Shortly after posting a discussion of conservative legal scholar Illya Somin’s article at Reason declaring the Trump administration’s effort to deport Mahmoud Khalil “unjust and unconstitutional,” I became aware of the article at City Journal in which conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro defends the policy as legal and constitutional. It is clear from the essay that he also believes the policy is appropriate and ethical.
ICE arrested Palestinian activist and former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil with the intent of deporting him in accordance with the announced Trump policy of deporting non-citizens who engage in pro-“terrorist” speech related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Predictably, the Axis is all-in supporting Khalil, who sure appears to be a bad human hill to die on. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned ICE’s detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, calling it a “tyrannical” move, “Violating rule of law, actually,” she wrote. That AOC defends him alone makes me inclined to want to get rid of the guy, but that would be irrational. Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York issued an order today halting Khalil’s processing and scheduled a hearing on the case for later this week. Ah yes, the Southern District of New York!
In a confusing essay at The Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin writes that deporting non-citizens for the content of their speech is a First Amendment violation and “a slippery slope,” then, in the fifth paragraph, acknowledges that 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(3), bars “Any alien who … endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” I’d say endorsing and supporting Hamas qualifies under that law, wouldn’t you? So Somin says, “Such laws, too, should be ruled unconstitutional.” But until and unless it is, the Trump administration has the law on its side.
The question remains, is such a restriction on the free speech of non-citizens ethical? Somin:
“The First Amendment’s protection for freedom of speech, like most constitutional rights, is not limited to US citizens. The text of the First Amendment is worded as a general limitation on government power, not a form of special protection for a particular group of people, such as US citizens or permanent residents. The Supreme Court held as much in a 1945 case, where they ruled that “Freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.”
People who don’t (or can’t) read court decisions—and in this very large group I include most pundits and journalists—are prone to dismiss careful thought out and reasoned judicial arguments that took careful research and consideration as the product of political bias rather than what they (usually) are: sincere, honest, intelligent dissections of issues that are far more complex than advocates for opposing sides care to admit.
The Sixth Circuit just triggered an almost certain U.S. Supreme Court review of state same-sex marriage bans by upholding such bans in several states. Immediately, pro-gay marriage advocates and pundits attacked the decision as “right wing,” as if the court reached the decision from a starting point hostile to gays and homosexuality generally. The implication of this interpretation is that judges do not follow the law, legal principles and standards of jurisprudence and construction, but merely decide what result they wish to reach based on ideological and partisan biases, and then write essays of advocacy disguised as objective analysis.
The presumption is both ignorant, unfair, and convenient. It is ignorant because it assumes that the judicial profession and those in that profession ignore the primary ethical requirements of being a judge, standards that have stood unchanged and unchallenged for centuries and that every jurist swears to uphold. The first two Canons of the ABA Model Judicial Code state those standards clearly: Continue reading
“It’s simple, guys, really. We just drive you to the polling place, and we vote the way we tell you to. Otherwise, you’ll be breaking the law.”
Well that didn’t take long at all. Engaged Americans who have been paying attention to the mess in Washington decided to defy the news media’s will and ringingly reject the governing philosophies of the last six years, so not-so-secretly-true-blue pundits of the mainstream media came out with their plan to make sure that future elections will be dominated by unengaged, low-information voters who will go to the polls and vote as they are told, or, as it often is in Presidential elections, vote for whoever guarantees them the most benefits or who scares them the worst.
Washington Post editor Ruth Marcus delivered a call for compulsory voting in her column this morning. It is one of the most ethically indefensible columns I have ever read in a respected publication, and remember, I read all the New York Times columns. How anyone can take Marcus seriously after such a revolting demonstration of multi-level ethics blindness is a mystery, assuming anyone does.
To begin with, her partisan motives couldn’t be more obvious, though she denies them. After last night’s carnage was recorded, TV panels across the liberal media spectrum confidently opined that Democrats shouldn’t worry: once those dependable Democratic voters from the “base” show up to vote, as they can only motivate themselves to do in sufficient numbers every four years, all of this unpleasantness will go away in 2016. “Ah HA!” thinks Marcus. If we force those easily manipulated, self-interested, group-identifying, naive, uneducated, ignorant and easily frightened voters ( Republicans will take away your Social Security! Your food stamps! Your contraceptives! Your children will be shot in school! “They’ll put y’all back in chains!”) to come out every two years, we won’t have to endure elections like this at all! ( Over at the New York Times, a leftist scholar who saw the writing on the wall right before the election proposed another solution to the same problem: eliminate mid-terms altogether.) Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 