The Lawyer Left Rules

If you listen to the media and to Democratic politicians, you would think that they alone are defending the rule of law and our sacrosanct democracy. They believe that President Trump is a despot, that he is imposing his will on the nation and that his will does not represent the will of the people.

It ought to be well enough known by now, but today’s Democratic party believes that a fair election is one that it wins. But, it should be better known that the Democratic party does not believe in the will of the people or the rule of law. It believes fervently, Andrew McCarthy reminds us, in the rule of lawyers. That is, in the rule of judges.

When Obama was ruling by executive edict, it was good and normal. When Trump issues an executive order, he is acting despotically. In truth, he is so despotic that many of his more important orders have been delayed or canceled by federal judges. That is, be federal judges that were appointed by President Obama… and by President Clinton.

The Lawyer Left, as McCarthy calls them:

… talk a good game about “ground-up democracy,” but the actual goal is top-down control. Those judges — their judges — are in place to dictate policy outcomes, not to let democracy happen.

And also:

You may have been under the impression that Trump won the election, and that choosing among competing policies is what elections are about. That is how it is supposed to work in our free, constitutional republic. But day by day, the space for free choice is shrinking. To the Lawyer Left, elections represent a policy choice only when Democrats win. The rest of the time, the courts are there to consolidate the Left’s gains, to repel democratically driven policy shifts.

Last week, for example, a federal judge in Montana blocked the Trump order allowing the construction of the Keystone pipeline… on environmental grounds. As  you could have guessed, the judge had been appointed by Obama:

On the same day, an Obama judge in Montana issued an injunction blocking the Keystone Pipeline. This toed the Obama line, the former president having halted construction of the pipeline — which would transport oil from Canada to Nebraska — in obeisance to his green base and as an exhibition of American global leadership on climate change.

Trump ran against these policies in his presidential bid. He sought to convince the public that the promotion of economic development was essential to national prosperity and would not harm the environment. He urged voters that Obama’s conception of global leadership was to preen while developing countries ignored his greenhouse-gasbaggery and developed countries made commitments that were “aspirational” (translation: economically ruinous) and that they had no intention of trying to keep.

As for the Trump administration restrictions on illegal immigration, McCarthy notes that it’s only a matter of time before a judge somewhere strikes them down:

Some federal district judge, somewhere in the United States, will soon issue an injunction blocking enforcement of the Trump administration’s restrictions on asylum applications.

The restrictions come in the form of a rule promulgated jointly by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and a proclamation issued by President Trump. In conjunction, they assert that an alien who wishes to apply for asylum in the United States must act lawfully: An alien who is physically present here and wishes to apply must be in the country legally; an alien outside the country who wishes to apply must present himself at a lawful port of entry — not attempt to smuggle his way in or force his way in as part of a horde (i.e., no invasions by caravan).

And then there is DACA. It was instituted extra-constitutionally by Barack Obama. Now, courts are saying that you cannot challenge it:

Just as the administration was readying the new asylum standards, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled that Trump is powerless to reverse Obama’s DACA policy (Delayed Action on Childhood Arrivals). You’ll be shocked, no doubt, to learn the panel’s composition: two Obama judges and one Clinton judge who was on Obama’s short list for elevation to the Supreme Court.

DACA effectively amended deportation law, a presidential usurpation of legislative power. Obama imposed it unilaterally despite several times conceding that he lacked the authority to do so. (If you don’t remember, my friend Hans von Spakovsky reminds you here.) But the judges are enshrining it nonetheless. Mind you, DACA is not even a regulation, much less a law (indeed, Congress declined to enact such a law). Obama decreed it by having his homeland-security secretary issue a policy memo.

Yet the judges would have you think it was engraved on tablets pried from the Ark of the Covenant. The court’s opinion often reads like a bad novel — as if jurisprudence has become Sonia Sotomayor’s world, and we’re just empathizing in it. Otherwise, it reads like a policy memo that borrows liberally from Obama’s policy memo. Bottom line: The Ninth Circuit says Trump did not provide a good enough explanation for changing Obama’s policy.

Given this context, it makes perfect sense that the Lawyer Left would go to the mat to keep Brett Kavanaugh off of the Supreme Court. It’s not just about the rule of law or democratic institutions. It’s about the rule of lawyers and the will to prevent Trump from erasing the Obama legacy.

In truth, the same thing is happening in the case of Jamal Khashoggi. The same leftist media groups that tried to sell the country on the Iran nuclear deal, thus, to produce a strategic realignment in the Middle East-- pro-Iranian, anti-Israeli and anti-Saudi-- has been hard at work undermining the American alliance with Saudi Arabia.

You will note that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, while expressing his horror at what happened to Khashoggi, has stated that he will not let the even undermine the burgeoning alliance he is forming with Sunni Arab states. Naturally, the media industrial complex is attacking Netanyahu and telling him that he is threatening his relationships with America.