President Trump Has to Win the Border Security Fight

by Newt Gingrich: The one thing neither the liberal media nor the Democrats have taken into their calculations about the government shutdown is that President Trump has to win on the border security issue. He has no choice. If it takes six months, it will take six months. If it can be done next Monday, it will be done next Monday.

As commander in chief, President Trump has said controlling the southern border is a genuine national security issue and that failure would mean Americans continue to risk losing their lives to criminals who enter the country illegally. How does he back away from protecting American lives?

As a political leader, candidate Trump made controlling the southern border one of his major themes. He has been talking about it for three and a half years. If he were to back down, it would send a signal of weakness to his base.

Remember that despite endless negative news coverage from the liberal media (92 percent negative by some studies) President Trump averages 42 percent approval across a variety of polls. This number is rock hard because his base believes he is a genuine change agent. They shrug off attacks by the liberal media as the natural result of Trump being committed to real change.

If President Trump were to back down, he would resemble the Republican politicians who had failed to fight for the Tea Party movement – and earned the GOP-led Congress only 12 percent approval of the Republican electorate in 2016. Trump was nominated in part because the base Republican electorate was tired of leaders who promised big changes at campaign time and then delivered excuses when trying to govern. They currently believe Trump is different from normal politicians. So far, every indication we have is that he is truly different and truly a unique figure.

President Trump is also caught by the very book that first made him famous. Trump: The Art of the Deal was a huge best seller after it was published in 1987 and established Trump as a great dealmaker. He has repeated this claim to dealmaking brilliance over and over – as a candidate and president. To now walk away without a deal would be a stunning collapse of his reputation.

Having led congressional Republicans during the longest government shutdown up to now (until midnight at least) people ask me how to get to an end game. In our case, in 1995-96, we had a genuine breakthrough, and President Clinton agreed to work toward a balanced budget. That shutdown established the principle of tough bipartisan negotiating, and out of it came welfare reform, the largest capital gains tax cut in history, and four consecutive balanced budgets (the only time this has occurred in our lifetime). The shutdown was painful, but the outcome was consequential.

The difference between the 1995-96 shutdown and the current situation is the relentless hostility of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the left-wing of the Democratic Party. Pelosi has an activist base which hates President Trump and would rather cripple the government than provide the $5.7 billion he wants to secure the border. When the President asked her if she would negotiate on the wall funding within 30 days if the government re-opened, she said no. He then did exactly the right thing. He got up, said bye-bye, and walked out.

When one side refuses to compromise, there can’t be a compromise. There can only be surrender or victory.

The Democrats have decided to start the new congress by trying to humiliate the President, give him nothing, and force him to surrender on their terms.

For President Trump to let them win under those circumstances would simply destroy his presidency and end his chance of re-election. After all, if Speaker Pelosi can win this round, what will her next demands be?

The President has three strategies to implement at the same time.

First, President Trump can reach out to the country and make clear that concerns about illegal immigrants killing, raping, and robbing innocent Americans are legitimate. As a first step, he should invite the families and friends of every person killed by an illegal immigrant to come to a White House gathering and then go to Capitol Hill to lobby their House and Senate members. Let the Democrats who claim this is a manufactured crisis look the victims’ families in the eyes and tell them they don’t count.

Today, Democrats care more about non-Americans who are illegally crossing the border than they care about Americans who have been killed, raped, and robbed. As this reality sinks in, a lot of Democrats will start looking for a way to get out from under the Pelosi left-wing machine and cut a deal to reopen the government and secure the southern border.

Second, the President can develop the proposal to help the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, who came here when they were young. Every day that passes, it is clearer that the Democrats hate Trump more than they care about helping these young people. The President’s supporters should flood Spanish language radio and other outlets with requests for people to call their members of Congress and demand they help the President help the Dreamers. Many Republicans have long said we can’t help DACA recipients until the border is secure – so do both at the same time.

Third, the President needs to remind the members of Congress, in both parties, that if he is prepared to veto left-wing efforts to block control of the border, they have no hope of overriding his veto. Republicans who get nervous (and we had these back in 1995-96, too) have to recognize that there is no possibility of enough Republicans splitting with the President to override a veto. Since Senator McConnell has adopted the right party position of refusing to even schedule a bill the President would veto, there will be no legislative solution to this shutdown without the President’s approval.

Finally, the President should relax some and accept that this fight may take until the end of February or later. The Democrats will not agree to compromise until they are exhausted and look increasingly stupid. As it sinks in to the average American that this entire struggle can end if the Democrats will only agree to protect the southern border, they will look more and more ridiculous. As the federal employee unions realize that their members are being left without paychecks because of a partisan fight over protecting the border, they will start pressuring the Democrats to cut a deal.

As the master of The Art of the Deal, President Trump knows that some negotiations must ripen before they can be completed. His job is to relax, stand firm, and let the situation ripen until the Democrats accept a deal that includes the southern border security provisions. Anything less just wouldn’t be Trump.
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Newt Gingrich is a former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House. He co-authored and was the chief architect of the "Contract with America" and a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections. He is noted speaker and writer. The above commentary was shared via Gingrich Productions.

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Tags: Newt Gingrich, commentary, President Trump, Has to Win, the Border Security Fight To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Fusion GPS-Linked Group Funded by Soros Worked with Tech Firm Behind Russian False Flag Against Roy Moore

Roy Moore

by Debra Heine: "New Knowledge," the Texas-based cybersecurity firm behind "Project Birmingham," the deceptive social media campaign that used Russian disinformation methods against Alabama Republican Roy Moore in the 2017 Senate special election, has ties to a Soros-funded non-profit with links to former British spy Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS, the Daily Caller's Chuck Ross reported Thursday.

#Soros has admitted to funding an ongoing private #Trump-#Russia investigation,had funded a $50M.An aide to Soros,Vachon,said that he has funded an ongoing effort by Fusion GPS&ex-Feinstein staffer&ex FBI agent,Dan Jones,to 👉privately continue the Trump-Russia investigatigation pic.twitter.com/Z3GSR4GSCa

— Secular Syria🇸🇾 (@syria_true) September 27, 2018

New Knowledge partnered with the sketchy non-profit Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP) before the 2018 midterms ostensibly to track alleged Russian disinformation networks on a website the organizations collaboratively ran.
Both organizations have links to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), which is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, as well as possible Trump campaign collusion.
SSCI provided New Knowledge with data from various social media companies as part of an investigation into Russian disinformation networks, according to a report New Knowledge released Dec. 17. Two days later, news broke that New Knowledge’s chief executive was involved in a self-described “false flag” operation in the special election for a Senate seat in Alabama, as was another staffer who was the lead author on the Senate report.

