trump-Turnbull conversation in an entirely different light.

That, my friends, is from left-leaning Guardian, and it’s significantly more informative (and more Trump-friendly) than the WaPo’s account.

So, to recap: these refugees have been held by Australia in deplorable camps for years and that country is adamantly refusing to take them in (imagine if, instead of “Australia” in that sentence, we had “the Trump administration;” the hue and cry would be deafening). Obama agreed to take them in and get Turnbull off the hot stove, with the proviso that the US would be vetting them in whatever manner the Obama administration considered adequate and appropriate. Trump expressed dissatisfaction to Turnbull about the deal Obama had made, and yet agreed to abide by it. In the meantime, he wants to vet these refugees—these refugees that Australia will not accept—more carefully than Obama might have, under new vetting rules that the Trump administration will be drawing up.

In the course of expressing this position, Trump either did or did not act angrier than the laws of diplomacy would dictate. I have no idea what really transpired, but my strong guess is that he was indeed somewhat testier than would have been diplomatically desirable. I doubt very much that this will affect either the deal or Turnbull, except perhaps to help Turnbull by positioning him as the un-Trump. In the US, the story as it’s been reported adds another layer to the furor and upset about Trump as president—as desired by the MSM.

I wish Trump wouldn’t give them any ammunition of this sort, although given his makeup it’s going to happen. And given their makeup, if it didn’t happen they would invent it. But on the substance of the disagreement, it’s Australia who should be ashamed of itself, not Trump.

The Klondike’s Golden Staircase

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I happened across a photo from the late-nineteenth century Klondike Gold rush of the part of the Chilkoot Pass that was known as the Golden Staircase. You can see why the photo caught my attention:

Here’s one that’s more of a closeup, to see what they were carrying up that mountain staircase:

I’m not quite sure why that was called a pass. Looks an awful lot like a mountain to me, but I guess it’s a low one. People were awfully tough back then. Here’s more about the Staircase:

The twenty-six mile trail over Chilkoot Pass was steep and hazardous. Most stampeders who gave up did so attempting to cross the mountains.

In the winter, stampeders struggled in blizzards, snow, frigid temperatures, and avalanches. The trail shot up about 1,000 feet in the final half mile. Stampeders climbed the “golden staircase,” 1,500 steps cut in the snow and ice, and used a guide rope for support…

Travelers did not always fare better in the summer. Stampeders struggled in rain, fog, boulders, and bogs. Without its covering of snow and ice, the trail to the summit led over giant boulders over which people literally crawled.

To move one outfit over the pass, stampeders packed and cached their goods up to forty times and hiked up to 1,000 miles. The terrain on the last four miles of the trail was too rough for pack animals. Discarded supplies littered the trail as stampeders cast unnecessary items aside. Many took three months to move their goods from Dyea to the summit.

The name “Golden Staircase” quite obviously describes the goal at the end of the arduous journey: gold. The staircase itself was made of ice and snow. But the phrase jogged a memory for me of a song lyric, and Google helped me find the sources. It’s a common metaphor for the route to heaven, in the Salvation Army hymn called “Climbing Up the Golden Stair” as well as the one with which I’m familiar, Peter Paul and Mary’s rendition of “Early in the Morning” (second verse, “won’t you guide me safely, to the golden stair”):

Dershowitz says Yates should have resigned

The New Neo Posted on by

Alan Dershowitz continues his refusal to toe the Democratic party line, although I’m virtually certain he remains a Democrat:

An attorney general, like any citizen, has the right to disagree with a presidential order, but unless it is clear that the order is unlawful, she has no authority to order the Justice Department to refuse to enforce it. This order is multifaceted and complex. It raises serious constitutional and legal issues that deserved nuanced and calibrated consideration from the nation’s highest law officer.

…A blanket order to refuse to defend any part of the statute is overkill. If she strongly disagreed with the policies underlying the order, she should have resigned in protest, and left it to others within the Justice Department to defend those parts of the order that are legally defensible.

I, too, disagree, with the policy underlying the order, but I don’t immediately assume that any policy with which I disagree is automatically unconstitutional or unlawful.

There used to be more people in the Democratic Party like that. Now Dershowitz must be feeling pretty lonely. Perhaps he should give Joe Lieberman a call.

