Dr. Lott has a new piece in the Daily Caller
The media is apoplectic that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has criticized the federal judge in Hawaii who suspended President Donald Trump’s revised executive order on visas and refugees. Sessions offending statement? “I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the President of the U.S. from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power,” Sessions said on Tuesday.
While the media wants to argue that Sessions was disrespecting the state of Hawaii, he was actually just raising a basic question. How can one federal judge control the immigration policy of the entire country?
The threat of terrorism is real. With yet another ISIS attack in Paris, it is hard to argue with President Trump’s warning that we need to “keep these foreign terrorists from entering our country in the first place.”
But a federal judge in Hawaii, Derrick Watson, struck down the administration’s temporary suspension of entry from six countries. Watson, a district court judge appointed by President Barack Obama, declared that Trump’s executive order was “motivated by anti-Muslim animus.”
As evidence, Judge Watson cites Trump’s verbal statement while signing the first travel ban: “I am establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States.” Trump also later remakred, “If the ban were announced with a one-week notice, the ‘bad’ would rush into our country during that week.”
Can’t Watson differentiate between a Muslim ban and trying to keep out “radical Islamic terrorists?” Doesn’t it make sense that terrorists would try to enter the United States before the new rules went into effect?
The judge’s attempt to read religious intolerance into reasonable statements involves more politics than law.
These aren’t irrational fears. . . .
The rest of the piece is available here.
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