TDIP is also linked to the Senate Intelligence panel. Its founder, Daniel J. Jones, was previously a staffer for Democrats on SSCI. He was also in contact in early 2017 with Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic vice chairman of SSCI. As part of TDIP’s own Trump-Russia investigation, the group hired Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, the author of the anti-Trump dossier.Republican staff members on the Senate Judiciary Committee asked Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson about his anti-Trump work in August of 2017.

“So you didn’t do any work on the Trump matter after the election date, that was the end of your work?” Republican staff asked.

Simpson answered: “I had no client after the election.”

In a recent missive to Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) pointed out that according to the FBI and others, Fusion GPS did continue their anti-Trump dossier work after the 2016 election for its new client Dan Jones.
As part of the public release of the House Intelligence Committee’s majority report on its Russia investigation, the executive branch declassified some previously classified information from an FBI document. That information detailed a March 2017 meeting between Daniel Jones and the FBI.
Mr. Jones stated that he was leading a research and investigatory advisory organization called the Penn Quarter Group, which “had secured the services Steele, his associate [redacted], and Fusion GPS to continue exposing Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election.” Mr. Jones further told the FBI that the Penn Quarter Group “was being funded by 7 to 10 wealthy donors located primarily in New York and California, who provided approximately $50 million.”

The report noted that Mr. Jones stated he planned to push the information he obtained from Fusion and Steele to policymakers on Capitol Hill, the press, and the FBI. As with statements to the Committee, statements to the FBI, like Mr. Jones’, are subject to 18 U.S.C. § 1001. So, despite the fact Mr. Simpson said he had no client after the election, he in fact did, and that client revealed himself to the FBI.Dan Jones is a former staffer for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who currently serves as the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Together, TDIP and New Knowledge ran a dashboard at disinfo2018.com, purportedly to track “social media disinformation networks — to include suspected foreign state-actors — conducting information warfare against the American public prior to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.”

According to TheDCNF, the project was similar to Hamilton 68, another notorious dashboard, this one operated by the Alliance For Securing Democracy.

Jonathon Morgan, a former State Department adviser and founder of New Knowledge, also helped create Hamilton 68 and has appeared frequently in the media to hyperventilate about Russia’s disinformation efforts.
In an interview with BBC, Morgan claimed Russians were behind #ReleaseTheMemo, the hashtag used to call for the release of a memo from House Intel Republicans that questioned the FBI’s reliance on the unverified Steele dossier to obtain surveillance warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.New Knowledge recently produced a report on Russian disinformation networks for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, allegedly at SSCI's request. However, an SSCI official told TheDCNF that the committee did not pay New Knowledge for the work and that the SSCI does not necessarily endorse the firm's findings.

But now, thanks to the New York Times' damning Dec. 19, 2018, exposé implicating his firm in the false-flag operation against Moore, Morgan's reputation is in tatters.

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” New Knowledge said in its internal report about the effort obtained by the New York Times.

Numerous news outlets jumped on the false narrative and reported that Moore was being supported by a Russian disinformation network.

In other words, Morgan, a cybersecurity expert who supposedly advises the Senate on Russian disinformation networks, spread disinformation on social media alleging that Moore's campaign was being assisted by Russian disinformation networks.

Want an even bigger laugh? Morgan last summer was the keynote speaker at a Microsoft media conference. The topic he was there to discuss (as he is clearly one of the country's leading authorities on the subject): "Defending Against Disinformation and Social Media Manipulation."

Don't miss the CLOSING KEYNOTE: Defending Against Disinformation and Social Media Manipulation at M&E Day 2018 in NY next week: Jonathon Morgan, CEO, New Knowledge; and Founder, Data for Democracy takes the floor. Info here - https://t.co/DTUw5Aj3XD @data4democracy #MEDay18 pic.twitter.com/Qwr7RwtJ7J

— MESAlliance (@MESAlliance) July 17, 2018

In fairness, Morgan claims that he was paid by American Engagement Technologies "to experiment on a small scale with disinformation tactics, including creating a Facebook page that sought to appeal to Republicans who might not support Moore."

And he insists that his firm deployed the Russian botnet false flag not to influence the election, but merely to study how the tactics worked.

“The research project was intended to help us understand how these kinds of campaigns operated,” Morgan said. “We thought it was useful to work in the context of a real election but design it to have almost no impact.”

But virtually no one believes him. The left's hypocrisy, however appalling, is not in the least surprising. Nor are the tangled webs of left-wing networks they are constantly weaving.

Silicon Valley billionaire and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman gave $750,000 to American Engagement Technologies (AET), the group that hired New Knowledge to run the campaign.

AET is run by Mikey Dickerson, a former Google engineer and Obama appointee who is also the executive director of the New Data Project, a nonprofit that developed the invasive "Vote with Me" app used in the 2018 midterm elections to pressure millennials into voting for Democrats.

AET is also behind a recently discovered disinformation campaign that posted misleading ads on Facebook pages in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections.

A couple of weeks ago, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said that he would be looking into the operation to see if it affected the closely fought Senate race.

“The information is concerning,” Marshall, a Republican, said. “The impact it had on the election is something that’s significant for us to explore, and we’ll go from there.”

Dan Jones' TDIP "has maintained a lower profile than New Knowledge," TheDCNF maintains.
Most of what’s known about the group has been revealed only through Adam Waldman, an attorney who had contact with the organization in 2017. Information that Jones, the TDIP founder, provided to the FBI was also released in an April 27, 2018, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report.
Jones, who registered TDIP on Jan. 31, 2017, told the FBI in late March 2017 his organization had hired Fusion GPS and Steele, a former MI6 officer, to continue investigations into Russian meddling in the U.S. elections that began with funding from the DNC and Clinton campaign. Jones also told the FBI the project had received $50 million in funding from between seven and 10 wealthy liberal donors.

IRS records suggest TDIP did not receive all of that funding at once. Information from the nonprofit’s tax filings show the group received $9 million in 2017.

Around the same time as his meeting with the FBI, Jones reached out to Waldman, an attorney with a myriad of links to players in the Russia saga. Waldman represented Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and has apparent links to Steele.