That piece appeared yesterday, but that’s not the only thing Dershowitz has said recently. There’s also today’s statements from him on SCOTUS pick Gorsuch:

Famed Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, however, said Democrats and Republicans shouldn’t play politics with the Supreme Court appointment.

“They are too important,” he said during an interview on the FOX Business Network. “This is a very distinguished judge who will serve for many, many, many years.”

Despite the initial pushback from Democratic leaders, Dershowitz said Gorsuch will likely be approved during his Senate confirmation hearing.

“I think he has to be vetted very carefully” Dershowitz added. “Everything I know about him shows that he’s qualified.”

Actually, it may be that Gorsuch is not the hill on which the Democrats will choose to fight, for reasons explained here.

What goes around comes around: they don’t call it the “nuclear option” for nothing

The New Neo Posted on by

Most of us old enough to remember can recall a time when the Senate involved a fair amount of compromise, at least on presidential appointments. It pretty much boiled down to the idea that what goes around comes around. Unless an appointee was egregiously unqualified rather than merely partisan, a president ordinarily was given his nominees. That wasn’t because people were so loving and wonderful, so eager to sing kumbaya together; it was because they knew the same courtesy would be extended to them when they had the presidency.

The nuclear option was similarly avoided for the same reason. If a party did away with it, they wouldn’t have it to fall back on when the time came. They wanted to preserve minority rights to block things when they no longer held the Senate and the presidency. No one wanted to be the first to throw that away, lest they need it in the future.

So the two things worked together to create more cooperation, or at least the appearance of more cooperation, than has existed in recent years. I’m not going to go into the history of how and when this ended, but major turning points are often thought of as the Bork nomination, and a host of other events described here, with both parties involved in sometimes advocating it. The most recent and most extreme move, however, was made by the Democrats during Obama’s presidency, culminating in November of 2013:

On November 21, 2013, the Senate voted 52”“48, with all Republicans and 3 Democrats voting against, to eliminate the use of the filibuster against all executive branch nominees and judicial nominees other than to the Supreme Court. At the time of the vote there were 59 executive branch nominees and 17 judicial nominees awaiting confirmation.

The Democrats’ stated motivation for this change was expansion of filibustering by Republicans during the Obama administration, in particular blocking three nominations to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Republicans had asserted that the D.C. Circuit was underworked, and also cited the need for cost reduction by reducing the number of judges in that circuit…

As of November 2013, President Obama’s nominees had faced 79 votes to end debate (i.e. cloture votes), compared to just 38 during the preceding eight years under President George W. Bush. Most of those cloture votes successfully ended debate, and therefore most of those nominees cleared the hurdle. Obama won Senate confirmation for 30 out of 42 federal appeals court nominations, compared with Bush’s 35 out of 52.

Regarding Obama’s federal district court nominations, the Senate approved 143 out of 173 as of November 2013, compared to George W. Bush’s first term 170 of 179, Bill Clinton’s first term 170 of 198, and George H.W. Bush’s 150 of 195. Filibusters were used on 20 Obama nominations to U.S. District Court positions, but Republicans had allowed confirmation of 19 out of the 20 before the nuclear option was invoked.

So, why did the Democrats do it in November of 2013? It doesn’t seem as though things were all that much worse for them regarding nomination confirmations than they had been in previous administrations. I’m not sure why they did it, but I think it was that the legislative philosophy had become “if we have the power to do it, we should do it” (Obamacare being the template).

The Democrats knew that in 2014 they might lose the Senate, and at any rate they weren’t going to get 60 Democratic senators into office. So in November of 2013, when they activated the nuclear option, they only had a year left of Democratic control of both the Senate and the White House, and that’s when the nuclear option makes sense.

I’m convinced that Democrats also thought it likely that they’d always keep the presidency, or just about always. They believed that Electoral College demographics now made it almost impossible for a Republican to win that office. So in the future, after the nuclear option had been implemented, even if Democrats lost the Senate and became a minority there the nuclear option wouldn’t hurt them because of their retention of the presidency. In other words, a party ordinarily has no need to block the appointments of a president of that same party, so no need to keep the filibuster for those appointments.

