What's going on at the border? Why are children and parents being separated when they are detained for illegally crossing at the U.S. border? Hans von Spakovsky explains whence the policy and controversy come:
In 1997, the Clinton administration entered into a settlement agreement in Flores v. Reno, a lawsuit filed in federal court in California by pro-illegal immigration advocacy groups challenging the detention of juvenile aliens taken into custody by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
The Clinton administration agreed to settle this litigation despite the fact the Supreme Court had upheld the Immigration and Naturalization Service regulation that provided for the release of minors only to their parents, close relatives, or legal guardians.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, the Flores agreement allows the agency to detain unaccompanied minors for only "20 days before releasing them to the Department of Health and Human Services which places the minors in foster or shelter situations until they locate a sponsor."
But in a controversial decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, the most liberal in the country, has interpreted the settlement agreement to apply to "both minors who are accompanied and unaccompanied by their parents."
In other words, it is the 9th Circuit's misinterpretation of the Clinton administration's settlement agreement that doesn't allow juvenile aliens to stay with their parents who have been detained for unlawful entry into the country.
Of course, if those parents would simply agree to return to their home countries, they would be immediately reunited with their children. So those who come here illegally are themselves to blame for their children being assigned to foster care or to another family member or sponsor who may be in the country.
The executive order signed by President Donald Trump directs the attorney general to file a request with the federal court in the Flores case to modify the settlement agreement to allow the government "to detain alien families together throughout the pendency of criminal proceedings for improper entry or any removal or other immigration proceedings."
Of course, the administration's critics know about this settlement and know it limits the ability of the administration to keep alien families together. The point of their propaganda war is to force the Trump administration to terminate its zero-tolerance policy of prosecuting all adult aliens for illegal entry, stop all detentions, and return to the "catch and release" policies of the prior administration.
[Hans von Spakovsky, "Who's Responsible for Separating Alien Kids from Their Parents? Many People, but Not Trump," The Daily Signal, June 21]
The Supreme Court blew it. On Thursday, the Supreme Court gave states the power to tax sales between their citizens and out-of-state retailers. In South Dakota v. Wayfair, the plaintiff, South Dakota, argued that the physical presence standard, established in the 1992 case Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, was no longer workable with the rise of e-commerce. South Dakota claimed it was losing billions in sales taxes that it could no longer collect and that the rule created an unfair advantage for online retailers competing tax-free against brick-and-mortar retailers who were subject to sales taxes. In a 5-4 decision the court obliged the plaintiffs and overturned the precedent in Quill. The decision, write Trevor Burrus and Matthew Larosiere, is wrongheaded:
The majority in Wayfair mislabel Quill as some sort of decrepit roadblock to sensible internet jurisprudence, but the reality couldn't be any more different. Quill was a safeguard that made states consider who they were taxing and why. Classic considerations like whether a taxpayer availed themselves of state services like fire and police were taken into consideration. Now that is thrown into disarray, as state lines mean less for the limits of state power.
Where e-commerce customers live does not change the fact that companies like Wayfair had no opportunity to vote in state elections or influence state policy. What the majority in Wayfair misses is that this is less a matter of petty tax avoidance than a question of the limits of state power. States were frustrated with the inability to collect taxes from out-of-state retailers under Quill, but governments around the world are prone to complain about the difficulties of collecting taxes. As we wrote in our amicus brief supporting Wayfair, "the Framers would not recognize the concern South Dakota poses: that interstate commerce is thriving to such an extent that collection of a particular type of tax has become difficult."
While Quill was decided in the days when 28.8k modems beeped and hissed, the question of due process was no different. Due process requires some definite link between the state and any person, property, or transaction that a state seeks to tax or regulate. Wayfair does not own property in South Dakota, elects no representatives in South Dakota, and was afforded no protection by South Dakota's police.
[Trevor Burrus and Matthew Larosiere, "South Dakota v. Wayfair: A Taxing Decision," Cato Institute, June 21]
They'll defend your free speech rights—as long they like what you say. The ACLU is no longer a defender of free speech, but merely a defender of progressive values. Robby Soave reports:
The American Civil Liberties Union will weigh its interest in protecting the First Amendment against its other commitments to social justice, racial equality, and women's rights, given the possibility that offensive speech might undermine ACLU goals.
"Our defense of speech may have a greater or lesser harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed," wrote ACLU staffers in a confidential memo obtained by former board member Wendy Kaminer. [...] Moving forward, when deciding whether to take a free speech case, the organization will consider "factors such as the (present and historical) context of the proposed speech; the potential effect on marginalized communities; the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values; and the structural and power inequalities in the community in which the speech will occur."
Kaminer, as quoted by Soave, writes in the Wall Street Journal:
The speech-case guidelines reflect a demotion of free speech in the ACLU's hierarchy of values. Their vague references to the "serious harm" to "marginalized" people occasioned by speech can easily include the presumed psychological effects of racist or otherwise hateful speech, which is constitutionally protected but contrary to ACLU values. Faced with perceived conflicts between freedom of speech and "progress toward equality," the ACLU is likely to choose equality. If the Supreme Court adopted the ACLU's balancing test, it would greatly expand government power to restrict speech.
In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), for example, the ACLU defended the First Amendment rights of a Ku Klux Klan leader prosecuted for addressing a small rally and calling for "revengence" against blacks and Jews. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed Clarence Brandenburg's conviction, narrowly defining incitement to violence as speech both intended and likely to cause imminent illegal action. Brandenburg made an essential distinction between advocacy and action, which progressives who equate hate speech with actual discrimination or violence seek to erase.
