The killer of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry has been apprehended in Mexico. Most of you will recall that his murder at the hands of a Mexican rip-crew was the event which unraveled Fast and Furious to the American public. The fact that no one in the Department of Justice was held to account for this abuse of power-or the obstruction of information related to it-illustrates the impunity with which the federal bureaucracy routinely operates.

Too many have lost their lives to our willfully negligent government. Hopefully, all of those responsible for Agent Terry’s death, as well as the deaths of hundreds of innocent Mexican citizens, will eventually be brought to justice.

The big news to come out of the President’s first weeks in office is a federal judge enjoining his executive order blocking immigration from 7 nations of concern. The motion by the Trump administration for an emergency stay has been denied by the 9th Circuit, a decision which bodes ill for its ultimate fate, as Andrew McCarthy points out, although the court will hear the challenge later today. There are a number of troubling aspects to this ruling, foremost among them being the idea that a single judge can influence American foreign policy and national security based upon specious legal reasoning. This is a distressingly familiar sight for the patriotic immigration reform movement, which has seen a single judge thwart Proposition 187-consigning California to its current dismal fate-and another obstruct the implementation of SB 1070-the law which inspired this very website.

The biggest threat to President Trump’s immigration agenda, beyond the attempt by the Chamber of Commerce wing of the GOP to undermine it within Congress, is judicial obstruction. Immigration law is just one of many domains usurped by the federal judiciary over the past century, however it is one of the most vital to the survival of our republic. Notwithstanding the media-generated fog, this executive order is critically important, not least because it drastically reduces the number of refugees being resettled in the United States and, to the horror of the ACLU, targets criminal aliens.

The lack of reasoning that went into this decision is transparent. As Byron York points out, this injunction-relying upon a litany of unexamined open borders cliches-has been rebutted by the Justice Department, which described in painstaking detail the plenary power exercised by the Executive Branch with regard to the entry of foreign nationals into the United States. Contrary to the Obama administration, which attempted to confer a panoply of benefits upon illegal aliens without the consent of Congress, this is a measured attempt at maintaining the security of American citizens at minimal cost/inconvenience to foreigners. Even so, the same bureaucratic forces which enabled President Obama to flout the Constitution are intent upon thwarting that very reasonable aim of the current administration.

Josh Blackman has a thorough 2 part exploration of the injunction from a statutory perspective, which I highly recommend reading. These cases will set the precedent for how immigration is dealt with going forward. Therefore, we need to address and refute the myths and exaggerations which have already taken hold in large swathes of the media landscape. We cannot allow lies to dominate the narrative, because immigration is the defining issue of our era.

While the scrupulously impartial moderator of Monday’s presidential debate didn’t see fit to ask a single question about one candidate’s wanton disregard for the law, though she herself alluded to it obliquely, Judicial Watch is not in the habit of playing favorites. Criminality is criminality, even when the Director of the FBI refuses to deem it so. That’s why it is holding a special presentation exploring both emailgate and the elaborate money laundering scheme known as the Clinton Foundation tomorrow afternoon. You’ll find all of the details about tomorrow’s event in their press release, and can watch the proceedings live here. Perhaps you’ll do Lester Holt a favor and send him that link, just to refresh his memory for any future debates he might oversee.

It seems as if the alternative media has rallied around the flag, which in Hillary’s case was probably purchased by benefactors like Goldman Sachs and the Gulf Arab slave state of Qatar. After all, who can resist GIRL POWER, even if it’s marshaled on behalf of someone who’s spent much of her career destroying the reputations of Bill Clinton’s comfort women? To get a sense of the cognitive dissonance at work, it’s worth reading this week’s Village Voice, which all but admits its preferred candidate is an inveterate liar, albeit one who can answer that 3 A.M. call!

By the way, does anyone else recognize the absurdity of Clinton backers running a variation on an ad which was universally panned-from a race which she lost-in order to lambast the purported shortcomings of Donald Trump? If there are any calls being made to a Clinton White House after midnight, I’m almost certain they will be made at the behest of sleazy foreign donors who want a return on their investment. That is indeed the purpose of the single greatest legal money laundering scheme on the planet, one which would make even El Chapo green with envy.

With all her seemingly disqualifying character traits and extensive history of semi-criminal actions, not to mention, thralldom to corporate interests, you would expect sincere leftists to express some reservations about her candidacy. You would think that even those who believe her to be the best choice in a binary election have enough integrity to admit that she is a dreadful choice, one who cares not so much about being a progressive as the acquisition and retention of power. The problem is that that is what progressivism, at its core, has become. The Faustian bargain the left has made in this election involves sacrificing its purported principles, including its increasingly hypocritical rhetoric about the underclass, in order to achieve its immediate political aims, e.g. importing millions of immigrants from the third world, cauterizing the 1st and 2nd Amendment to the Constitution, and crushing any remaining opposition to the cultural domination of social progressivism.

