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Monday, January 30, 2017

Our Tea Party President

Trump’s revolution has been a long time brewing.

January 24, 2017

Pundits keep puzzling over what party President Donald Trump belongs to, since he emphatically is not an orthodox Republican, even though he sails under the GOP flag. But the answer is simple. He is the Tea Party president.

Just think back to 2009, when the Tea Party movement began with CNBC financial commentator Rick Santelli’s furious on-air rant against Barack Obama’s stimulus package. “How many of you people want to pay your neighbor’s mortgage, that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” Santelli asked the traders behind him on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. When they roared their disapproval, Santelli invoked the Founding Fathers and announced that he was thinking of staging a Tea Party in Chicago, fair warning that citizens were fed up with taxation without representation and a government that, like George III’s, had become swollen with “a multitude of New Offices,” as the Declaration of Independence had put it, and with “swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

Santelli was more prophetic than he knew, for the stimulus saved few Americans from foreclosure on their over-leveraged houses. Instead, it mainly kept state and local government workers employed, while the citizens whose taxes formerly paid their salaries were losing not just their houses but also their jobs. If Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson could see what America had become and was becoming, Santelli spluttered, they’d “roll over in their graves.” It was certainly not the republic they created, and that Franklin had warned we’d need steadfast vigilance to keep.

But we failed to keep it; and it turned out that millions of Americans shared Santelli’s sense of that failure and his red-hot anger over it. Millions who signed up for local Tea Party chapters and rode buses to rallies from coast to coast recognized that somehow we had lost the Constitution that the Founders had given us, and that we now lived in a polity those great men wouldn’t recognize—and that was certainly not the one described in our history books, with its strictly limited powers and its exquisitely designed checks and balances. What exactly it was, and how it had slouched into being, the Tea Partiers didn’t really know, but they saw that it was closer to rule by a government without the consent of the people than to the self-government, liberty, and self-reliant and self-realizing pursuit of happiness that the Founders had envisioned.

Commentators are right that a big portion of Trump voters were working-class Americans displaced from their jobs by Obama’s war on fossil fuels, by globalization, automation, and the shifting balance in manufacturing from the importance of the raw materials that go into products to that of the engineering expertise that designs them. These are the people Trump referred to in his Inaugural Address as “the forgotten men and women of our country.”

But that’s only part of the new president’s coalition. As Amity Shlaes shows in her 2008 book The Forgotten Man, that term, which Franklin Roosevelt applied to the man on the breadline in the Great Depression, “the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” more properly applies to those unhappy-if-silent taxpayers who funded the New Deal’s social-welfare schemes. And these are the forerunners of the Tea Partiers, another key class of Trump voter: the widow on a fixed income whose property-tax payment helps house a public-sector retiree comfortably but whose inexorable rise is making her own paid-off home unaffordable; the retiree whose IRA savings the Great Recession eroded or who can no longer get an adequate income from safe bond investments, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s policies; the small businessman or farmer ruined by undemocratic government regulation lacking even the pretense of due process; the ex-soldier abandoned by a dysfunctional Veterans Administration; the parent disgusted with public schools that impose ideologies she abhors on her children, while leaving them inadequately educated; and all those sincere believers in God or traditional values whom Obama dismissed as clinging desperately to outmoded pieties, as the arc of history, which the elite professor-president claimed to understand and direct according to his politically correct enlightenment, swirled them down the drain.

The Tea Partiers wanted a second American Revolution that would sweep away the Administrative State that the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the War on Poverty set loose to devour and fatten on the carcass of the Founders’ republic, replacing a government of limited and enumerated powers with an unlimited government that rules by administrative decree and redistributes wealth as if it belonged to the governors and not the governed. No wonder Obama’s Internal Revenue Service worked to squash that movement as tyrannically as George III’s tax collectors. Let’s see if the new revolutionaries picked a leader who knows what they want and how to get it.

Myron Magnet, City Journal’s editor-at-large and its editor from 1994 through 2006, is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. His latest book is The Founders at Home.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/our-tea-party-president-14982.html

Sunday, January 29, 2017

EXTREME VETTING, HERE WE COME

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN DONALD TRUMP, IMMIGRATION, ISLAM, TERRORISM

President Trump began to fulfill one of his signal campaign promises yesterday with the promulgation of an executive order addressing immigration from Muslim countries. The New York Times has posted the text of the executive order here.

The order proceeds through a series of cross-reference to other laws that renders it incomprehensible on its own terms. Perhaps improvidently, I take the summary of the order’s operative provisions by Michael Shear and Helene Cooper in the New York Times at face value. See also Carol Morello’s Washington Post story on the order.

