Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Triumphant Trump Vindicated Again

THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
by John and Andy Schlafly

Only Donald Trump wins as comfortably in the hushed halls of the Supreme Court as on the backroads of rural America.  In the past few days he has triumphed before the Supreme Court, leads by 51-36% in the latest approval poll concerning his economic policies, and prevailed by an incalculable margin in rebuking the restaurant that denied service to his press secretary and her family.

The new liberal strategy of harassing Trump officials is backfiring.  As leading Democrats themselves recognize in unsuccessfully trying to rein in their extremists, it is un-American to harass fellow Americans for their political views.

Time magazine piled on with a ridiculous cover image of President Trump standing stubbornly over a little girl detained at our border.  Yanela Hernandez was supposed to become the poster child for family separation, after she was brought here by her mother all the way from Honduras.

But it is the facts that are stubbornly ruining the anti-Trump script.  The girl was actually separated from her father not by Trump but by her own mother, who took the child on a dangerous 3-week, 1,600-mile journey without telling her husband (the girl’s father).

Nearly 20 years ago, a 5-year-old Cuban boy named Elián González was brought by his mother on a dangerous journey to Florida.  Elián was placed with relatives in the United States after his mother drowned, but as demanded by liberals President Clinton ordered him seized him at gunpoint and returned to communist Cuba.

Illegal immigration is what is separating families, not President Trump.  Yanela Hernandez would not have been taken away from her family in Honduras if we had sensible border control.

Referring to the deprivation of his little girl from him by her mother in Honduras, her father Denis Hernandez told a reporter for the Daily Mail, “I do think it was irresponsible of her to take the baby with her, because we don’t know what could happen.”

“I thank God I have a good job here,” Mr. Hernandez said from his home in Puerto Cortes, Honduras, which is safe enough to be a tourist destination. “I would never risk my life making that journey.”

This case illustrates someone who should be sent back immediately without a judicial hearing, since the Hernandez family has no basis for claiming asylum or refugee status.  When Trump suggested that, a news story in the New York Times declared it was “an escalation of his attacks on the judicial system.”

That criticism of Trump is ironic in light of the Supreme Court ruling in his favor on Tuesday, for which he patiently waited for nearly a year-and-a-half.  Far from attacking the judicial system, Trump fully complied with all its procedures and prevailed as the Court upheld his so-called travel ban from nations hostile to us.

Let’s hope lower federal courts take a cue from the Supreme Court in deferring to presidential authority in these matters.  But earlier this month, on June 6, a federal judge in San Diego allowed the ACLU to continue its lawsuit against the “practice” of separating migrant children from their parents without showing that the parent is unfit or presents a danger to the child.

On June 5, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a statement blasting the Trump administration’s policy of zero tolerance for illegal entry into the United States.  The statement ordered our government to “stop criminalizing what should at most be an administrative offense — that of irregular entry or stay in the U.S.”

The UN human rights office accused our government of committing “a serious violation of the rights of the child,” before complaining that the U.S. “is the only country in the world not to have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.”  That’s right, the United States has wisely refused to ratify that dangerous UN treaty since the 1990s, when it was pushed by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton and properly opposed by Phyllis Schlafly.

On June 19, the U.S. formally withdrew from a related UN agency called the Human Rights Council, whose members include some of the most repressive regimes on earth.  Ambassador Nikki Haley denounced the council, which has passed more resolutions to condemn Israel specifically than to condemn Syria, Iran and North Korea combined, as “an organization that is unworthy of its name.”

Another globalist tribunal which our country declined to join more than 15 years ago is the international criminal court, located in the Hague.  That did not stop a clueless protester from shouting at Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, that “you belong in the Hague!”

As hard as the Left smears and harasses him and his team, the stronger Trump becomes.  “Triumphant Trump” emerges victorious again and again.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Trump Should Stand Firm Against Illegals

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
by John and Andy Schlafly

The push for amnesty for illegal aliens is turbo-charged by stories of separating children from their parents at the southern border.  But children are often separated from lawbreaking and even law-abiding American parents, so it is curious why liberals and others would suddenly complain when it happens to families for entering our country illegally.

