Trump Does Scalia Justice With Gorsuch Pick Senate Democrats signal a war ahead. Joseph Klein

President Trump has nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch, 49, to fill the Supreme Court seat held by Justice Antonin Scalia until he passed away last February. In announcing the nomination, President Trump said, “Judge Gorsuch has outstanding legal skills, a brilliant mind, tremendous discipline and has earned bipartisan support.” President Trump added that Judge Gorsuch was “the man our country needs and needs badly to ensure the rule of law and the rule of justice.”

Judge Gorsuch was a Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford, a Harvard Law School graduate, and a clerk for Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. He served in a high-ranking position in the Justice Department before he was nominated by former President George W. Bush and confirmed by voice vote in the Senate for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in 2006.

Judge Gorsuch shares Justice Scalia’s originalist legal philosophy. Like Justice Scalia did throughout his judicial career, Judge Gorsuch seeks to interpret the Constitution through strict construction of its text and an understanding of the Founding Fathers’ original intent.

“The great project of Justice Scalia’s career was to remind us of the differences between judges and legislators,” Judge Gorsuch remarked at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland. He said that judges should refrain from imposing their own moral predilections in their decisions. Instead, they should use “text, structure and history” in their interpretations of the law. Legislators “may appeal to their own moral convictions and to claims about social utility to reshape the law as they think it should be in the future,” Judge Gorsuch said. However, “judges should do none of these things in a democratic society.”

As Judge Gorsuch put it in one of his opinions, judges should “apply the law as it is, not as they wish it to be.”

It is this approach, as reflected in his opinions, which explains Judge Gorsuch’s ranking near the top of the so-called “Scalia Index,” created by some legal academics, to analyze who would be likely to best follow in Justice Scalia’s footsteps.

Victoria Kincaid: ISIS, Child Soldiers and Islamic Schools

While ISIS is ransacks the Middle East, and while the intolerable fundamentalist Muslim communities in Western cities are ignored by the Left, Muslim children suffer immeasurably. They will continue to suffer until the Western world finally recognises that the underlying problem is Islam.
The subjugation and exploitation of women and girls in Islam is well publicised. The moderate factions promote the sexual shaming of women under the guise of “modesty” by the hijab, niqab and burqa. The extremists conduct the increasingly prolific sex-slave trade of Yazidi women as a recruiting tool for the Islamic State. It is no secret that Islam is the most misogynistic institution in the world. However, what is not widely considered is the appalling treatment of children under Islam. The Left will cover its ears and insist child abuse is a global phenomenon, not attached to any particular ideology. But child abuse in the Muslim world occurs for reasons that are Islamic, rather than universal. Its purpose is not only to disempower, but to brainwash.

There is a calculated endeavour by Muslim conservatives and extremists to exploit children of both genders. They use children to project fundamentalist Islamic ideals into the future. Little girls are not the sole recipients of physical and psychological abuse in the name of Islam, such as beatings by male relatives, and the ever-present horror of genital mutilation. Little boys, both in radical and so-called “moderate” Islam, are also suffering.

The most extreme issue facing boys under Islam is the recruitment of child soldiers by the Islamic State. A series of photographs and videos released in 2015 and 2016 featuring children as young as four or five years old, depicted either watching or conducting gruesome acts of war, has propelled this epidemic into the spotlight. The Islamic State has dubbed these child-warriors “the Cubs of the Caliphate”.

A study by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) in February 2016 has analysed photographs and videos released by IS between January 2015 and January 2016 eulogising eighty-nine “martyred” child recruits. Mia Bloom, John Hogan and Charlie Winter, who conducted the study, have concluded that the number of child soldiers significantly exceeds previous estimates. They assert that while the phenomenon of child soldiers is by no means new, the Islamic State’s use of prepubescent recruits is different from that of other violent Islamist organisations such as the Taliban, Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

“What this database points to is the fact that use of children is far more normalized,” Winter revealed when interviewed about the study. “They are not just being used to shock people in execution videos. They are being used for their operational value as well. This is something that sadly we have to expect to increase and accelerate as the situation becomes more precarious for ISIS in the years to come.”