According to Shear and Cooper, the order suspends the entry of refugees into the United States for 120 days, and Syrians indefinitely. It also suspends immigration from seven Muslim countries for only 90 days, while allegedly ordering priority be given to visas for Christians from Muslim nations (I don’t see the religious preference set forth in the text of the order). The seven Muslim countries are Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

Shear and Cooper want to imply that differentiation among faiths for the purposes of the order is unconstitutional. They write: “Mr. Trump also established a religious test for refugees from Muslim nations: He ordered that Christians and others from minority religions be granted priority over Muslims.” The Constitution, however, only bars religious tests for office or “public trust.” (More here.)

Might there be a reasonable basis for distinguishing among faiths for purposes of granting visas, refugee status, naturalization and immigration generally? Shear and Cooper don’t raise the question. Indeed, Shear and Cooper argue stupidly with the order throughout their story on it. They can’t help themselves.

Information is to be gathered, reviewed and summarized during the periods of suspension so that policy can be conformed to the national interest of the United States. Indeed, the order focuses throughout on the national interest of the United States, as in this provision that will never be quoted in a New York Times story:

Sec. 1: …In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles. The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law. In addition, the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including “honor” killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.

You mean we aren’t already doing this? We must be out of our minds.

Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from foreign nationals who intend to commit terrorist attacks in the United States; and to prevent the admission of foreign nationals who intend to exploit United States immigration laws for malevolent purposes.

You mean we aren’t already doing this? We must be out of our minds.

Despite its difficulty, the order is worth reviewing in its entirety. The following provision, for example, should resonate with citizens of sound mind:

It is the policy of the executive branch that, to the extent permitted by law and as practicable, State and local jurisdictions be granted a role in the process of determining the placement or settlement in their jurisdictions of aliens eligible to be admitted to the United States as refugees. To that end, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall examine existing law to determine the extent to which, consistent with applicable law, State and local jurisdictions may have greater involvement in the process of determining the placement or resettlement of refugees in their jurisdictions, and shall devise a proposal to lawfully promote such involvement.

With Minnesota’s ever growing community of Somali immigrants and refugees, we find the order hitting close to home. The Star Tribune collects critical comments from Somali immigrants without any reference to the, ah, special law enforcement challenges that they have raised — and continue to raise.

The reform of visa, refugee and immigration policy implicit in the terms of the executive order are, to say the least, long overdue.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/01/extreme-vetting-here-we-come.php

Prosperity Is Destiny

If the economy grows during Trump’s administration, his opposition will dwindle.

By Victor Davis Hanson

“Ten thousand cuts an awful lot of family ties.”
— Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch

When Ronald Reagan entered office in 1981 amid negative economic growth, roaring inflation, and high unemployment, his critics immediately grew emboldened and sought to ankle-bite him at every turn: Reagan purportedly had created homelessness all by himself; Reagan was on the verge of ensuring a “nuclear winter” and a “day after” desolation from a likely nuclear exchange, given his nihilistic tough stance against the Soviet Union.
After dismantling the air-traffic controllers’ union, Reagan had supposedly endangered the lives of plane passengers and ruined the idea of unionism itself, replacing it with “let them eat cake” indifference.
Yet four years later — with an economy booming at over 7 percent per year — Reagan breezed to reelection victory. It was suddenly “Morning in America.” His 1984 election opponent, a decent and respected Walter Mondale, was reduced to a cardboard-cutout caricature of fossilized 1960s liberalism.