Waldman told TheDCNF Jones told him that Fusion GPS was involved with TDIP. He also said Jones claimed Soros had provided funding for TDIP’s anti-Trump operation.Waldman showed TheDCNF text messages from March 17, 2017, in which Jones said TDIP helped plant anti-Trump news stories.

“Our team helped with this,” Jones wrote to Waldman, linking to a Reuters article about Russian investment in Florida properties owned by President Donald Trump.

Waldman also exchanged text messages with Warner throughout the spring of 2017. In one text to the lobbyist, the senator expressed a desire to "not have a paper trail" of his messages. He suggested in another text that he did not want Burr or any other senator included in the discussions. In another text, he suggested the Warner was in close contact with Jones.

“Dan Jones is coming to see you,” Waldman wrote in an April 25, 2017, text message to Warner.

It is not clear whether Jones has worked with any other congressional investigations into Fusion GPS’s involvement in the 2016 election.
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Debra Heine is a Catholic, mom of six and long time political pundit. She has written for PJ Media and several blogs including her own, Nice Deb!

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Tags: Fusion GPS-Linked Group, Funded by Soros, Worked with Tech Firm, Behind Russian False Flag, Against, Roy Moore, Debra Heine, PJ Media To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Background Checks: No Impact on Criminals

by NRA-ILA: We have seen a generation of gun-grabbers rise and fall. The new generation of gun-grabbers are pushing for the same tired and baseless policies that won’t so much as inconvenience criminals. We understand the emotional response to violence and the desire to “do something.”

But that “something” has to be the right thing, a policy that will be effective on the target population and is backed by sound evidence. To design a policy that will stop criminals from getting guns, the first step should be to find out where criminals get guns.

Fortunately, the Bureau of Justice Statistics within the Office of Justice Programs at the Department of Justice just this week released a report that provides this very information. The report is the “Source and Use of Firearms Involved in Crimes: Survey of Prison Inmates, 2016” and its findings are quite clear.

More than one in five prisoners in state or federal prisons (20.8%) possessed or used a firearm during their crime; 18.4% had or used a handgun.

A plurality – 43.2% - got their guns off the street or on the underground market which does not include gun shows, flea markets, or private sales. The underground market only includes “markets for stolen goods, middlemen for stolen goods, criminals or criminal enterprises, or individuals or groups involved in sales of illegal drugs.”

About ten percent (10.1%) acquired the gun from a retail source. This includes 8.2% whom acquired it from a licensed dealer at a retail source. Just under 7% bought the firearm under their own name and then at least 6.7% underwent a background check; we say “at least” because some number of prisoners are unaware if a check was conducted. The remaining 3.3% includes people who may not be aware they were submitted to a check because, for many people, the check is completed instantly. As you know, federal law requires firearms dealers to conduct background checks.

A quarter (25.3%) of prisoners acquired the firearm they had at the time of their crime from an individual; 14.5% of these bought, traded, borrowed, or rented the gun from a family member or friend. The other 10.8% were given the firearm as a gift or it was purchased for the prisoner.

That sounds like it likely includes straw purchases, which are a federal crime.

Theft was not uncommon, at 6.4%, though not as common as anti-gun organizations would have you believe.

The remaining 17.4% cited some other source; 6.9% found it at the scene of the crime or it was the victim’s, 4.6% say the gun was brought by someone else, and 5.9% from “other” sources. This last category is a catch-all, including sources that are different from all of the other sources listed in the report. It is important to note that none of the types of “other” sources had enough responses to warrant their own category.

In other words, there weren’t enough prisoners saying they bought a gun online or from a stranger to categorize these straw-man arguments into categories. Some quick, back of the envelope math shows that just under 5,200 prisoners surveyed reported having a gun during their criminal offense.

How would so-called universal background checks impact any of these categories?

First, you have to rule out the retail purchases because most already underwent a background check. You would also have to concede that those who obtained the firearm from a family member or friend wouldn’t be affected, because of the exemptions in so-called universal background checks laws for family members and… well, come on. If someone is going to give a known criminal a gun, then they’re not going to change their minds because of a law. It’s already a crime to knowingly give a gun to a prohibited person.

Sellers on the underground market aren’t going to start running background checks because they are, themselves, criminals. Burglars won’t stop burgling to get a background check run on the firearms they’re stealing.

Criminals who somehow manage find a gun at the scene of the crime through no action of their own wouldn’t be affected by a background check.

So, please, tell us: which source of firearms for criminals will dry up under so-called universal background checks?

Unless drug dealers and purveyors of stolen goods set up shop with clipboards, log books, and internet access to run background checks, criminals will still have a source of illegal guns.

Oh, and don’t forget that universal background checks don’t work.
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NRA-ILA article.

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Migrants from Terrorist Nations Try to Enter U.S. Via Mexico at Record Rates—300% Hike in Bangladeshis in Texas Alone

by Corruption Chronicles: Federal agents along the southern border routinely encounter individuals from terrorist nations and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) considers them one of the top threats to the United States, according to a congressional report made public this month. Titled “Stopping Terrorist Travel Through Illicit Pathways to the Homeland,” the document outlines the findings of a lengthy investigation involving Special Interest Aliens (SIA) by the House Homeland Security Committee. SIA’s are individuals from countries outside the western hemisphere—mostly the Middle East, Asia and Africa—that pose a national security risk to the U.S. In Laredo, Texas alone there was an astounding 300% increase in immigrants from Bangladesh, a south Asian Islamic country well known as a recruiting ground for terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda Indian Subcontinent (AQIS).

Congressional investigators found that the number of SIAs flowing north via Latin America has increased tremendously in the last few years thanks to established Transitional Criminal Organizations (TCO) that facilitate travel along drug and migrant smuggling routes. “On a recent Committee staff delegation trip to Latin America, Panamanian officials communicated to Committee staff that tens of thousands of SIAs have entered Panama since 2014,” the report states. “Colombian officials communicated similar numbers to Committee staff, stating that hundreds of SIAs have entered Colombia each year for the past few years. In both countries, nearly all the SIA migrants were headed to the United States and originated from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa—including Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bangladesh, India, Eritrea, and many others. Additionally, encounters with these special interest individuals resulted in the seizure of tens of thousands of fraudulent documents—including passports and visas—that facilitated travel from their countries of origin through the Americas.”