The critics do not provide an alternative to the current policy of prosecuting lawbreaking parents while allowing their children to go free.  If we had a border wall then these separations would not occur, and the critics of Trump are the same ones who oppose building the wall.

Migrant camps would be needed to keep all families together as the adults break the law, but that is a European rather than American approach.  There is no crisis in Central America that justifies establishing refugee camps.

“The United States will not be a migrant camp,” President Trump rightly declared, “and it will not be a refugee holding facility.  Not on my watch!”
The timing is suspicious for this media campaign about separating children from parents.  The push for an amnesty bill has reached a fever pitch for more than a million young adults, who are euphemistically called “childhood arrivals” because many of them crossed our border illegally while teenagers.

These migrants would be wonderful assets to their homelands, and they have more relatives back home than they do here.  Amnesty would merely encourage more illegality.

Lobbying groups in D.C. are turning up the heat on congressmen to get this amnesty passed, and the Koch donor network is demanding it, too.  Big business benefits from cheap labor that crosses our borders illegally.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed into law an immigration bill that granted amnesty and created the incentive for more illegal immigration.  Far from solving a problem, amnesty induces more illegal immigration in the future.

So to attract support by President Trump, the House compromise amnesty bill includes funding for construction of a border wall, to the tune of $25 billion.  But funding a wall is not the same as building a wall, because liberals run to court to block almost anything Trump does related to immigration.

Before the ink could dry on such a bill, even if it were to pass the Senate intact, liberals would file suit to obtain injunctions blocking the construction of a wall.  They would sue in predictably activist jurisdictions such as San Francisco and Hawaii, where multiple injunctions have already been issued to block Trump’s executive orders that were tame compared with a border wall.

Congress has the authority to “strip” federal courts of jurisdiction, and has done so on many occasions.  As explained by Phyllis Schlafly in her classic book The Supremacists, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) once stripped jurisdiction from federal courts over challenges to brush-clearing in his home state.

Before President Trump signs any immigration bill, he should insist on broad jurisdiction-stripping provisions.  He should demand that Congress remove federal court jurisdiction over his executive orders limiting travel from hostile nations.

If federal courts are allowed to wield authority over the construction of a border wall, then multiple Clinton – or Obama – appointed judges will surely enjoin its construction.  Reasons given will range from environmentalism to non-existent prejudice.

Fortunately, few Republicans who want to win reelection will cross President Trump at this point, after his tweet sunk Never-Trumper Congressman Mark Sanford in his own primary in South Carolina.  There is no reason for Trump to cave into Republicans now.

Lame duck House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is stepping down at the age of only 48 rather than fight for the Trump agenda, has long given priority to the agenda of the pro-illegal immigration lobbyists.  But their goals are not those of the American people who elected Trump as president.

Trump announced that he is not going to sign the Ryan immigration bill, which reminds us again why Trump is so much better than any other Republican presidential candidate.  Anyone else would have capitulated to the pressure from Republican mega-donors and lobbyists to sign into law an amnesty bill.

No immigration bill can become law without the support of President Trump, and House leaders are meeting with him on Tuesday to seek a compromise.  Trump should adhere to non-negotiable requirements, including a withdrawal of jurisdiction from the courts over issues relating to construction of the wall, Trump’s executive orders concerning immigration, and challenges to deportation.

Congressmen Steve King and Lou Barletta, who is a candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania against a Democrat incumbent, have long been leaders on this all-important issue of immigration.  Both oppose the compromise bill being pushed on President Trump, and no bill on immigration is worth supporting unless Representatives King and Barletta are on board.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Trump's Winning Economic Positions

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
by John and Andy Schlafly

President Trump reasserted American leadership on trade and security in the last week, sending his doubters into disarray.  Trump’s historic performance at the G-7 meeting in Canada, followed quickly by his meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore, left no doubt that America is indeed great again on the world stage.