UP NEXT

Trump vows to launch 'major investigation' into voter fraud

Bill Clinton did almost everything imaginable to destroy his presidency in his last two years in office: kinky sexual explorations with a young subordinate intern, lying under oath about his tawdry escapades, and a recrudescence of older sexual-harassment allegations. Most Americans believed that he was an inveterate liar and would never leave their teenage daughters in the same room with such a creepy sexual predator. No matter — he was not removed from office even though he’d been impeached. His Republican accusers never quite understood that the American people preferred having an economy with a growth rate above 4.5 percent to removing a sleazy Lothario from office.
George W. Bush got reelected in 2004 despite massive opposition to the ongoing Iraq War because the economy was growing at nearly 4 percent in 2004. He left unpopular in 2009, not only owing to Iraq (evidence was already in by January 2009 that his bold surge had worked) but also because the economy had imploded in September 2008.
One reason that a personally popular, landmark Barack Obama failed as president — aside from doubling the debt, institutionalizing zero interest rates, leaving a mess in the Middle East, and using his un-Midas touch to undermine nearly everything he tapped, from health care to immigration law to race relations — was that he was the first modern president under whose tenure the economy never reached a modest 3 percent economic-growth rate. Had Obama just achieved 4 percent economic growth, Hillary Clinton would be president.
In other words, economic growth and perceived prosperity cut a lot of political ties.
The election of Donald Trump has turned everything in the political world, from the trivial to the existential, upside down. He is the first non-politician without military experience to become president. The polls and press caricatured him for nearly two years as a classic loser. He won despite being outspent and out-organized, and without real support from his own party or the mainstream conservative press. The Left is rightly convinced that he is a danger to the postmodern redistributive state. The Never Trump Right is still invested in his eventual implosion, issuing “I warned you about him” messages in a nonstop effort of self-justification.
Trump’s demeanor, language, and comportment remain antithetical to what we are accustomed to in a sober and judicious president. Cat-like Barack Obama gracefully tiptoed down the steps of Air Force One almost like a prissy metrosexual; a grimacing Trump stalks about as if he were on a work site inspecting the cement on a newly laid foundation. Obama, with his Mussolini-like strutting jaw, conveyed collective revolutionary confidence to the Left; to Left and Right alike, the scowl from a slouching Trump suggests unrepentant payback to come.
The nation’s stunning new First Lady is foreign-born and speaks heavily accented English. Trump is the first thrice-married president and the first billionaire to assume office. All that is just the personal disconnect from norms of the past.
On policy, Trump promises to outdo the reset of Ronald Reagan, who lacked Trump’s Republican-controlled Congress, vast majorities in the state legislatures and governorships, and the blank-check authority bequeathed by Harry Reid and Barack Obama, whose ends-justify-any-means-necessary changes in legislative and executive protocols have fortified the presidency with enormous new avenues of power. Reagan lacked the legislative apparatus to become a true revolutionary; Trump’s windfall Republican majorities almost force him into that insurrectionary role.
So Trump is intent on overturning Obama’s therapeutic foreign policy, slashing federal spending, rebuilding the military, exporting fossil fuels, waging a cultural war against political correctness and the liberal media, and enforcing immigration law. In other words, from his person to his policies, Donald Trump is a revolutionary, with a huge target on his back that the foundations, universities, networks, major newspapers, Hollywood, and the coastal-strip elite will always have in their scope.
Indeed, in that regard, the Trump revolution’s mantra of “drain the swamp” is a sort of political Roundup^TM strategy: The root causes of progressive hysteria must be addressed by fundamentally recalibrating approaches to the media, the universities, and immigration. It seems that Trump means to challenge the tactics that to date have fueled left-wing agendas that otherwise would not gain support from a majority of the public.
Political observers, left and right, assume that Trump’s mouth and personal recklessness will derail his agendas. Heraclitus’s “a man’s character is his destiny” (an obscure fragment [ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων] that could be translated in a variety of quite different ways) is quoted ad nauseam to suggest that Trump’s intrinsic and immutable flaws will inevitably lead to overweening arrogance and thus catastrophe, as nemesis catches up with him at precisely the most opportune — and embarrassing — moment.
Perhaps.
But it’s far more likely that Trump’s fate will hinge on his economic reforms. Achieve 4 percent–plus GDP growth rate and then Black Lives Matter, the residuals of Occupy Wall Street, the hysterical House Democrats, and the assorted unhinged fringe of Michael Moore, Lena Dunham, and Madonna will recede into the woodwork.
In truth, we are on the cusp of a great experiment. For decades, conservatives, both traditional and pro-growth supply-siders, have preached that deregulation, reasonable and predictable Federal Reserve interest rates, reduced government, a radically simplified and pruned-back tax code, new incentives for investment, an open energy market, and a can-do psychological landscape that encourages entrepreneurship will make the economy soar at rates of 4 percent GDP and more.
We shall soon see. If Trump unleashes American know-how and strengthens the economy, then his cultural and domestic agendas, as well as his personal demeanor and language, however radical and jarring, will probably be accepted. In contrast, if he blows up the deficit and sees interest rates spike at Carter levels and the cost of debt service soar, if he allows unemployment to grow — while never exceeding Obama’s dismal economic growth rates — then the Trump agenda will stall and the media will be liberated to obsess over the tweets, gaffes, and bombast of every nanosecond of his presidency.
Economic growth cuts through political orthodoxy; economic stagnation intensifies it. Regrettably or not, prosperity, not character per se, determines a president’s political fate.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444140/trump-economy-prosperity-will-silence-his-opponents

Study Claims Up To 2.8 Million Non-Citizens Voted In 2008

PETER HASSON

Reporter, Associate Editor

Old Dominion University professors Jesse Richman and David Earnest, the study’s co-authors, concluded that “some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections.”

“In spite of substantial public controversy, very little reliable data exists concerning the frequency with which non-citizen immigrants participate in United States elections. Although such participation is a violation of election laws in most parts of the United States, enforcement depends principally on disclosure of citizenship status at the time of voter registration,” Richman and Earnest note.