The report includes several disturbing cases of Islamic terrorists who made it to the U.S. via Mexico. Among them are Mohammad Aldairi, a Jordanian arrested last summer in New York for illegally smuggling SIAs from Yemen across the U.S.-Mexico border into Texas. Others include Pakistani Sharafat Ali Khan, convicted for smuggling fellow Pakistanis with terrorism ties into the U.S.; Somalian Abdullah Omar Fidse, a member of the al-Shabaab terrorist group; Somalian Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane, a member al-Qaeda linked al-Barakat and Al-Ittihad Al-Islami and Lebanese Mahmoud Yousef Kourani, a fighter, recruiter and fundraiser for Hezbollah. Kourani paid a Beirut consular officer $3,000 for a Mexican visa and an additional $4,000 to be smuggled across the U.S.- Mexico border, according to information included in the report. Some of the other SIAs also operated smuggling rings through south and central America.

“Latin America and the Caribbean are the major initial entry points to the Western Hemisphere for SIAs,” the House Homeland Security Committee report states. “Many countries in the region continue to face economic and governance challenges, as well as consistently high levels of violent crime. Additionally, many of the countries in the Americas have lenient visa and immigration policies in place, even for individuals from ‘special interest’ countries. Lastly, the frequency of international flights from ‘special interest’ regions around the world into Latin America and the Caribbean continues to increase. These regional issues create an attractive environment for illicit travel of SIAs and other nefarious actors into the Western Hemisphere with the end goal of reaching the United States.” Adding to the problem is that Hezbollah is “growing at an alarming rate in Latin America,” according to Committee investigators. “Designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the State Department, Hezbollah has been operating in Latin America since the early 1990s when it worked with Iran to carry out the 1994 bombing of a Jewish Community Center in Argentina,” according to the report.

The House investigation found that, as of September 2018, a record 630 Bangladeshi nationals have been arrested trying to enter the U.S. illegally in Laredo, Texas alone. That marks a 300% increase from the previous year. “The routes facilitating the illicit travel of these Bangladeshis are mostly controlled by TCOs and drug cartels, which charge tens of thousands of dollars to smuggle SIAs and other migrants across the U.S.,” the committee writes. It also confirms what Judicial Watch reported months ago, that the recent migrant caravan has included several SIAs and suspected terrorists.

Judicial Watch traveled to the Guatemala-Honduras border back in October and government sources in Guatemala confirmed that SIAs waiting to get smuggled into the U.S. through Central America integrated with poor Hondurans in the caravan. Among them were nationals of Bangladesh, which appears on the Treasury Office of Foreign Asset Control’s Counter Terrorism Designations list.
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Judicial Watch authors Corruption Chronicles.

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Tags: Corruption Chronicles, Judicial Watch, Migrants, from Terrorist Nations, Try to Enter U.S., Via Mexico, at Record Rates, 300% Hike in Bangladeshis, in Texas To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

In Case of Emergency, Build Wall?

by Tony Perkins: It was just last week that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) promised the American people that her House would be "bipartisan and unifying." Eight days later, there isn't a scrap of evidence she meant it. After 20 days of waiting at the negotiating table, President Trump is considering going it alone on the border wall. One of the options being tossed around by the White House is declaring a national emergency -- an idea some people think is too far-fetched. But is it? Legal experts say no.

Believe it or not, these types of national emergencies aren't as unusual as you might think. In two years, President Trump has already declared three. Since 1976, when Congress gave the White House that authority, there have been 58 national emergency declarations -- 31 of which, Breitbart's Ken Klukowski explains, are still in effect today. That includes, Ken points out, the very first national emergency from Jimmy Carter on Iran-sponsored terrorism. But is it, I asked him on Thursday's "Washington Watch," a legitimate legal option for the border wall?

"Right now," Ken said, "the president is going the extra mile with Senate Democrats. The law does not require him to negotiate. He is doing so, and I believe he's doing so in good faith -- trying to find a settlement for everyone to save face." But, he went on, "in the event that Pelosi and Schumer continue to dig in their heels... the president has unconditional authority to declare a national emergency about anything."

"Contrary to what you're hearing from partisan Democrats -- and also from hyperventilating media pundits, who are all of the sudden calling themselves legal experts -- the fact that there [have] been 31 of these shows how common it is for presidents to do it. If Trump declares a border emergency, [then]... under [the U.S. code], the secretary of Defense can then order military units -- including the Army Corps of Engineers and the other construction units of the U.S. military -- to direct their personnel and their funding and money and machinery to construction projects... There are billions of dollars that are available to DOD to be able to undertake that project, if the president decides to declare a national emergency."After all, this is Defense Department money that's already been approved by Congress. The president would simply be redirecting it to another national security crisis: the flood of illegal immigrants, drugs, and criminals crossing the border. And in this case, there's already a precedent for using national emergency declaration to stop the flow of heroin and cocaine into the country. Back in the 1990s, Bill Clinton used the same kind of declaration to deal with narcotics traffickers. As Ken argued in his column, "one of the deadliest drugs killing Americans right now, fentanyl, is made in China -- but fully 85 percent of that lethal drug enters the United States through the Mexican border. Such a declaration would be consistent in scope and effect with many of the 31 current emergencies."

Of course, as with everything this president does, there would almost certainly be lawsuits -- even if it's well within Trump's legal power to act. "The reality," Ken says, "is that you'll always find someone who files a lawsuit... And if you pick the right judicial district, dominated by left-of-center judges, you're running a pretty good odds that you're going to get a judge who dares to go where no judge has gone before... We have seen some federal judges at the trial level act like they are nothing short of the resistance of Donald Trump. We have seen some outrageous judicial activist rulings from federal judges..." Even on issues where the Supreme Court would almost certainly side with the president, there's a good chance the legal battle would put everything on hold for a good "12 or 18 months."

Of course, "Can the president?" and "Should the president?" are two very different questions. Most people, Donald Trump included, would like to solve this problem legislatively. "I would like to do the deal through Congress," he's said. "It makes sense to do the deal through Congress... It would be nice if we can make a deal, but dealing with these people is ridiculous." The longer Democrats refuse to do their jobs, the more creative Republicans will have to get in order to protect America.