Justin Trudeau, Canada’s leftwing prime minister, was unnecessarily belligerent to Trump at the end of the G-7 summit, and Never-Trump Republicans should not have piled on.  Lame duck Republican senator Jeff Flake, who is so unpopular in Arizona that he decided not to run for reelection, once again lashed out at Trump, as did other globalist Republicans.

But American workers are behind Trump, and the stock market shows no harmful effects of Trump’s pro-American, pro-tariff trade policies.  The G-7 summit, a gathering of the leaders of seven large economies, demonstrated that it has become a farce.

It held a breakfast meeting devoted to "gender equality," and we applaud how Trump showed up late for such an unproductive attempt at political correctness.  The politicians at the G-7 summit are in denial about how voters throughout Europe, as in the United States and more recently in Italy, are rejecting the business-as-usual approach of the Establishment.

Meanwhile, although Trump's pro-tariff positions receive all the attention, a little-noticed appointment back home may be nearly as important.  Makan Delrahim, Trump's handpicked leader of the antitrust division at the Department of Justice, is working hard to ensure more competition domestically and Silicon Valley monopolies are nervous about this.

Small businesses create far more jobs than big business does, a fact lost on the pre-Trump Republican Party.  President George W. Bush pursued policies favorable to big business and it all cratered in 2008, handling the election to Obama.

Once the home of countless tech start-ups, Silicon Valley has devolved into a two-tier society of haves and have-nots, and little real competition.  A mere handful of giant companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google have exploited the H-1B visa program and failed to compete with each other for labor, such that salaries have not kept up with the cost of living there.

The latest average salary increase of tech workers in Silicon Valley -- the region between San Francisco and San Jose that is the birthplace of many familiar technology behemoths -- is only 0.4% per year.  That is because there is not real competition there, but merely large companies that fight to maintain the status quo with them on top.

The cost of living goes up there, but real wages do not.  The result is a large homeless population of people who simply cannot earn enough, even working multiple jobs, to afford housing.

Worn-out RVs line one edge of Stanford University, and homeless camps of families litter the landscape close to wealth centers like Google's headquarters. Monopolies interfere with a healthy distribution of wealth, creating enormous disparities more familiar in countries like Mexico, where a few people control much of the property.

Big companies rarely innovate, and in fact often stifle inventions that threaten their dominance.  The largest Silicon Valley companies have been most responsible for changing our patent system from one that rewarded the inventor to one that favors big business.

Trump's outspoken criticism of Amazon.com has led others in his Administration and the Republican Party to look more critically at Silicon Valley monopolies like Facebook.  The scrutiny is long overdue, and some antitrust enforcement may be just what the doctor ordered.

This is welcome relief from the failed policies of the administration of President George W. Bush, which rolled over for the Microsoft monopoly and got nothing for the American public in return.  Bill Gates then poured some of his wealth into promoting Common Core and other liberal goals, which conservatives have fought ever since.

Many of these tech monopolies are too anxious to give away American trade secrets to China in exchange for making a few bucks in that market.  Already China is manufacturing cheap smart phones, but where did it acquire the secrets to do so?

Apple itself did not invent the smart phone, as the Blackberry deserves more credit for that.  But then Apple embarked on a business plan of selling in China, which typically requires giving China technology secrets to do so.

The profits Apple made on those sales have been mostly kept outside the United States, so they have not helped Americans at all.  The long-term effect of Apple's sales in China may simply be to transfer secret technology developed here to a foreign power hostile to the United States.

A strong antitrust policy against the monopolistic technology companies will complement Trump's principled support of fair trade.  Trump was right to reject the globalism of the G-7 summit, and to send a long-overdue message that the United States will no longer be taken for granted on trade.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Abortion Rights for Illegal Aliens Rejected

Phyllis Schlafly Report
by John and Andy Schlafly

Promoters of abortion are aggressively pursuing a legal strategy to establish a new constitutional right to abortion for illegal aliens.  Young girls are entering our country unlawfully, while pregnant, and a cadre of attorneys demand that courts compel the Trump Administration to be complicit in facilitating abortions for them.

