Tag: law

No exit, no entry

Here is an easy win for the God-Emperor:

Approximately 30 countries are refusing to accept the deportations of illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes in the U.S., according to Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar.

While these countries are refusing to accept the deportations of these criminals, the U.S. government is still issuing visas and student visas to citizens of those countries, according to the Texan congressman. There is already a law on the books which allows the U.S. to hold visas from a country that is not taking back its criminals, but according to Cuellar, the U.S. is not enforcing it.

“We’re not enforcing it, which is amazing. So now my intent is to go back to our committee on appropriations and affect their funding until they do that,” Cuellar told Sharyl Attkisson, host of Full Measure, in an interview.

Cuellar, a Democratic member of the House Committee on Appropriations, told Attkisson that the Supreme Court has ruled that illegal immigrants arrested for criminal activity can only be held for a certain period of time before they must be released.

Forget the student visas. If a country doesn’t accept its own repatriated citizens, the God-Emperor would be wise to refuse entry to all citizens from that country until it does. Why not throw in a 100 percent tariff on all trade goods from that country while we’re at it?

And until those countries give in, which they will, ship all the repatriates-in-waiting to Guantanamo.

Not even pretending

The God-Emperor has unmasked the lawlessness of the Left’s pretense at the Rule of Law, and in doing so, is building a strong case for acting outside of the Left-dominated deceptively titled “justice system”:

His basis for doing so was an extraordinary interpretation of the right to travel and the freedom of association, which before, has only been associated with U.S. citizens,” Barnes continued. “Every court decision in the 200 years prior to this has said that people who are not citizens of the United States, who are not present within the United States, have no First Amendment constitutional rights. The Constitution doesn’t extend internationally to anybody, anywhere, anyplace, at any time. Instead, this judge said it did, as long as you had a university here who wanted to assert, quote-unquote, the foreigner’s rights, or you had some physical person here. In this case, it was one of the leading Muslim imams in Hawaii; he wants to bring over various family and friends from the Middle East.”

“The Hawaii judge’s decision says he has a First Amendment constitutional right to do so because he’s Muslim. It was one of the most extraordinary interpretations of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment ever given, which is that because these are Muslim countries that were banned where the issue of terror arises from that that meant they had a special right to access the country and visit the country,” he said.

“As long as there is somebody here that wants them here, no president can ever preclude them from coming here. He basically gave First Amendment rights to everybody around the world and gave special preferences to people who are Muslim under his interpretation of the First Amendment,” Barnes summarized.

“So it’s an extraordinarily broad order. Its legal doctrine has no limits. If you keep extending this, it means people from around the world have a special right to access the United States, visit the United States, emigrate to the United States, get visas to the United States. There wouldn’t be any limit, and the president would never be able to control our own borders. It would be up solely to the whim of a federal judge who effectively delegated it, in this case, to a Muslim imam in Hawaii,” he contended.

Barnes noted that the judge did not “cite any prior decision” that has ever established this astonishing new quirk of the Constitution.

“Just last year, the Supreme Court implicitly said the opposite, when they said your right to association does not include a right to bring foreigners into the United States, in the Din decision,” he pointed out. “Now, there were several concurrences, so the binding precedent of that has been left open, but he does not even reference or mention or discuss the decision. He doesn’t even mention the statute, the main statute that gives the president the right to ban any alien from the country, for any reason the president deems appropriate, for any temporary time period, that the president yesterday cited in his national speech. Like the prior Ninth Circuit decision, the Hawaii judge never mentions the decision at all.”

“So there’s no real legal precedent. He’s taking three or four different concepts that have been applied in completely different areas of law, that only ever have historically applied to U.S. citizens, and he’s magically adding it to foreigners and acting like that’s always been the case when it’s never been the case,” he said.

There is no way to pretend that what these courts are doing is in any way compatible with democracy, law, tradition, history, or even Western Civilization. What we are witnessing is a literal breakdown of civil society and a descent into structural lawlessness. This has been a long time in the making, but it is becoming increasingly impossible to even pretend that there is a coherent or meaningful legal structure of any kind in the United States.