For more on the immigration crisis, check out my column in today's Washington Times, "Protecting America's National Home." Also, don't miss my full interview with Ken Klukowski, as he takes a deeper look at the prospects of a national emergency declaration.
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Tony Perkins is President of the Family Research Council . This article was on Tony Perkin's Washington Update and written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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Tags: Tony Perkins, Family Research Center, FRC, Family Research Council, Emergency, Build the Wall To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Trump At The Border, Mockery & Misinformation, What's Next, A Force For Good

Gary Bauer

by Gary Bauer, Contributing Author: Trump At The Border - President Trump went to the border community of McAllen, Texas, yesterday to meet with Border Patrol agents and make the case for more physical barriers on the border.

Joining the president was Reggie Singh, brother of California Police Officer Ronil Singh, who was gunned down by an illegal alien the day after Christmas. Singh said:

"The way he [Ronil] was killed, what my family is going through right now, I do not want any other family, law enforcement person, to go through that. Whatever it takes to minimize, put a stop to it, my family fully supports it."

The president also met with Acting Chief Patrol Agent Raul Ortiz. Agent Ortiz told the president:

"Just yesterday we apprehended 133 people from countries other than Central America and Mexico. That includes individuals from India, Pakistan, China, Romania . . . on and on and on. . .

"Mr. President, we have 55 miles of fencing in this sector. We started a job in 2006. We need to finish that job. . . Part of our area is covered with some fencing on our east side. That accounts for about 6% of our traffic. Where we have no fencing, over 90% of our traffic occurs in those areas."

Mockery & Misinformation - While President Trump was meeting with agents on the frontline and hearing from the victims of criminal aliens, the media continued to mock the president, suggesting there is no crisis at the border.

CNN's Jim Acosta decided to tour the border himself and filed this report:

"Here are some of the steel slats that the president's been talking about. But as we're walking along here, we're not seeing any kind of imminent danger. There are no migrants trying to rush toward this fence. . . No sign of the national emergency the president has been talking about. As a matter of fact, it's pretty tranquil down here."

Good job, Jim! Thanks for proving what Agent Ortiz said and what most of us have known all along: WALLS WORK!

Sadly, that may be the only time you'll hear Big Media admit that walls work. The San Diego border wall worked so well that CNN disinvited a local reporter from appearing on its network to discuss the wall. Here's how KUSI explained the situation:

"KUSI offered our own Dan Plante, who has reported dozens of times on the border. . . We believe CNN declined a report from KUSI because we informed them that most Border Patrol Agents we have spoken to told us the barrier does in fact work.

"We have continuously been told by Border Patrol Agents that the barrier along the Southern border helps prevent illegal entries, drugs, and weapons from entering the United States, and the numbers prove it."

It can't be repeated enough: Barriers, fences and walls work.

That's why so many property owners build fences. That's why so many people choose to live in gated communities.

That's why Israel, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Hungary have all built major border fences and walls.

TAKE ACTION: The primary responsibility of government is to protect its citizens. That begins by securing our borders. Congress needs to do its job.

Click here to send a message urging your members of Congress to support additional funding for serious border security.

What's Next? As liberal politicians dig in and as left-wing judges knock down anything Trump tries, the president is increasingly raising the idea of declaring an emergency at the border.

In fact, he's being encouraged to do so by Senator Lindsey Graham because Democrats refuse to negotiate on border security.

Just to be clear: This is not martial law. Nor is Trump suggesting anything unprecedented. There are 31 active national emergencies. Barack Obama used this same authority 13 times. Where was the media freak out then?

When President Trump says, "The law is 100% on my side," he's 100% right. Here's how constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley explains it:

"Congress expressly gave presidents the authority to declare such emergencies and act unilaterally. The 1976 National Emergencies Act gives presidents sweeping authority as well as allowance . . . to declare an 'immigration emergency' to deal with an 'influx of aliens which either is of such magnitude . . . that effective administration of the immigration laws of the United States is beyond the existing capabilities' of immigration authorities. . .

"The basis for such an invocation generally includes the 'likelihood of continued growth in the magnitude of the influx,' rising criminal activity . . . and 'other circumstances.'"

Now recall what we have reported in recent days:

• The Washington Post acknowledged that "Record numbers of migrant families are streaming into the United States, overwhelming border agents."
• The Pew Research Center reports that apprehensions in 2018 were "the most . . . since 2014." That was the same year as Obama's big border crisis.
• The Department of Homeland Security reports that December apprehensions of migrant families set a record and marked "the third month in a row that more than 50,000 people have illegally crossed into the U.S."
• ICE announced that it arrested more than 158,000 criminal aliens last year. More than 5,300 had convictions for murder and sexual assault.

And Trump is considering this declaration as reports are breaking that a new migrant caravan is preparing to leave Honduras and march on the border.

A Force For Good - Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered an outstanding speech yesterday at the American University of Cairo, the same venue where President Barack Obama made his first major speech on foreign soil in June of 2009.

Here are some excerpts of Pompeo's remarks:

"Remember: It was here, here in this city, that another American stood before you. He told you that radical Islamist terrorism does not stem from an ideology.

"He told you that 9/11 led my country to abandon its ideals, particularly in the Middle East. He told you that the United States and the Muslim world needed, quote, 'a new beginning.' . . .

"The good news is this: The age of self-inflicted American shame is over, and so are the policies that produced so much needless suffering. Now comes the real new beginning."
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Gary Bauer is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

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A New National Security Strategy For America

. . . Immigration is America’s top national security threat.

by Daniel Greenfield: After the Cold War, what is the biggest threat to America? The debate between Obama and Romney famously bogged down over the question of whether Russia was our biggest geopolitical foe. While Obama slammed Romney’s answer as a Cold War relic, after losing the next election, his party defines its foreign policy and domestic opposition around the fear that Russia is now more of a threat than ever.

Answers by other politicians have ranged from the structural, the national debt and internal divisions, to the inanimate and absurd; Bernie Sanders’ claim that global warming is our top national security threat. But assessments that name conditions rather than threat vectors are unhelpful because even when they are right, they tell us to address a weakness or failure, rather than meeting an external threat.

Being able to name and define external threats is vital for reaching informed national security decisions.

The debates over border security, Syria, Afghanistan, and Russian informational warfare have been taking place in a chaotic environment of rapid fire talking points backed by ideological agendas, but with no framework for understanding the larger threat environment and how to achieve national security.

Our national security framework dates back to the Cold War. The doctrines we employed during the Cold War quickly became dated even while the Soviet Union was around. They’re so old now that the vast majority of Americans weren’t even born when they were hatched. And yet in the generation since the Cold War ended, we haven’t found anything new to replace them with. And that is the problem.