IS’s prolific use of children in its ranks indicates the group has a long-term purpose in mind: to indoctrinate another generation of fighters into the extremist regime. This will enable potentially thousands of heavily indoctrinated children to continue the battle for the Caliphate for decades to come.

The data suggests the mobilisation of young boys and teenagers for military purposes is increasing:

On a month-by-month basis, the rate of young people dying in suicide operations rose, from six in January 2015 to 11 in January 2016. The rate of operations involving one or more child or youth is likewise increasing; there were three times as many suicide operations involving children and youth in January 2016 as the previous January. It seems plausible that, as military pressure against the Islamic State has increased in recent months, such operations … are becoming more tactically attractive. They represent an effective form of psychological warfare—to project strength, pierce defences, and strike fear into enemy soldiers’ hearts. We can expect that, as their implementation increases, so too will the reported rate of child and youth deaths.

Boys as young as eight are recruited, fed information on weaponry and ways of war, and thrust onto the battlefield. Some boys are from the Yazidi religious minority who have been kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam. They are then sent to camps and subjected to brutal training regimes. Reports of gruelling physical drills and beatings are rife. In early 2016, reports revealed an incident of children being threatened with rape if they did not submit to the Islamic State’s authority.

Trump’s Iran Notice Tehran tests the new President with another ballistic missile launch.

One early test for the Trump Administration will be how it enforces the nuclear deal with Iran, and that question has become more urgent with Iran’s test last weekend of another ballistic missile.

The test of a medium-range, home-grown Khorramshahr missile is Tehran’s twelfth since it signed the nuclear deal with the U.S. and its diplomatic partners in 2015. John Kerry, then Secretary of State, insisted that the deal barred Iran from developing or testing ballistic missiles. But that turned out to be a self-deception at best, as the U.N. Security Council resolution merely “called upon” Iran not to conduct such missile tests, rather than barring them.

Iran has little reason to stop such tests because the penalties for doing them have been so light. The Obama Administration responded with weak sanctions on a few Iranian entities and individuals, even as it insisted that Iran is complying with the overall deal and deserves more sanctions relief. In December Boeing signed a $16 billion deal to sell 80 passenger planes to Iran, never mind that the regime uses its airliners to ferry troops and materiel to proxies in Syria.

President Trump has offered contradictory opinions about that sale, but he has been unequivocal in his opposition to what he calls the “disastrous” Iran deal. In a call Sunday with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, the President pledged to enforce the Iran deal “rigorously,” and on Monday the Administration requested an emergency Security Council meeting to discuss the latest test.

That meeting probably won’t yield much, thanks to the usual Russian obstruction, but it will put a spotlight on the willingness of allies such as Britain to do more to uphold an agreement the enforcement mechanisms of which they were once eager to trumpet. Whatever happened to the “snapback economic sanctions” that were supposed to be the West’s insurance policy against Iran’s cheating?

The Administration could also warn Iran that the Treasury Department will bar global banks from conducting dollar transactions with their Iranian counterparts in the event of another test, and that it will rigorously enforce “know your customer” rules for foreign companies doing business with counterparts in the Islamic Republic, many of which are fronts for the Revolutionary Guards.

The U.S. needs to provide allies with military reassurance against the Iranian threat. Supplying Israel with additional funds to develop its sophisticated Arrow III anti-ballistic missile system would send the right message, as would an offer to Saudi Arabia to sell Lockheed Martin’s high-altitude Thaad ABM system. The State Department and Pentagon will have to explore diplomatic and military options in case the deal unravels.

What Kind of a Judge Is Neil Gorsuch? He carefully follows the law, and writes as engagingly as Scalia, without the abrasiveness. By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman

Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia, is a native Coloradan and avid outdoorsman. He clerked for a federal appellate judge and two Supreme Court justices and spent a decade practicing law before his appointment in 2006, at age 39, to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In the decade since, he has written some 850 opinions.