2nd travel ban blocked

The federal judges are doubling down against the President:

The state of Hawaii says an imam from Honolulu has legal standing to assert the First Amendment claim of religious discrimination when challenging President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban.

Hawaii’s case for a temporary restraining order to block the ban is being heard Wednesday in federal court in Honolulu.

The judge told lawyers that he is more interested in constitutional claims and wanted to know who had such standing in the lawsuit.

Attorney Colleen Roh Sinzdak says a Muslim plaintiff in the lawsuit, Ismail Elshikh, has such standing to challenge the ban. Elshikh says the ban prevents his mother-in-law, who lives in Syria, from visiting family in Hawaii.

Sinzdak says Elshikh and all Muslim residents in Hawaii face higher hurdles in reuniting with family members because of their faith.

She says that harm applies to all residents, not just Muslims.

If this genuinely surprises or demoralizes you, do remember at whose grave the God-Emperor was laying a wreath recently. This is all just setting the stage. This is just recon.

Executive Order: improving efficiency

And eliminating unnecessary or redundant agencies.

Presidential Executive Order on a Comprehensive Plan for Reorganizing the Executive Branch

EXECUTIVE ORDER

– – – – – – –

COMPREHENSIVE PLAN FOR REORGANIZING THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1.  Purpose.  This order is intended to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability of the executive branch by directing the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (Director) to propose a plan to reorganize governmental functions and eliminate unnecessary agencies (as defined in section 551(1) of title 5, United States Code), components of agencies, and agency programs.

Sec. 2.  Proposed Plan to Improve the Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Accountability of Federal Agencies, Including, as Appropriate, to Eliminate or Reorganize Unnecessary or Redundant Federal Agencies.  (a)  Within 180 days of the date of this order, the head of each agency shall submit to the Director a proposed plan to reorganize the agency, if appropriate, in order to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability of that agency.

It would certainly be a blow to the Deep State if the God-Emperor started with the CIA and the NSA. Looks like the lull period is over and it’s back to the grand offensive.

Target: Bannon

The opposition media is desperate to take down Steve Bannon by any means necessary:

The issue of Bannon’s legal residency has been simmering since last summer, shortly after he became chief executive of Trump’s campaign. The Guardian reported in an Aug. 26 story that he was registered to vote at a then-vacant house and speculated that Bannon may have signed an oath that he was a Florida resident to take advantage of the state’s lack of state income taxes.

In California, where Bannon had lived and owned property for more than two decades, income tax can exceed 12 percent.

Bannon has not responded to repeated requests by The Washington Post to discuss the matter. Two Post reporters sought to independently verify his residency claims, using a wide array of publicly available information.

They obtained utility bills, court records, real estate transactions, state driver reports and the checks he wrote to pay municipal taxes in California. They interviewed neighbors, spoke with landlords and tracked his Breitbart-related activity.

In the digital age, when most Americans leave a clear footprint of their whereabouts, Bannon left a meandering trail filled with ambiguity, contradictions and questions. The Post found that Bannon left a negligible footprint in Florida. He did not get a Florida driver’s license or register a car in the state. He never voted in Florida, and neighbors near two homes he leased in Miami said they never saw him. His rent and utility bills were sent to his business manager in California.

Bannon’s former wife occupied the premises, according to a landlord and neighbors.

At the same time Bannon said he was living with his ex-wife, she was under investigation for involvement in a plot to smuggle drugs and a cellphone into a Miami jail, a law enforcement document obtained by The Post shows.

The Post learned that state prosecutors in Miami have an active investigation into Bannon’s assertions that he was a Florida resident and qualified to vote in the state from 2014 to 2016. In late August, investigators subpoenaed Bannon’s lease of a Coconut Grove home and other documents. They also contacted the landlords of that home and another that Bannon leased nearby, and sought information from a gardener and handyman who worked at one of the homes, according to documents and interviews.

Because state laws do not clearly define residency, making a false registration case can be difficult.