The Clinton administration ignored national security and put the military at the disposal of the UN on exercises in nation building that helped revive Russia as a serious threat while ignoring the threat of Al Qaeda. The Bush administration rolled out nation building as a response to Islamic terrorism. This was a misguided approach that failed to understand the nature of the threat and how to address it.

The Obama administration combined the follies of both of its predecessors and added more of its own, by harnessing Clinton style nation building to Bush style interventions with the aim of defusing Islamic terrorism by helping the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists come to power in the Middle East.

The result was genocide, ethnic cleansing, beheadings, sex slavery and more terrorism than ever.

To build a realistic national security strategy, we have to discard the Cold War framework under which every administration beginning with Truman and Eisenhower had operated under. We are no longer dealing with a global struggle against an ideological movement based out of a global superpower.

And it’s the global part that is the problem.

Successive administrations have thought of national security as a global issue. But it’s not a global issue. It’s a national one. That doesn’t mean that we should abandon support for NATO or our allies. But we should stop trying to envision national security as something that emerges from global alliances. That worldview may have been relevant during the Cold War, but it’s no longer meaningful today.

Instead we need to think of national security as inside out, coming not from outside America, but from inside it. We don’t face a serious risk of invasion by a military superpower. It may be a generation until China has the military capabilities to embark on such a venture. And while we shouldn’t neglect exploring what a Chinese Pearl Harbor might look like, we first need to get our own house in order.

Our domestic threats in this century have all involved infiltration, whether it was the Islamic colonists who carried out the 9/11 attacks and succeeding acts of terror, and the Chinese and Russian hacks and espionage operations that exposed our military secrets, wrecked the NSA and weakened our defenses.

These catastrophes make it clear that there can be no national security without securing the nation.

That includes border security. Regardless of how many terrorists may have come across the unguarded border (even one is too many), efforts by the Trump administration to reduce travel from terror states and refugee admissions will lead terrorists and future terrorists to seek alternative means of entering this country. And securing the border closes a major vulnerability in our national security.

Furthermore, while Iran’s nuclear program remains a major national security threat, a nuclear attack on America is likeliest to come through a nuclear device smuggled by terrorists across the border. It may never happen, and hopefully never will, but failing to prepare could be a disaster that would make the national security failures that allowed the 9/11 attack to take place seem almost inconsequential.

If we examine the American conflicts of this century, it’s easy to see that they had their roots in immigration, migration and open borders, both physical and virtual. We’ve lost over 10,000 Americans in wars caused by a failure of immigration security. And the national gun violence rate is largely fed by gang violence. Much of that gang violence is caused by legal and illegal immigration to the United States.

National security threats can be most clearly measured by the violent deaths of Americans inflicted on us by organized movements and groups. It’s undeniable that these have originate with immigration.

China and Russia remain geopolitical threats. But their attacks depend on infiltrating our country through the internet or immigration. Informational security is vital to any future conflict. A Chinese Pearl Harbor would likely begin on the internet. And so is immigration security. Chinese and Russian operatives, like their Islamic counterparts, have to enter the United States. If we can secure immigration and secure information, we will have effectively neutralized their attacks for the time being.

The leading geopolitical threat isn’t posed by China or Russia. Instead it comes from Islamic terrorism. While China poses a military threat to its neighbors in Asia and Russia poses a military threat to Europe, Islamic terrorists piggyback on Islamic colonies in America to pose a military threat inside our borders.

Aside from the loss of life, Islamic terrorists have inflicted trillions of dollars in economic losses on the United States, second only to the People’s Republic of China. And as the Islamic colonies increase in size, they begin to pose an increasingly greater threat. Islamic colonies in France and Sweden have shown behavior resembling the early stages of guerilla warfare. The same thing will happen in America.

That is why immigration security must be the first priority of any national security strategy. The second priority should focus on weakening terrorist groups and their state sponsors abroad, but without the extensive nation building commitments that have bogged down previous administrations.

We should also avoid the Cold War’s sociological preoccupation with root causes abroad. Sociological philosophizing failed miserably in the Great Society. There is no reason to believe that the same approach that failed at home will work any better when applied to other societies and cultures.

It isn’t difficult to identify malaises in the Muslim world, but we should be wary of facile solutions, such as democracy, feminism or microfinance, for solving them. The United States did not fix the social problems of Communism. Instead it sought to contain Communist states, limiting their influence, preventing their expansionism, and allowing their own social problems to destroy them.

Instead of nation building in Muslim countries, we should aid non-Muslim or secular countries under siege by Islamists, containing and limiting the spread of Islamic ideology abroad and at home through economic, informational and military means, when appropriate, without extended occupations.

The interregnum between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the fall of the British Empire marked a period of Islamic military, cultural and political decline. The Cold War era revived Islamic fortunes as the United States and the Soviet Union invested extensive wealth, information and training into Muslim countries. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Muslim terrorists backed by Muslim states emerged as the leading antagonists of the United States, Europe, Russia, China and other non-Muslim world states.

While a global alliance against Islamism, similar to the one against Communism, might be ideal, it is more likely that America’s geopolitical antagonists, Russia and China, will instead back Muslim factions in proxy wars against us. We must stop doing the same thing no matter how appealing it may seem.

Political and military engagement with Islamic forces badly weakened both America and Russia. After two generations of arming, aiding and collaborating with Islamic terrorists under the Soviet Union, and then another generation of Putin’s Eurasian experiment aimed at integrating Islam into a new Russian empire, our old antagonist has doomed itself. We should learn the urgent lessons of Russia’s folly.

Because they are also our own.

America’s Cold War alliances with Islamic countries helped create the wave of terror. Our openness to Islamic immigration was once seen as a means of building Cold War alliances. Instead it has killed over ten thousand Americans and put us on a path to a religious civil war similar to that of Europe.

Cold War divisions have deeply divided Americans. The collapse of religion and traditional values, accompanied by mass migration, and the disruptive qualities of the internet, have fragmented any notion of national unity. The firehose of mass migration is hitting all of our fracture points, ideological, economic, social and cultural, at the same time. It’s also the essential vector for Islamic terrorism.

America needs time to recover from the economic, social, cultural and technological disruptions of the last hundred years. And it needs breathing room to prepare for the geopolitical conflicts to come.