This combination of illegal immigration and demands for a right to abortion may be opening people’s eyes to both.  To those who support abortion, do they support a right for illegal aliens to abortion here?

The D.C. Circuit convened en banc, which is a rare sitting of all its active judges, for the majority Clinton and Obama-nominated judges to declare a constitutional right to abortion by illegal aliens.  Then the attorneys pushing this issue for a 17-year-old girl, who apparently entered our country unlawfully while pregnant, arranged for a middle-of-the-night abortion to circumvent timely review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The abortion mooted the case, and the precedent of the en banc D.C. Circuit ruling supposedly settled the issue for use nationwide.  Ordinarily there is nothing left to appeal when a case is moot.

But something did not sit well with the Supreme Court Justices, perhaps including Justice Kennedy.  He had silently sided with expanding the rights to abortion in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016), which overturned a Texas pro-life law, but is he really fine with establishing a new right to abortion for pregnant girls unlawfully entering the United States from countries having pro-life laws?

Perhaps not, and perhaps that is leading him and others to rethink their logic towards abortion.  Trump’s Solicitor General Noel Francisco brilliantly appealed the D.C. Circuit concerning the pregnant illegal alien to the Supreme Court, after finding a precedent that authorizes overruling decisions that were mooted by a subsequent factual development.

Solicitor General Francisco also requested that the High Court consider disciplining the attorneys on the other side who arranged for such an irregular abortion to evade Supreme Court review.  The lack of respect for the orderly administration of justice – not to mention the possible exploitation of the immigrant girl – should be troubling even to those who support abortion.

In a similar case, another immigrant changed her mind about having the abortion amid the legal maneuvering.  But a middle-of-the-night abortion does not lend itself to the clarity of mind needed for informed consent up until the operation, nor does it maximize the safety of the operation because complications are known to be higher for late-night surgeries.

Something evidently troubled at least five of the Supreme Court justices about this case of Azar v. Garza, probably including Justice Kennedy, because it bounced through an extraordinary 15 conferences before a terse decision emerged from the Court.  The opinion was obviously a compromise, as near the end two competing views of the tactics used by the attorneys in procuring the abortion were recounted without resolution.

It was probably to avert a worse defeat for the Left in this case that four Justices who typically side with Planned Parenthood and the ACLU joined the unanimous decision to overturn and vacate the D.C. Circuit opinion.  This wipes from the books that appellate precedent for a right to abortion by illegal aliens.

If this decision merely stood alone, one might be reluctant to read too much into it.  But it comes less than a week after a surprise denial of a petition for cert by Planned Parenthood to challenge a new pro-life law in Arkansas that is expected to cause some abortion clinics to close there.

There was no dissent from that denial of cert in Planned Parenthood v. Jegley, and the media was dismayed about how Planned Parenthood could lose before a Court that supposedly had five votes in its corner.  The lack of a dissent suggests that the 5-4 majority on the Court for the pro-abortion side is in jeopardy or may no longer exist.

Later this month we will learn if any retirements are forthcoming from the Court, which would give President Trump the opportunity to nominate a strong new Justice.  But even without a retirement, this pair of decisions and the spectacle of 15 conferences to issue a unanimous decision against an abortion precedent suggests that something is afoot internally at the Court.

A majority of the Court may feel, as they should, that illegal aliens from pro-life countries do not have a constitutional right to abortion here.  They need to return home to give birth, because their homeland prohibits abortion, or they should give birth here.

That means a majority on the High Court would give effect to the pro-life laws of South American countries.  If Planned Parenthood and the ACLU lose on that issue, as they should, then it follows that they should lose on their similar arguments that demand invalidation of pro-life laws enacted by democratically elected legislators in our country.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.