The danger, as I can personally testify, is that some state agents are willing to lie, ignore conclusive evidence, and make blatantly false residence claims. The Minnesota Department of Revenue eventually gave up and settled its absurd case against my father, two years after illegally seizing his house there for “unpaid taxes”, because it relied upon an agent pretending that two flights, one back to Florida and another one up to Minnesota, had not taken place even though my father provided the electronic and paper evidence that he had been on them. Erasing those flights added several nonexistent weeks to his time in Minnesota, just enough to permit them to make a false claim of his residence there and claim that he owed taxes that he manifestly did not.

Agencies love the nebulous “footprint” standard, which they prefer to the hard and fast residency laws that clearly enumerate the number of days one has to be physically present in a state in order to be a resident there. Some dirt, you see, is so magic that it sticks to you wherever you go.

In my father’s case, the entire family knew the MDR claim to be false, because we had all been with him at his house in Naples at one point or another during the time he was supposedly in Minnesota. But the agent ignored literally all the evidence, documentary and testimonial, in order to lay the foundation for a false residence claim. He’s dead now. Karma can be a bitch.

Anyhow, this would be an excellent time for the God-Emperor to return the favor and order investigations into the personal lives of the Post reporters who are so determined to dig up dirt on Bannon.

US Attorney refuses to resign

This would appear to be a breach of standard protocol. One assumes he has a good reason for doing so:

Preet Bharara, a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, is refusing the Trump administration’s demand to resign, according to multiple reports Saturday.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Friday asked 46 attorneys appointed by former President Obama to submit their resignations, including Bharara.

“HOLDOVER: Bharara is not submitting his resignation, according to several ppl briefed – WH not responding to what they’ll do next,” the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman tweeted Saturday.

CNN’s Jake Tapper also reported that Bharara was refusing to resign.

I have no idea what would possess the man to take this stand now. Is he trying to stop an investigation? Is he trying to protect an investigation? There is simply not enough information to have an opinion at this time, especially given all of the darker rumors floating around.

The Grand Inquisitor cleans house

Attorney General Sessions asks all remaining Obama-appointed prosecutors to resign:

In a move that will likely provoke further media, and pundit, fury despite it being a routine act that is concurrent with every change in administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has asked all remaining Obama-appointed U.S. Attorneys for their resignation.

Sarah Isgur Flores, Director of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice, released the following statement:

“As was the case in prior transitions, many of the United States Attorneys nominated by the previous administration already have left the Department of Justice. The Attorney General has now asked the remaining 46 presidentially appointed U.S. Attorneys to tender their resignations in order to ensure a uniform transition. Until the new U.S. Attorneys are confirmed, the dedicated career prosecutors in our U.S. Attorney’s Offices will continue the great work of the Department in investigating, prosecuting, and deterring the most violent offenders.”

Trump had previously asked the Obama-appointed U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, to stay on. In addition, the Obama-appointed U.S. attorney in Alexandria, Virginia, Dana Boente, is currently serving as acting deputy attorney general, and Trump has nominated the Obama-appointed U.S. Attorney for Maryland, Rod Rosenstein, for the deputy attorney general, Politico adds.

However, as NBC adds, Preet Bharara is one of the Attorneys asked to resigns, suggesting that something may have changed in the amicable realtionship between Trump and Bharara in the past few months.

The issue of removing U.S. attorneys at the change of administration has been a contentious one in past years. According to Politico, in 2007, President George W. Bush’s administration sought to defend his firing of eight U.S. attorneys by asserting that President Bill Clinton had fired all sitting U.S. attorneys in 1993 “in one fell swoop,” as a top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales put it. However, that was not true. In both the Clinton and Bush administrations, the vast majority of U.S. attorneys were replaced in the first year, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2007. The Clinton team asked for resignation letters in March, but also allowed many prosecutors to stay until their successors were confirmed.

Now we appear to be getting somewhere. Still not tired.

H1B: the real cost-benefit

Why the H1B visa program should be shut down without delay:

A close look at H1BPays.com’s data shows that, as you move past the Googles and Microsofts of the IT world, H-1B salaries tend to cluster around the $65,000 to $75,000 level.  There is a reason for this.  If outsourcing companies pay their H-1B workers at least $60,000, the company is exempted from a number of regulations designed to prevent visa abuse.