American elites continue focusing on a global order while ignoring the decline of the United States. A broken America will be unable to meet any geopolitical threats abroad. Any national security strategy that does not begin with securing our own national security at home will be doomed to fail.

Democrat opposition at the state and judicial level has prevented President Trump from exercising control over immigration, protected terrorists and gangs, while leaving our borders unsecured. States and cities openly defy immigration authorities and Democrat judges sabotage any effort at controlling the flow of legal and illegal aliens into our country. This thoroughly cripples our national security.

America’s national security depends on restoring the control of the executive branch over our borders.

The President of the United States has been robbed of the ability to fulfill his sworn duty to see to the national security of the United States. This isn’t just political opposition. It’s treason. And it must end.
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Daniel Greenfield is Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a New York writer focuses on radical Islam and the radical left. David Horowitz is a Contributing Author of the ARRA News Service

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Memo to Trump: Declare an Emergency

by Patrick Buchanan: In the long run, history will validate Donald Trump’s stand on a border wall to defend the sovereignty and security of the United States.

Why? Because mass migration from the global South, not climate change, is the real existential crisis of the West.

The American people know this, and even the elites sense it.

Think not? Well, check out the leading liberal newspapers Thursday.

The Washington Post and The New York Times each had two front-page stories about the president’s battle with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer on funding the border wall.

Inside the first section, the Post had more stories, including one describing walls in history from China’s Great Wall to the Berlin Wall to the Israeli West Bank wall to the wall separating Hungary from Serbia.

Inside the Times was a story on a new anti-immigration party, Vox, surging in Andalusia in Spain, and a story about African migrants being welcomed in Malta after being denied entry into Europe.

Another Times story related how the new president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has pulled out of a U.N. pact on migration, declaring, “Brazil has a sovereign right to decide whether or not it accepts immigrants.”

Half the columns on the op-ed pages of the papers dealt with Trump, immigration and the wall. And there was nothing significant in either on the Democrats’ hot new issue, a Green New Deal.

Consider. In 1992, this writer’s presidential campaign had to fight to have inserted in the GOP platform a call for “structures” on the border.

Now, the whole Western world is worried about its borders as issues of immigration and identity convulse almost every country.

Looking ahead, does anyone think Americans in 2030 are going to be more concerned about the border between North Korea and South Korea, or Turkey and Syria, or Kuwait and Iraq, or Russia and Ukraine, than about the 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico?

Does anyone think Pelosi’s position that a wall is immoral will not be regarded as absurd?

America’s southern border is eventually going to be militarized and defended or the United States, as we have known it, is going to cease to exist. And Americans will not go gentle into that good night.

Whatever one may think of the face-off Tuesday with “Chuck and Nancy,” Trump’s portrait of an unsustainable border crisis is dead on: “In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records, including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes and 4,000 violent killings.”

The Democrats routine retort, that native-born Americans have a higher crime rate, will not suffice as new atrocities, like those Trump related, are reported and repeated before November 2020.

What should Trump do now? Act. He cannot lose this battle with Pelosi without demoralizing his people and imperiling his presidency.

Since FDR, we have had presidential government. And when U.S. presidents have been decisive activists, history has rewarded their actions.

Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. On taking office, FDR declared a bank holiday. When Britain was barely hanging on in World War II, he swapped 50 destroyers for British bases. He ordered U.S. ships to chase down German submarines and lied about it. Truman fired General MacArthur.

Reagan fired the striking air controllers and ordered the military to occupy Grenada to stop Marxist thugs who had taken over in a coup from taking 500 U.S. medical students hostage.

Critics raged: Reagan had no right to invade. But the American people rewarded Reagan with a 49-state landslide.

Trump should declare a national emergency, shift funds out of the Pentagon, build his wall, open the government and charge Democrats with finding excuses not to secure our border because they have a demographic and ideological interest in changing the face of the nation.

For the larger the share of the U.S. population that requires welfare, the greater the need for more social workers, and the more voters there will be to vote to further grow the liberal welfare state.

The more multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual America becomes — the less it looks like Ronald Reagan’s America — the more dependably Democratic it will become.

The Democratic Party is hostile to white men, because the smaller the share of the U.S. population that white men become, the sooner that Democrats inherit the national estate.

The only way to greater “diversity,” the golden calf of the Democratic Party, is to increase the number of women, African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics, and thereby reduce the number of white men.

The decisive issues on which Trump was elected were not the old Republican litany of tax cuts, conservative judges and increased defense spending.

They were securing the borders, extricating America from foolish wars, eliminating trade deficits with NAFTA nations, the EU and China, making allies pay their fair share of the common defense, resurrecting our manufacturing base, and getting along with Russia.

“America First!” is still a winning hand
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Patrick Buchanan is currently a conservative columnist, political analyst, chairman of The American Cause foundation and an editor of The American Conservative. He has been a senior advisor to three Presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and was the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000. He blogs at the Patrick J. Buchanan.

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Kentucky Republican Moves To Expand Gun Rights

by Tom Knighton: If someone is a responsible gun owner and concealed carrier in one place, why are they a criminal if they move, say, two feet to their right?

Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? You’re no more of a danger than you were two feet prior, now were you? Yet that’s the way the laws read in most states. You’re fine so long as you’re carrying on that side of a property line.

In Kentucky, one lawmaker seeks to change all of that.
Hours before Kentucky lawmakers presented bipartisan school safety legislation, a House Republican filed a bill that would let people carry guns into schools.

House Bill 30, filed by Rep. Robert Goforth, of East Bernstadt, would scrap most location restrictions for persons with a concealed deadly weapon license, meaning that guns could legally be carried into day care centers and elementary schools, as well as onto college campuses.

The bill would also abolish restrictions preventing people with concealed carry licenses from bringing guns into bars and other private businesses. Those with licenses would also be able to bring concealed weapons into meetings of the General Assembly.

“I’m trying to protect the public,” Goforth told the Courier Journal on Wednesday.

Goforth said his bill is intended to address a loophole in state law, which allows individuals to carry concealed weapons into bars, restaurants and other private establishments as long as the firearms aren’t loaded.

“Most people may not realize that the person next to you has a clip in his left pocket and a gun in his right pocket and there’s nothing law enforcement can do about it,” Goforth said. “They’re already doing it, so they need to be trained, they need to be licensed and we need to hold them to a higher standard.”