The way to take a judge’s measure is to read his opinions, and so we set out to review Judge Gorsuch’s. It was not an arduous task, for his prose is unusually engaging—think Scalia, with none of the abrasiveness. Justice Elena Kagan has declared herself a fan of his writing style. The only difficulty in summarizing Judge Gorsuch’s output is the compulsion to quote, at length, from so many of his opinions.

One opens this way: “Haunted houses may be full of ghosts, goblins, and guillotines, but it’s their more prosaic features that pose the real danger. Tyler Hodges found that out when an evening shift working the ticket booth ended with him plummeting down an elevator shaft.” The case, by the way, was a prosaic dispute between insurers. Another opinion starts: “What began as a fight at a strip club finds its way here as a clash over hearsay.”

Judge Gorsuch shows a concern for the people whose disputes are before the court. Each opinion typically begins with the name of the person seeking relief and why. A recent example: “After a bale of hay hit and injured Miriam White while she was operating her tractor, she sued the manufacturer, Deere & Company.” Ms. White’s appeal was summarily denied, but even the brief, three-page opinion reflects a serious engagement with her arguments and the facts—in contrast with the boilerplate language judges often use in such decisions. Win or lose, parties appearing before Judge Gorsuch surely know that they have been treated with fairness, consideration and respect.

Rashid Khalidi Worries that Jews Will ‘Infest’ the Trump Administration The famous Columbia professor repeatedly used a Nazi-era metaphor to depict Jews as vermin. By Dore Feith

Rashid Khalidi is unapologetic. The longtime Columbia University professor last month said repeatedly that supporters of Israel would “infest” the Trump administration — language that evokes the imagery and metaphors of the Nazis. But for all the on-campus sensitivity seminars and trigger warnings that dominate our age, don’t expect an apology in this case. Apparently, no language, even if it is dehumanizing and deeply rooted in historic anti-Semitism, is out of line in condemning Israel.

Professor Khalidi is well known as Columbia University’s professor of modern Arab studies. January 17, in a lengthy radio interview on WBEZ Chicago’s “Worldview,” Khalidi warned that this infestation would begin under the new president. Describing Israel supporters in terms that evoke vermin was not a momentary lapse or slip of the tongue. He used “infest” three times, saying “these people infest” the Trump transition team and will soon “infest” the government.

Who are “these people?” In his view, they’re a bit crazy but also scheming. Khalidi explains:

There are a group of people, a lot of them in Israel and some of them in the United States, who live in a world of their own. That is to say, they think that whatever they want, and whatever cockamamie schemes they can cook up, can be substituted for reality.

Free speech is a blessed thing, and hypersensitivity to offensive language is a curse on college campuses. I have no desire to stifle discussion, but it’s fair to ask: What’s become of “reasonable people can differ”? What’s become of civil discourse? What’s become of the golden rule? One has to suppose that Khalidi would take offense if someone analogized Palestinians, rather than Jews, to rats or cockroaches.

His remarks may not be the ugliest comment along these lines that ever emerged from the Middle East–studies faculty at Columbia. Professor Hamid Dabashi once described the soul of an Israeli Jew as containing a “vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.” But the “infestation” theme is nasty enough to warrant special notice.

What makes it especially nasty is its historical resonance. To be sure, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism and not all anti-Semitism is Nazism. But there’s no getting around the fact that in his memoir, Mein Kampf, Hitler over and over again described the Jews as an infestation of vermin. That was one of the book’s main metaphors. And that’s why Nazi officials made a point of saying their Jewish policy aimed not to “kill” but to “exterminate” (vernichten), a word more appropriate for bugs or lice than human beings.

Brown Accused of Sexism for Gym Dress Code That’s Exactly the Same for Men as for Women Two women asked to leave the gym over the policy don’t understand what discrimination is. By Katherine Timpf

Two Rhode Island School of Design students were kicked out of Brown University’s gym for wearing midriff-baring gear, and now they’re insisting that the dress code is sexist — even though the rules are exactly the same for men as they are for women.

RISD student Elizabeth Dimitroff claims that she was told to either cover herself or leave while she was working out at Brown’s Nelson Fitness Center in a “sports bra with high-waisted leggings” last spring, according to the Brown Daily Herald. And another RISD student, Chloe Karayiannis, said that an employee at the gym told her that her bare stomach might make other people at the gym uncomfortable while she was working out there over winter break.

