How to Build A Border Barrier

            We may or may not have made progress today, something that will be known over the next few weeks. It all boils down to whether or not Congress wants to be involved in building a wall on the southern border.

            Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) declared that he does not like shutdowns and is willing to “go to extraordinary lengths” to solve the natural security problem. He wants to accomplish this task before President Donald Trump shuts down the government again. He declared today, “I don’t like shutdowns.” He does not want another shutdown, and he does not want President Donald Trump to declare a national emergency. Well, he should have been working on the problem a long time before it became a national emergency! After all, he has been the Senate Majority Leader for a number of years! So what happens if Congress fails to pass a bill that the President will sign?Trump claims that he will build the wall with or without Congress. Can he do it legally?

            Josh Hammer joined Steve Deace on “The Steve Deace Show” today. Hammer is a former clerk on the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals and is now the editor-at-large for The Daily Wire. Deace wanted to know if President Trump “has the legal authority to build a wall on the southern United States border using executive powers.” A secondary question concerns whether or not Trump using executive powers to build a wall “would be any better than former President Barack Obama when he used executive action to grant amnesty to immigrants who are here illegally.” 

             Hammer read the law straight from the Constitution that gives Trump the authority to build the wall using national emergency powers. Trump does have constitutional authority to do so. “Would it be the right thing politically” is still in question.

            Would it be the same thing as Obama’s action on amnesty for illegal aliens? Hammer says “no.” The difference lies in the fact that Congress had already considered granting amnesty to illegals and had voted against it. Obama did not like the vote, so he took it upon himself to grant amnesty by executive order. Congress has already approved building a wall several times, but the current crop of Democrats refuses to fund it. The entire interview is interesting and well-worth watching.

            I found an interesting and powerful PragerU video narrated by the late Charles Krauthammer. He clearly and intelligently answers the question, “Can America solve its illegal immigration problem both justly and humanely?” He says that it can be done, but the solution requires that a barrier be in place on the border first.

            President Trump obviously understands that a border barrier comes before addressing the problem of illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. Krauthammer emphasizes that America cannot and will not deport all of them. However, more and more illegal aliens will come if the United States grants legalization before the border is secure. We know that this happens because we granted amnesty to 3 million of them in the 1980s and now have 22 million illegal immigrants. Krauthammer also declares that legalization should not include a path to citizenship because we should not reward anyone for breaking the laws of our nation.

            So, we come full circle. How will we build a barrier along the southern border? Will the Democrats stop opposing the President’s attempt to secure the border, or will the President declare a national emergency and have the Department of Defense build the barrier? It sounds to me that the problem has one of two solutions if the wall is to be built.

Charles Krauthammer

            Charles Krauthammer is my VIP for this week for several reasons. One reason is that he is a brilliant man who made life better and/or interesting for millions of people. A second reason is his announcement that he has only few weeks to live.

            Krauthammer was born in 1950 in New York City. His father was from Ukraine, his mother was from Belgium, and his only brother was four years older. Both of his parents were Orthodox Jews, and they educated their two sons at a Hebrew school. The family spoke French in their home and moved to Montreal when Krauthammer was five years old.

            Krauthammer graduated with First Class Honours in 1970 from McGill University in Montreal. Since McGill University had a lot of political activism, he learned to avoid extremism – whether far left or far right. A year after graduating from McGill, Krauthammer studied as a Commonwealth Scholar in politics at Balliol College at Oxford. He then returned to the United States to attend medical school at Harvard.

            During his first year of medical school, Krauthammer suffered a serious diving board accident and was left paralyzed from the neck down. He was in the hospital for 14 months and used a wheelchair the rest of his life. In spite of his injuries, he continued with his studies and graduated with his original class in 1975.

            Krauthammer was a resident in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1975 to 1978 and served as the chief resident during his final year. While a chief resident, “he noted a variant of manic depression (bipolar disorder) that he identified and named `Secondary Mania.’ He published his findings in the Archives of General Psychiatry. He also coauthored a path-finding study on the epidemiology of mania.’”

In 1978, Krauthammer moved to Washington, D.C., to direct planning in psychiatric research under the Carter administration. He began contributing articles about politics to The New Republic and, in 1980, served as a speech writer to Vice President Walter Mondale. He contributed to the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In January 1981, Krauthammer joined The New Republic as both a writer and editor. In 1983, he began writing essays for Time magazine, including one on the Reagan Doctrine, which first brought him national acclaim as a writer.