Goforth, who joined the General Assembly last February, said the bill is also about leveling the playing field for lawful gun owners. Certain officials, including law enforcement officers, judges and county attorneys, are exempted from location restrictions under the state’s concealed carry law.

“I want everyone to be able to protect themselves, their families and others, instead of only a select few in our society being able to do so,” he said. “I don’t see how one can argue that an attorney can be more qualified to carry a concealed firearm in those locations than any other person.”I agree, for the most part.

Don’t get me wrong, I oppose training requirements, but Goforth doesn’t have to sell someone like me on the idea of allowing firearms in these places. He has to sell others, many of whom will be more likely to be swayed by his argument rather than fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone Second Amendment pontification.

I think it’s the right argument to make if you want to expand Second Amendment rights.

As it stands, Goforth is offering up a measure that every Second Amendment supporter–even those who are squishy on the Second Amendment–should back. The question is, will there be enough folks in Kentucky to agree to see this on the books?
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Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger at Bearing Arms. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia.

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Hypocrat Tears . . .

. . . Democrats are more worried about Government workers getting their checks on time than they are about American citizens being killed and victimized by criminals coming across the border.

Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

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A Stalemate as Trump Goes Factual, Democrats Illogical

Michael Barone

by Michael Barone: The televised presidential address from the Oval Office, a staple of communication between the chief executive and the people in the second half of 20th century, has recently been in desuetude. Former President Barack Obama delivered only three such addresses in his eight years in office. President Donald Trump this week delivered his first one, just days short of completing half his term.

It was a sober address, short but touching some emotive chords, carefully based on facts and proposals -- contrary to the Democrats' meme that it would be based on fears, not facts.

Post-speech fact-checking was particularly farcical. The Washington Post said Trump's claim that ICE officers made "266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records" in two years is accurate but "misleading" because the number includes all crimes. Huh?

Another complaint is that Trump claimed 1 in 3 women in migrant caravans is sexually assaulted. The complainer pointed to a study that says it is 60 to 80 percent of those women. Obviously, nobody knows the actual numbers; a good guess might be "a lot." But it is pretty obvious what's been happening on the southern border.

Attempted border crossings were way down in 2017, presumably for fear of tough Trump enforcement. They rose in 2018, as many Central Americans started arriving with children, hoping to gain entry into the United States by exploiting court-created loopholes in American asylum law. Few had legitimate claims on the political persecution or other traditional grounds for asylum; many complained of high local crime rates, for which, so far as I know, no nation has ever granted asylum.

Now it may be objected that the number of illegal southern border crossings was much higher 15 and 20 years ago. That's why Congress, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, voted in 2006 for more border protection.

And it's possible to argue that in the current hot labor market, illegals have little depressing effect on wages, and that the numbers of violent crimes by illegals, though regrettable, are bearable in a nation of 328 million. Democrats understandably tend to shun these valid but hard-hearted arguments.

Instead they insist vehemently that a wall, which many supported a dozen years ago, will inevitably be ineffective and must be regarded as "immoral."

This first argument flies in the face of evidence. As American Enterprise Institute's Michael Rubin pointed out in 2017, Israel's wall with the West Bank, Morocco's with Algeria, India's with Bangladesh, Hungary's with Serbia and others have reduced illegal crossings to near zero. This year, Rubin reports that France, Iraq, Lithuania, Estonia and Norway are putting up walls. "(I)t is simply counterfactual to suggest that walls won't work, a willful subordination of facts to the politics of the day," he writes.

And why are walls immoral? Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell recognizes the "but the Berlin Wall was to keep people in" argument but insists a wall to keep people out is "medieval" and "a symbol of 'us and not us.'" Well, yes -- U.S. citizens and not U.S. citizens. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith says Trump's call for the wall is rooted in "xenophobia and racism."

To say that it is impermissible or racist to distinguish between American citizens and others is to make a case for open borders. Even in the days of Ellis Island, health restrictions blocked some would-be immigrants and deterred perhaps millions of others.

Trump made the argument more gracefully, pointing out that wealthy politicians build walls, fences and gates around their property not "because they hate the people on the outside but because they love the people on the inside." A backyard fence is not a prison wall.

In his speech, Trump was careful to stress that he is seeking better technology, more personal humanitarian assistance and asylum law changes, as well as "a physical barrier." He says, "At the request of Democrats, it will be a steel barrier rather than a concrete wall."

In her response, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi conceded, "we need to secure our borders." And Sen. Schumer said, "Democrats and the president both want stronger border security." You might see these words as pointing toward a deal. I don't.

Pelosi and Schumer insisted, without citing evidence, that a wall is "ineffective" and "unnecessary." Their party seems emotionally fixated on blocking a wall and impervious to argument, even as Trump, perhaps surprisingly, made a dignified and factual case that it's needed to "protect our country."

Government shutdowns, formerly headline news, seem less painful these days (three-quarters of government is funded). Looks like a stalemate.
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Michael Barone is a Senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel  and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics Shared by Rasmussen Reports.

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Five-Alarm Foolishness

by Paul Jacob, Contributing Author: Will President Trump declare a “national emergency”? Is he that desperate to get the funds needed to build a wall (or steel-slate fence or barrier of some sort) on the U.S. border with Mexico?

It looks increasingly likely, but who knows . . .

What I do know is how foolish and dangerous it is to provide “emergency” loopholes for politicians.

Words have very mutable meanings to politicians. “Emergency” will entail whatever the president invoking it desires.

In fact, when Congress passed the National Emergencies Act in 1976, the legislation didn’t even bother to define the term, “emergency.”

Every time I hear “national emergency,” it reminds me of Colorado and Oregon, where state constitutions are clear that an emergency entails a true threat to the health and safety of the public. But since those constitutions protect emergency bills from the check of a citizen referendum, legislators make use of the obvious loophole: a majority of bills in those states now carry a clause dishonestly claiming emergency status.

I guess we should not be shocked to discover that Congress has awarded the president at least 136 emergency powers, as Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice informs The Washington Post.

Ninety-six of those “powers” allow the president to act unilaterally.

What sort of blind power giveaways are we talking about?

Goitein explains that in a declared emergency, under current law, Congress has authorized “the president to shut down or take over radio stations and even suspend a law that prohibits government testing of chemical and biological weapons on unwitting human subjects.”

We need a wall, all right . . . between politicians and this foreign notion of extra-constitutional “emergency” powers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Paul Jacob is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacob is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service.

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