One thing I really think Democrats did not envision occurring was what in fact occurred: Republican president, Republican Senate. That’s where we are now, with the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to SCOTUS. It’s certainly difficult to object if the Republicans trigger the nuclear option for SCOTUS justices, although Democrats can always argue that they themselves limited it to all executive branch nominees and judicial nominees except the Supreme Court. That argument is plenty weak—after all, if not the former, why not the latter—but right now there are other anti-Gorsuch arguments they’re mounting. The biggest one seems to be that the seat was “stolen” from them because last year the Republicans (who were in the majority at the time) blocked hearings on Obama’s appointee, Judge Garland.

I have no doubt that the theft argument appeals to a great many Democrats. But it’s awfully hard for Democrats to argue along that line to other than the party faithful, because their own determination to frustrate and block anything and everything they can in the Trump administration is so transparently clear.

The NY Times is leading the charge, as usual, with its august and oh-so-objective editors authoring an editorial today entitled, “Neil Gorsuch, the Nominee for a Stolen Seat.” I’m not going to waste my time fisking it; it fisks itself. But I will say it’s a small masterpiece of the sort of subtle and not-so-subtle misdirections and distortions in which the Times specializes. It ends this way:

Mr. Trump’s failure to choose a more moderate candidate is the latest example of his refusal to acknowledge his historic unpopularity and his nearly three-million-vote loss to Hillary Clinton. A wiser president faced with such circumstances would govern with humility and a respect for the views of all Americans.

Isnt’ that beautiful, in its own way? The harping on Trump’s loss of the popular vote, as though that has any meaning? The high and respectful tone? The implicit pretense that a Democrat would somehow rise above all that petty partisanship and show the sort of “humility and respect for the views of all Americans” the Times is demanding? The sort that its champion, President Obama, showed when Obamacare was passed and so many other unpopular measures were pushed through because, after all (as Obama himself has said): “I won.”

Well, Trump won. And no serious person expects any president, liberal or conservative, to appoint a moderate to the Supreme Court if that president’s party also controls the Senate. That happens to be the situation right now.

Let me add that two things seem to be clear at this point. The first is (and I don’t think he’s gotten enough credit from the right for this) McConnell stood firm against pressure to confirm Garland, and that has made this opportunity possible. The second is that Trump has made good on his promise to choose a conservative.

Next we will discover whether the Democrats will force the GOP’s hand and cause them to extend the nuclear option to SCOTUS in order to get Gorsuch confirmed, and whether the GOP will actually do so if pressed.

Trump’s SCOTUS pick is announced

The New Neo Posted on by

And it’s Neil Gorsuch.

“I am a man of my word” says Trump.

Here’s what the WaPo had to say about Goresuch three days ago:

Indeed, Gorsuch, now 49, seems naturally equipped for his spot on President Trump’s short­list of potential Supreme Court nominees.

There is a family connection to Republican establishment politics and service in the administration of George W. Bush. There is a glittery Ivy League résumé ”” Columbia undergrad, Harvard Law ”” along with a Marshall scholarship to Oxford. There is a partnership at one of Washington’s top litigation law firms and a string of successful cases.

There is a Supreme Court clerkship; Gorsuch was hired by Justice Byron White, a fellow Colorado native, who shared him with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy…

… [T]hose who know Gorsuch and have studied his decade of solidly conservative opinions on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit say he more resembles the man he would replace ”” the late Justice Antonin Scalia ”” than the more moderate Kennedy.

Like Scalia, Gorsuch is a proponent of originalism ”” meaning that judges should attempt to interpret the words of the Constitution as they were understood at the time they were written ”” and a textualist who considers only the words of the law being reviewed, not legislators’ intent or the consequences of the decision.

Critics say that those neutral considerations seem to always lead Gorsuch to conservative outcomes, a criticism that was also leveled at Scalia…

Kagan is among many who have praised Gorsuch’s lucid and occasionally lyrical writing style.

But those who know him say he lacks Scalia’s combustible, combative style.

“He has very strong opinions, but he just treats people well in every context,” said Melissa Hart, a University of Colorado law professor. She is a Democrat who clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired in 2010.

At 49, Gorsuch could have a long tenure.

Good appointment, I think. It will be hard for the Democrats to make any case against this pick unless it’s a completely political one: that they don’t like his conservatism.

[ADDENDUM: Gorsuch graduated from Harvard Law School in the same class as Obama.]