RUTHFULLY YOURS

With additional comments by Adam Andrzejewski founder of Open the Books , (www.openthebooks.com/) a project of American Transparency.

In 2014 under the aegis of Family Security Matters, Nancy Kennon and I published a comprehensive study of every Congressional and Senatorial election, including incumbents and challengers, highlighting all their top issues. We found almost unanimous bi-partisan concern with protecting our Veterans and their rights.

It stands to reason that all Americans would cherish those who, in the words of Hannah Sennesh, a Holocaust martyr and poet, would have “the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake” and for duty and country.

This was a welcome development from an earlier time during and after the Vietnam war, when veterans were derided and not accorded the respect they were due.

A young veteran John Kerry testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 22, 1971, that American troops “…had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam…” and accused the U.S. military of committing war crimes “on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”

An aspiring young William Clinton, to justify his draft resistance, wrote “so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military.” To be fair, as president he proposed reforms in VA health care programs and expedited hearings on Veterans’ Affairs early in his administration. In 1994 he appointed Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer a physician trained in emergency medicine and Public Health, as Director of U.S. Veterans Health Administration to update and modernize the VA health system. This was another case of good intentions with poor implementation and very limited success.

Under President George Bush, a scandal erupted in 2007 detailing the systematic neglect, and frustration, and deteriorating facilities that veterans faced at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, ostensibly the top medical facility for veterans. What made this more poignant is the fact that so many were veterans of both wars initiated by the president. The scandal provoked caterwauling outrage and hearings to condemn the deplorable Army hospital environment. They led to negligible reform and the venerable hospital closed its doors in July 2011 after 102 Years of healing troops and veterans.

While the stigma and the libel against veterans ended, almost pari passu with the end of the draft in 1973, another national tragedy and scandal ensued.

It was like a wake inside the Department of Homeland Security’s D.C. headquarters on Tuesday, according to a source inside the DHS. The previous evening, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Obama administration’s immigration amnesty plan again, holding that the president has “no statutory authority” to take such unilateral action.

The court upheld the preliminary injunction issued February 16 by federal district court judge Andrew Hanen. Assuming the administration abides by the court order, the amnesty plan remains on hold.

Texas led a coalition of 26 states that filed suit against the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program that President Obama announced last November. They challenged the program on the grounds that it violated both the notice and comment requirements of the federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and the Take Care Clause of the Constitution.

DAPA would grant “lawful presence” to more than 4 million illegal aliens and give them Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) — renewable, three-year work permits. Moreover, as the government admitted in its opening brief, granting “lawful presence” status would make them eligible to receive “social security retirement benefits, social security disability benefits, or health insurance under Part A of the Medicare program.” The government did not deny the district court’s finding that such aliens would also become eligible for earned-income tax credits and entitled to numerous state benefits such as unemployment insurance and driver’s licenses.

The president’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) is the most extraordinary display of presidential lawlessness in recent memory. On Monday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rightly blocked that lawlessness from proceeding further.

Last November, President Obama announced that he would be halting enforcement of congressional statutes for certain illegal immigrants residing in the United States — some 5 to 6 million, by most estimates — and extending to them work permits, among a number of other benefits. He justified this politically as a necessary response to congressional inaction, and legally as “prosecutorial discretion.”

It was neither, as Texas federal judge Andrew Hanen made clear in February, when he granted an injunction blocking implementation of the action to Texas and 25 other states, which had sued the administration. The president “is not just rewriting the laws,” Hanen wrote; “he is creating them from scratch.” The Obama administration appealed to the Fifth Circuit to stay the injunction, but in May, a three-judge panel refused.

Maybe the separation of powers isn’t a dead letter after all. The U.S. Constitution’s core protection against tyranny got a reprieve late Monday when an appeals court upheld a federal judge’s injunction against President Obama’s unilateral immigration order.

A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2 to 1 that a legal challenge by 26 states has a high probability of success and thus the regulation should not be enforced until the case is decided on the merits. On Tuesday the Administration said it will appeal to the Supreme Court, which means this could be a landmark ruling before Mr. Obama leaves office.

The careful, 70-page opinion by Judge Jerry Smith eviscerates the Administration’s unprecedented claims of executive authority. The Homeland Security Department says it has executive discretion to decide whom to deport, but its detailed marching orders to immigration agents provide for almost no discretion in handling individual cases.

By bonfire of the academy we mean a conflict of values about the idea of a university that now threatens to undermine or destroy universities as a place of learning. Exhibit A is the ruin called the University of Missouri.

In the 1960s—at Cornell, Columbia, Berkeley and elsewhere—the self-described Student Left occupied buildings with what they often called “non-negotiable” demands. In the decades since, the academy—its leaders and faculties—by and large has accommodated many of those demands regarding appropriate academic subjects, admissions policies and what has become the aggressive and non-tolerant politics of identity and grievance.

This political trajectory arrived at its logical end this week at Missouri with the abrupt resignation of the school’s president, quickly followed by its number two official. The kids deposed them, as their liberal elders applauded either out of solidarity or cowardice.

This was an interesting presentation of often stark views.

“We witness our Christian faith and proclaim the word of God in the land where Islamic fundamentalists and extremists are in power,” stated recently a Pakistani Christian to a Washington, DC, area Christian gathering. Speaking anonymously for fear of reprisals back home, “Thomas” expressed with somewhat rudimentary English stark views about Islam during a church reception for about 30 and subsequent interview.

“You are very much free and blessed people,” Thomas noted for his American audience who “do not need guards while you worship.” By contrast, reception displays on Pakistani Christians included a photo of an adolescent pastor’s son standing guard with an assault rifle before a church. This “son is protecting the worshippers by putting his life in danger and father is preaching the gospel to save the life of the worshippers,” he stated.

An interviewed Thomas noted how guards averted massive casualties during a March 2015 attack on Lahore, Pakistan’s Catholic Church by preventing suicide bombers from entering, yet he distrusted Muslims in Pakistani security forces. While he perceived a lax official response to attacks upon Christian institutions or mosques of Pakistan’s Shiite minority, the army responded vigorously to a 2014 terrorist massacre at a Peshawar army children’s school. Christians often insist upon having private Christian guards for whom “their brothers and sisters are inside” church.