The Herald reports that although both women consider the policy to be “sexist and discriminatory towards women,” school officials have insisted that that’s not the case. In fact, Nelson Fitness Center manager Jason Bishoff told the publication that if an employee really did tell Karayiannis that the reason she had to cover up was to avoid making other people uncomfortable, then that employee simply did not understand the real reason for the rule — which he said is “to reduce skin contact with workout equipment.”

“We don’t want anybody to feel that this is targeted at them,” Bishoff said. “These rules apply to all genders, all ages, all populations.”

That’s right: According to Bishoff, the reason behind the rules is not to maximize the power of the patriarchy, but to minimize the amount of sweaty, germ-covered skin that will be touching the equipment. Still, both Dimitroff and Karayiannis insist that — gender-neutral or not — the rules are clearly rooted in a misogynistic desire to police women’s bodies

Dimitroff told the Herald that the policy “place[s] the blame on women and the way women dress,” and “blames women for something that men need to change about how they view women’s bodies.” And Karayiannis said that “it doesn’t matter whether or not it applies to men as well because it’s sending the message that what I’m wearing is not respectable and associates what I’m wearing with respect.”

But here’s the thing, Karayiannis — it actually does matter “whether or not it applies to men as well.” The definition of “discriminatory” is “making or showing an unfair or prejudicial distinction between different categories of people,” therefore, a policy that shows no distinction between categories would not qualify. In fact, it would be the opposite.

Distorting Senator Sessions’s Questioning of Sally Yates Despite the media narrative, the exchange does not cast Yates in a better light, and it in no way damages Senator Sessions’s candidacy to be attorney general. By Andrew C. McCarthy —

If the Left is going to twist every bit of Trump administration news into fiction, who is going to believe them when, inevitably, there actually is something worth raising hell about? The question is worth asking — for about the tenth time this week . . . and it’s only Tuesday! — in light of the fuss Democrats and their media friends are making over a discussion between just-fired acting attorney general Sally Yates and Senator Jeff Sessions, President Trump’s attorney-general nominee, at a 2015 Judiciary Committee hearing.

Yates, of course, has just made the leap from obscurity to the pantheon of progressive victim-heroes. Knowing she was soon going to be out of her very temporary job as acting AG, she seized the opportunity to go out in a blaze of glory with an act of insubordination against Trump’s executive order (EO) blocking the admission of various aliens into the U.S.

Yates is an Obama appointee. Trump’s EO is anathema to the Left, but regardless of what one thinks of the policy it advances, it is lawful. Moreover, even when orders are not lawful, everyone in the Justice Department knows that one’s choice, upon being given a directive from a superior about which one has misgivings, is to carry out the order or resign. Yates instead chose sabotage. She was rightfully canned, and the only question really worth pondering is why President Trump had maintained her in such an important position in the first place.

Naturally, that will not impede the frenetic campaign to fashion The Legend of Sally Yates — before the clock strikes 8:01 this evening, when Trump’s announcement of a Supreme Court pick turns her back into Sally Who?

Toward both that end and the simultaneous Democratic rope-a-dope to derail or at least delay the confirmation of Senator Sessions and other Trump nominees, the Left has leaped on a portion of Yates’s 2015 confirmation hearing (to become Obama’s deputy attorney general) in which she was questioned by Sessions.

Sessions asked Yates, “Do you think the attorney general has a responsibility to say ‘no’ to the president if he asks for something improper?” Elaborating, he pointed out that, before being confirmed as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, attorney general Loretta Lynch had said that she supported President Obama’s lawless immigration policies. Sessions added, “A lot of people have defended the Lynch nomination . . . by saying: ‘Well, [the president] appoints somebody who’s going to execute his views. What’s wrong with that?’ But if the views the president wants to execute are unlawful, should the attorney general or the deputy attorney general say ‘no’?”