The ACLU would be hard pressed to take Brandenburg's case today, given its new guidelines. The organization hasn't yet endorsed a ban on hate speech, or a broader definition of incitement. The guidelines affirm that "speakers have a right to advocate violence." But even if Brandenburg managed to pass the new balancing test for speech cases, some participants at his rally were armed, and, according to the guidelines, "the ACLU generally will not represent protesters who seek to march while armed."
[Robby Soave, "Leaked Internal Memo Reveals the ACLU Is Wavering on Free Speech," Reason, June 21]
The memo can be found here: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/20180621ACLU.pdf?mod=article_inline.
Doctor-assisted suicide makes depression-induced suicide more likely. Melinda Henneberger writes:
Doctor-assisted suicide increases overall suicide rates among the non-terminally ill everywhere it's made legal. Such laws have a measurable effect on those who aren't dying, but who are suffering from depression.
A study conducted between 1990 and 2013 and published three years ago in the Southern Medical Journal found the correlation unmistakable: "Controlling for various socioeconomic factors, unobservable state and year effects, and state-specific linear trends, we found that legalizing [physician-assisted suicide] was associated with a 6.3% increase in total suicides."
In Oregon, which legalized assisted suicide in 1997, suicide rates are more than 40 percent higher than the national average.
And wherever doctors could legally help their worst-off patients end their own lives, more of those in acute but treatable, transitory, psychic pain followed suit. [...]
Yet for some reason, assisted suicide for psychiatric patients is not prohibited, but increasingly accepted. An alarm-sounding March piece in the New England Journal of Medicine said, "Physicians in the Netherlands and Belgium have helped a small but growing number of patients with mental illness but no terminal condition to end their lives. In some U.S. states, attempts to extend physician-assisted death to psychiatric patients appear inevitable.''
These same people are most vulnerable to the risk of suicide contagion, which ought to make us rethink the whole glossy, hats-off-to-you way we in the media often present assisted suicide.
[Melinda Henneberger, "Doctor-Assisted Suicide Is Contagious, Too. Why Aren't We Sounding the Alarm?" Kansas City Star, June 21]
Charles Krauthammer, R.I.P. Columnist Charles Krauthammer died on Thursday at the age of 68. George Will writes:
In 1972, when he was a 22-year-old student at Harvard Medical School, he was swimming in a pool. Someone pushed the diving board out, extending over a shallower part of the pool. Charles, not realizing this, dove and broke his neck. At the bottom of the pool, "I knew exactly what happened. I knew why I wasn't able to move, and I knew what that meant." It meant that life was going to be different than he and Robyn had anticipated when they met at Oxford.
He left two books at the pool. One was a text on the spinal cord. The other was Andre Malraux's novel "Man's Fate."
Paralyzed from the neck down, he completed medical school, did an internship and, one thing leading to another, as life has a way of doing, became not a jewel in the crown of the medical profession, which he would have been, but one of America's foremost public intellectuals. Nothing against doctors, but the nation needed Charles more as a diagnostician of our public discontents. [...]
Medicine made Charles intimate with finitude — the skull beneath the skin of life; the fact that expiration is written into the lease we have on our bodies. And his accident gave him a capacity for sympathy, as Rick Ankiel knows.
Ankiel was a can't-miss, Cooperstown-bound pitching phenomenon for the St. Louis Cardinals — until, suddenly and inexplicably, he could not find the plate. Starting the opening game of a playoff series at age 21, the prodigy threw five wild pitches and his career rapidly spiraled far down to … resurrection as a 28-year-old major league outfielder, for a short but satisfying stint in defiance of F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that there are no second acts in a life. As Charles wrote, Ankiel's saga illustrated "the catastrophe that awaits everyone from a single false move, wrong turn, fatal encounter. Every life has such a moment. What distinguishes us is whether — and how — we ever come back."
[George F. Will, "Charles Krauthammer's Death Leaves a Huge Void," New York Post, June 21]
And Peter Wehner writes:
Charles, who received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, was not only an elegant writer; he also had a beautiful mind: precise, logical, subtle and blessedly free of cant. He loathed trendiness and the fads that sometimes sweep over the culture.
Like any good columnist, Charles had deep convictions — on the uniqueness and greatness of America, his devotion to democratic pluralism, and his support for Israel and Zionism; on the wonder and joys of physics, chess and baseball, especially his beloved Washington Nationals. (We once exchanged thoughts on an upcoming Super Bowl, but he couldn't help concluding this way: "Of course, the whole damn game is just a prelude to the beginning of spring training. We must keep things in perspective.")
But convictions on some matters never meant certainty on all matters. He was comfortable with what he called "inescapable ambiguity" on complicated moral matters. For Charles, abortion was such an issue. My views on abortion are more conservative than his were, but I have long kept in mind what he wrote in 1985:
There is not the slightest recognition on either side that abortion might be at the limits of our empirical and moral knowledge. The problem starts with an awesome mystery: the transformation of two soulless cells into a living human being. That leads to an insoluble empirical question: How and exactly when does that occur? On that, in turn, hangs the moral issue: What are the claims of the entity undergoing that transformation?
How can we expect such a question to yield answers that are not tentative and indeterminate? So difficult a moral question should command humility, or at least a little old-fashioned tolerance.
This is a model of concision, precision and illumination.
In an age when political commentary is getting shallower and more vituperative, we will especially miss Charles's style of writing — calm, carefully constructed arguments based on propositions and evidence, tinged with a cutting wit and wry humor but never malice.
[Peter Wehner, "The Example of Charles Krauthammer," The New York Times, June 21]
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