“We find that some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections. Non-citizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress,” they continue.The authors later say that the number of non-citizen voters “could range from just over 38,000 at the very minimum to nearly 2.8 million at the maximum.”

Richman and Earnest’s study has been contested by other social scientists and was the subject of a rebuttal article challenging their findings. That study, led by Harvard political scientist Stephen Ansolabehere, claimed instead that “the likely percent of non-citizen voters in recent US elections is 0.”

The Trump White House has faced criticism over President Donald Trump’s belief that millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 presidential election. Trump has declined to offer any evidence to back up his claim.

“The president does believe that, I think he’s stated that before, and stated his concern of voter fraud and people voting illegally during the campaign and continues to maintain that belief based on studies and evidence people have brought to him.” press secretary Sean Spicer said on Tuesday. Spicer did not cite any specific studies to back up Trump’s belief.

The White House has not yet returned an email from The Daily Caller regarding whether or not Richman and Earnest’s study was part of Trump’s belief that “millions” of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election and — if not — what other studies make up the basis of Trump’s belief.

America's Second Civil War

By Dennis Prager

It is time for our society to acknowledge a sad truth: America is currently fighting its second Civil War.

In fact, with the obvious and enormous exception of attitudes toward slavery, Americans are more divided morally, ideologically and politically today than they were during the Civil War. For that reason, just as the Great War came to be known as World War I once there was World War II, the Civil War will become known as the First Civil War when more Americans come to regard the current battle as the Second Civil War.

This Second Civil War, fortunately, differs in another critically important way: It has thus far been largely nonviolent. But given increasing left-wing violence, such as riots, the taking over of college presidents' offices and the illegal occupation of state capitols, nonviolence is not guaranteed to be a permanent characteristic of the Second Civil War.

There are those on both the left and right who call for American unity. But these calls are either naive or disingenuous. Unity was possible between the right and liberals, but not between the right and the left.

Liberalism -- which was anti-left, pro-American and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America; and which regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism -- is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don't call themselves conservative.

The left, however, is opposed to every one of those core principles of liberalism.

Like the left in every other country, the left in America essentially sees America as a racist, xenophobic, colonialist, imperialist, warmongering, money-worshipping, moronically religious nation.

Just as in Western Europe, the left in America seeks to erase America's Judeo-Christian foundations. The melting pot is regarded as nothing more than an anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Hispanic meme. The left suppresses free speech wherever possible for those who oppose it, labeling all non-left speech "hate speech." To cite only one example, if you think Shakespeare is the greatest playwright or Bach is the greatest composer, you are a proponent of dead white European males and therefore racist.

Without any important value held in common, how can there be unity between left and non-left? Obviously, there cannot.

There will be unity only when the left vanquishes the right or the right vanquishes the left. Using the First Civil War analogy, American unity was achieved only after the South was vanquished and slavery was abolished.

How are those of us who oppose left-wing nihilism -- there is no other word for an ideology that holds Western civilization and America's core values in contempt -- supposed to unite with "educators" who instruct elementary school teachers to cease calling their students "boys" and "girls" because that implies gender identity? With English departments that don't require reading Shakespeare in order to receive a degree in English? With those who regard virtually every war America has fought as imperialist and immoral? With those who regard the free market as a form of oppression? With those who want the state to control as much of American life as possible? With those who repeatedly tell America and its black minority that the greatest problems afflicting black Americans are caused by white racism, "white privilege" and "systemic racism"? With those who think that the nuclear family ideal is inherently misogynistic and homophobic? With those who hold that Israel is the villain in the Middle East? With those who claim that the term "Islamic terrorist" is an expression of religious bigotry?

The third significant difference between the First and Second Civil Wars is that in the Second Civil war, one side has been doing nearly all the fighting. That is how it has been able to take over schools -- from elementary schools, to high schools, to universities -- and indoctrinate America's young people; how it has taken over nearly all the news media; and how it has taken over entertainment media.

The conservative side has lost on every one of these fronts because it has rarely fought back with anything near the ferocity with which the left fights. Name a Republican politician who has run against the left as opposed to running solely against his or her Democratic opponent. And nearly all American conservatives, people who are proud of America and affirm its basic tenets, readily send their children to schools that indoctrinate their children against everything the parents hold precious. A mere handful protest when their child's teacher ceases calling their son a boy or their daughter a girl, or makes "slave owner" the defining characteristic of the Founding Fathers.

With the defeat of the left in the last presidential election, the defeat of the left in two-thirds of the gubernatorial elections and the defeat of the left in a majority of House and Senate elections, this is likely the last chance liberals, conservatives and the right have to defeat the American left. But it will not happen until these groups understand that we are fighting for the survival of America no less than the Union troops were in the First Civil War.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/01/24/americas_second_civil_war_132880.html