Yates responded, “Senator, I believe that the attorney general or the deputy attorney general has an obligation to follow the law and the Constitution, and to give their independent legal advice to the president.”

A Supreme Successor to Justice Scalia Rocky Mountain native Neil Gorsuch has an impressive judicial record as an originalist. By Ed Whelan

On the Saturday afternoon last February when he received word of Justice Scalia’s death, Neil M. Gorsuch “immediately lost [his] breath” and “couldn’t see . . . for the tears.”

In his grief over the death of a justice he deeply admired and emulated, Judge Gorsuch could hardly have imagined the series of events that would lead to his being selected today to fill the Scalia vacancy. And while he has rightly recognized that no one could ever replace Justice Scalia, there are strong reasons to expect Justice Gorsuch to be an eminently worthy successor to the great justice.

Gorsuch is a brilliant jurist and dedicated originalist and textualist. He thinks through issues deeply. He writes with clarity, force, and verve. And his many talents promise to give him an outsized influence on future generations of lawyers.

Gorsuch’s judicial outlook is reflected in his beautiful speech (text and video) celebrating — and embracing — Justice Scalia’s traditional understanding of the judicial role and his originalist methodology:

Perhaps the great project of Justice Scalia’s career was to remind us of the differences between judges and legislators. To remind us that legislators may appeal to their own moral convictions and to claims about social utility to reshape the law as they think it should be in the future. But that judges should do none of these things in a democratic society. That judges should instead strive (if humanly and so imperfectly) to apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be—not to decide cases based on their own moral convictions or the policy consequences they believe might serve society best.

In that speech, Gorsuch acknowledges that Justice Scalia’s project had its critics, from the secular moralist Ronald Dworkin to the pragmatist Richard Posner. He explains why he rejects those critics and instead sides with Justice Scalia in believing that “an assiduous focus on text, structure, and history is essential to the proper exercise of the judicial function.” The Constitution itself carefully separates the legislative and judicial powers. Whereas the legislative power is the “power to prescribe new rules of general applicability for the future,” the judicial power is a “means for resolving disputes about what existing law is and how it applies to discrete cases and controversies.” This separation of powers is “among the most important liberty-protecting devices of the constitutional design.” Among other things, if judges were to act as legislators by imposing their preferences as constitutional dictates, “how hard it would be to revise this so-easily-made judicial legislation to account for changes in the world or to fix mistakes.” Indeed, the “very idea of self-government would seem to wither to the point of pointlessness.”

The Democrat Patient Ignoring the symptoms, misdiagnosing the malady, skipping the treatment By Victor Davis Hanson

If progressives were to become empiricists, they would look at the symptoms of the last election and come up with disinterested diagnoses, therapies, and prognoses.

Although their hard-left candidate won the popular vote, even that benchmark was somewhat deceiving — given the outlier role of California and the overwhelming odds in their favor. The Republicans ran a candidate who caused a veritable civil war in their ranks and who was condemned by many of the flagship conservative media outlets. Trump essentially ran against a united Democratic party, the Republican establishment, the mainstream media (both liberal and conservative) — and won.

He was outspent. He was out-organized. He was outpolled and demonized daily as much by Republicans as Democrats. Yet he not only destroyed three political dynasties (the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas) but also has seemingly rendered the Obama election matrix nontransferable to anyone other than Obama himself.

Not that Hillary did not try to copy Obama’s formula. She brought on Obama politicos to staff her campaign. She supported all the Obama initiatives, from Obamacare and record debt to a collapsed foreign policy. She spoke in a faux-inner city accent the same way Obama had to get out the African-American vote. She outdid Obama’s clinger speech by her own twist of “deplorables” and “irredeemables.” She returned to her own hard-left phase of the 1990s. Yet she was trounced in the electoral college and saw the fabled “blue wall” crumble.

DIAGNOSIS

Any reasonable post-election autopsy for a party would identify certain inconvenient truths.

1) The African-American vote is vital to the Democratic party, but it is dubious to suppose that blacks will register, turn out, and vote in a bloc (as they did in 2008 and 2012) for a Democratic candidate other than Barack Obama. The very efforts to ensure that 95 percent of blacks will vote for other Democratic nominees might only polarize other groups in an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic America. Trump, of course, knows all this and will make the necessary adjustments.