In 1984, he was board certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. His New Republic essays won the `National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism.’ The weekly column he began writing for The Washington Post in 1985 won him the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1987. In 1990 he became a panelist for the weekly PBS political roundtable Inside Washington, remaining with the show until it ceased production in December 2013. For the last decade, he has been a political analyst and commentator for Fox News.

            Krauthammer, now 68 years old, has been silent, or nearly so for most of the past year. He revealed on Friday, June 8, 2018, that he is in the final stages of cancer and has just weeks to live. This is his statement: 

I have been uncharacteristically silent these past ten months…. I had thought that silence would soon be coming to an end, but I’m afraid I must tell you now that fate has decided on a different course for me.

[He stated that recent testing showed that his cancer is back.] There was no sign of it as recently as a month ago, which means it is aggressive and spreading rapidly…. My doctors tell me their best estimate is that I have only a few weeks left to live. This is the final verdict. My fight is over.

I leave this life with no regrets ….. It was a wonderful life – full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living. I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended.

            I began listening to and reading the words of Krauthammer some years ago. I did not know of his academic or writing successes, much less about his diving accident. I did not realize that he lived his life in a wheelchair – much like my beloved nephew who was also a quadriplegic from an accident. I will miss the wisdom of Krauthammer’s words.

Trust

                Can we truly trust our government to protect us from our foreign and domestic enemies?  Can we trust the government to execute justice fairly when we know that the IRS treated conservative and liberal individuals and groups differently?  The government knows everything about our finances now and will soon know all our health information under Obamacare.  Now we learn that the government has our telephone records and reads our e-mails.  Can we trust the government to use our “data” for our best good or do we need to worry about the government using our information against us?  Can we trust a President and his administration that repeatedly lies to us?

                Columnist Charles Krauthammer explained the situation with NSA:  “Thirty-five years ago in United States v. Choate, the courts ruled that the Postal Service may record `mail cover,’ i.e., what’s written on the outside of an envelope – the addresses of sender and receiver.

                “The National Security Agency’s recording of U.S. phone data does basically that with the telephone.  It records who is calling whom – the outside of the envelope, as it were.  The content of the conversation, however, is like the letter inside the envelope.  It may not be opened without a court order.

                “The constitutional basis for this is simple:  The Fourth Amendment protects against `unreasonable searches and seizures’ and there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for what’s written on an envelope.  It’s dropped in a public mailbox, read by workers at the collection center and read once again by the letter carrier.  It’s already openly been shared, much as your phone records are shared with, recorded by, and emailed back to you by a third party, namely the phone company.

                “Indeed, in 1979 the Supreme Court (Smith v. Maryland) made the point directly regarding the telephone:  The expectation of privacy applies to the content of a call, not its record.  There is therefore nothing constitutionally offensive about the newly revealed NSA data-mining program that seeks to identify terrorist networks through telephone-log pattern recognition.”

                Krauthammer is more concerned with the “other NSA program … PRISM.”  This program is “designed to read the emails of non-U.S. citizens outside the United States.  If an al-Qaeda operative in Yemen is emailing a potential recruit, it would be folly not to intercept it” since the Constitution is there to protect American citizens and not everyone in the world.  Besides, all nations “spy” on other nations.

                Krauthammer considers the real problem to be “practicality” rather than “constitutionality.”  “Legally this is fairly straightforward.  But between intent and execution lies a shadow – the human factor, the possibility of abuse.  And because of the scope and power of the NSA, any abuse would have major consequences for civil liberties.”

                The bottom line according to the article is whether or not we can trust our President and his administration.  Krauthammer explained that the President “issued a major foreign-policy manifesto” three weeks ago; the major theme of this manifesto was that the “War on Terror is drawing to a close and its very legal underpinning, the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, should be not just reformed but repealed to prevent `keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing.’"

                Krauthammer pointed out that while the President was telling us that the War on Terror was ending, the “government was simultaneously running a massive, secret anti-terror intelligence operation.”  He questioned why we have the “vast, ever-expanding NSA dragnet whose only justification is an outside threat” if there is no need for it.

                Common sense tells me that we cannot trust our President, his administration, or many of the members of Congress.  There are too many scandals, too many lies, and too much confusion.  Trustworthiness is an honorable attribute in an individual or a government, but once trust is lost, it is very difficult to regain.