But $60,000 is far below 2016 market rates for most tech jobs.

In 2014 (the last year we have good data), Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, and Tata Consultancy used 21,695 visas, or more than 25 percent of all private-sector H-1B visas used that year. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Uber, for comparison, used only 1,763 visas, or 2 percent.

What’s the difference? Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, and Tata are all outsourcing companies. Their business model involves using H-1B visas to bring low-cost workers into the United States and then renting those workers to other companies. Their competitive advantage is price. That is, they make their money by renting their workers for less than companies would have to pay American workers.

 This is the real story of the H-1B visa. It is a tool used by companies to avoid hiring American workers, and avoid paying American wages. For every visa used by Google to hire a talented non-American for $126,000, ten Americans are replaced by outsourcing companies paying their H-1B workers $65,000.

That’s how you kill high tech in America. It’s time for the God-Emperor to shut the program down entirely. There is ABSOLUTELY zero need for it. Let Microsoft and Google move to India if they think they can get better coders there.

No charges for BasedStickman

This is good news. The lesson here is that even in left-liberal strongholds, where the authorities are SJW-amenable, it is both legal and prudent to prepare oneself for violent confrontation with antifa and Black Bloc. As long as your preparations are primarily defensive, and your actions are in response to the Left’s violence, there is a reasonable chance that the authorities will refrain from doing more than attempting to put a brief scare into you. So hit back twice as hard.

Their reasoning is pretty simple, I suspect. If people cannot defend themselves with open, obvious, and limited means, they are going to start defending themselves with concealable and lethal means, and if they are prevented from doing that, there is a very good chance they will start engaging in reprisals that are considerably less easy to witness or prevent.

US society is observably on the decline towards primitive and tribal standards. One common aspect of primitive societies is ritual limited violence. This would appear to be a natural step towards that, in line with tattooing and body-decorating.

Towergate

There is a very good case to be made that Obama and/or someone on his team is now in serious legal jeopardy as a result of the reported wire-tappings of Trump Tower:

If the stories are correct, Obama or his officials might even face prosecution. But, we are still early in all of this and there are a lot of rumors flying around so the key is if the reports are accurate. We just don’t know at this time. The stories currently are three-fold: first, that Obama’s team tried to get a warrant from a regular, Article III federal court on Trump, and was told no by someone along the way (maybe the FBI), as the evidence was that weak or non-existent; second, Obama’s team then tried to circumvent the federal judiciary’s independent role by trying to mislabel the issue one of “foreign agents,” and tried to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “courts”, and were again turned down, when the court saw Trump named (an extremely rare act of FISA court refusal of the government, suggesting the evidence was truly non-existent against Trump); and so, third, Obama circumvented both the regular command of the FBI and the regularly appointed federal courts, by placing the entire case as a FISA case (and apparently under Sally Yates at DOJ) as a “foreign” case, and then omitted Trump’s name from a surveillance warrant submitted to the FISA court, which the FISA court unwittingly granted, which Obama then misused to spy on Trump and many connected to Trump. Are these allegations true? We don’t know yet, but if any part of them are than Obama and/or his officials could face serious trouble.

Read the rest of it there. Robert Barnes goes into some detail concerning the legal minutia of the laws related to FISA and how the Obama administration almost certainly misbehaved if it even attempted to get a FISA warrant to spy on a presidential candidate.

I discussed some aspects of this at last night’s Darkstream. And as I stated, the Trump administration is already on top of it: “A senior White House official said that Donald F. McGahn II, the president’s chief counsel, was working on Saturday to secure access to what the official described as a document issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing surveillance of Mr. Trump and his associates.” 

It seems pretty clear now that a FISA warrant was secured and the subsequent wire-tapping took place. Reporter Cathy Aureu stated on Fox News that a female source, who worked in the Obama administration for nearly the whole of his two terms, confirmed that a FISA warrant was secured. However, she does not know who was responsible for securing it.