2) Asians and Hispanics are less a monolithic voting bloc. Supposedly discredited melting-pot assimilation, integration, and intermarriage are still the norm and can temper tribal solidarities and peel away from Democrats a third of their assumed constituents — in an electoral landscape where there is already only a thin margin of error, given that Democrats have written off the white working classes. In the case of Latinos, red states such as Texas and Arizona are unlikely to be flipped soon by Latino bloc voting, especially if Trump closes down the border and ends illegal immigration as a demographic electoral tool of the Democratic party. And Latino electoral-college strength is dissipated in states that are likely to be blue anyway (California, Nevada, New Mexico).

3) The race/class/gender agenda so favored by coastal elites and promulgated by media, Hollywood, and popular culture is an anathema to Middle America, especially its strange disconnect between affluence and the mandate for purportedly progressive equality. Moralistic lectures from wealthy people are not a way to win over the working classes. Rants by Hollywood celebrities and racialist sermons by would-be DNC chairs will not win over 51 percent of the voters in swing states. The twin agents of progressive dogma, the media and the university, are themselves under financial duress, must recalibrate, and have lost support from half the country.

Meltdown at the EPA And not the nuclear kind: The agency’s junk-science promoters are flipping out. By Julie Kelly

In his recently released and timely book, Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA, author Steve Milloy says this about the Environmental Protection Agency:

The EPA has over the course of the last 20 years marshaled its vast and virtually unchallenged power into an echo chamber of deceptive science, runaway regulations and fatally flawed research derived from unethical human experiments. The EPA’s conduct runs the gamut from subtle statistical shenanigans to withholding key scientific data, from seeking to rubberstamp baseless research data to illegally spraying diesel exhaust up the noses of unsuspecting children and other vulnerable populations.

Milloy, who runs the website JunkScience.com, has chronicled the scientific and bureaucratic abuse at the EPA for two decades, and he is thrilled by President Trump’s plans to finally reform the EPA. “I can think of no agency that has done more pointless harm to the U.S. economy than the EPA — all based on junk science, if not out-and-out science fraud,” Milloy told me. “I am looking forward to President Trump’s dramatically shrinking the EPA by entirely overhauling how the remaining federal EPA uses science.”

It looks like the EPA will be the agency hardest hit by the Trump sledgehammer. For eight years, President Obama used the agency as his de facto enforcer of environmental policies he couldn’t pass in Congress even when it was controlled by his own party. If Obama was the climate-change bully, then the EPA was his toady, issuing one regulation after another aimed at imaginary polluters who were allegedly causing global warming. Jobs were lost, companies were bankrupted, and an untold amount of economic growth was stymied out of fear of reprisals from this rogue agency. The courts halted many of the EPAs most overreaching and unlawful policies initiated by Obama — such as the Clean Water Rule and Clean Power Rule, two regulations aimed at farmers and coal producers. Unsurprisingly, people in these sectors voted heavily for Trump.

Trump officials and Congress are ready to make major changes in the EPA. A leaked memo written by Trump’s EPA transition team details how the new administration wants to tackle shoddy science at the agency. The memo asserts that the EPA should not be funding scientific research, and it must make any data publicly available for independent scientists to review. It also said that the agency must eliminate conflicts of interest and bias from the science advisory process.

The administration also put a freeze on most contracts and grants, pending further review by incoming staff. A good chunk of the EPA’s $8.3 billion budget is spent on grants to universities and units of government; its 2017 budget for state- and tribal-assistant grants was nearly $3.3 billion. The agency also has nearly $6.4 billion in outstanding contractual obligations to dozens of companies across the country, dating back to 2001. These will get much-needed scrutiny over the next several months, and Milloy insists it’s a necessary step:

The EPA uses tax dollars to fund its friends and allies, who tend to be political activists and “political” scientists. There has been no effective oversight of the EPA because Republicans have lacked the numbers and often the will to challenge the all-powerful EPA.