Fortunately, there are a handful of leftists who have some degree of integrity, including Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who was one of only public figures on the left to publicly admit that her Democratic opponent should have been indicted. Her honesty about the deficiencies of Hillary Clinton the candidate-as well as the human being-stand in stark contrast to the pathetic fealty liberal media outlets and talking heads have shown towards a woman who, were she a Republican, would probably be sitting in a federal penitentiary instead of seeking the most powerful office in the world.

Another voice remarkable for its clarity is incendiary cartoonist Ted Rall, who’s pointed out 3 of the biggest reasons why Hillary Clinton does not belong in the Oval Office. Although there are many, many more-including a capacity for deception that is boundless and a wholly repellent personality-the 3 enumerated by Rall should be of particular interest to liberals, who tout their intellectual superiority and routinely hector insufficiently feminist public actors. The fact that most are seemingly unconcerned with these very problematic issues makes one question their purported convictions.

Finally, Doug Henwood has published a book, My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets The Presidency, which should be required reading for any leftist tempted to ignore the consequences of their alliance with the Clinton machine. It begins, appropriately enough, with an epigram by Brad DeLong describing Hillary’s most relevant Executive experience, i.e. her disastrous oversight of health care reform during the first year of the Clinton presidency. Although he has also been brought to heel, this is his description of HRC’s signature issue back then:

My two cents’ worth–and I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994–is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn’t smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly. 

“Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch–the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president. 

To quote another former FLOTUS, Just Say No.

Expanding upon yesterday’s post, it should be noted that there were several subjects covered during Michael Mukasey’s talk, particularly the question and answer session that followed, which had little to do with our government’s malfeasance in combating international and domestic Islamic terrorism. One topic of keen interest was the ongoing FBI criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server, which continues to yield unpleasant discoveries for the presumptive Democratic nominee. The most surprising moment during the Q&A session occurred when Judge Mukasey not only vouched for the integrity of Director James Comey-who has been widely praised across the political aisle-but asserted that there would be mass resignations from career FBI officials if the result of this investigation was not an indictment of the former Secretary of State and FLOTUS.

The decision of Barack Obama to meet with Attorney General Loretta Lynch immediately upon endorsing Clinton’s candidacy does not auger well for a non-political decision in this investigation. Neither does the fact that the Obama Justice Department is marinated in corruption, and has been unable to impartially administer the law since the days of Eric Holder, Judge Mukasey’s successor at DOJ. That said, if there is a wave of principled resignations within the Department of Justice this fall, a la the Saturday Night Massacre, remember where you heard it first.

Although this election cycle has been extremely entertaining-at least, for those of us with a Menckenian distaste for popular democracy-it has also been disturbing in a number of ways. The prospect of electing a politician facing down her second indictment in as many decades-and make no mistake, despite her manifold flaws as a candidate and individual she is the presumptive POTUS at this point-is deeply troubling. However, even more disconcerting is the widespread public indifference to the activist left’s decision to completely decouple itself from reality, to the point of summoning law enforcement because of its displeasure with chalkings expressing support for a specific presidential candidate. 

For what it’s worth, I have difficulty believing that these poor naifs-or the bolder critics who’ve chosen the route of attempted assault-would be more amenable to a less conspicuously vulgar, or significantly more articulate, Republican candidate. In fact, it’s worth remembering the campaign of ostracism experienced by two of Ted Cruz’s donors for defying the prevailing political wisdom within the gay community. The truth is that the protestors you see disrupting rallies-including those of Bernie Sanders-are an accurate, if not complete, representation of the Democratic left within this country in the year 2016. 

Our good friend Pamela Hall has a small sampling of their works on her site, The Silent Majority No More,which I would urge you all to check out, if only to get a sense of what to expect this summer.

While Europe deals with the consequences of a Middle Eastern invasion brought on by the terrible decisions of its ostensible leaders, the United States continues to see an influx of illegal immigrants from Central America. Despite the Obama administration’s assertions that the flow of unaccompanied minors has abated, OTMs continue to pore across the border, according to newly released Border Patrol statistics.

Of course, once they are here they will benefit from the free legal advice of radical open borders advocacy groups-mostly funded through the expropriation of wealth from American citizens-who excel at coaching their new charges on how to scam the American government. Judicial Watch has a startling report on this practice in their Corruption Chronicles, which I highly recommend reading, if only to see how much this administration has eviscerated immigration enforcement on the federal level.

Naturally, this imposed chaos is accompanied by the President’s willful disregard for separation of powers, reflected in a series of actions-detailed here-which try to enact by executive fiat what could not be done through the proper legislative channels. The scope of this presidency’s abuse of power is broad, but in no arena is it as flagrant is in the realm of immigration law.  January 20, 2017 can’t come soon enough, as far as I’m concerned.

For those of you who believed the carnage wrought by this administration’s criminally negligent-if not intentionally malicious-Fast and Furious program had ceased-or even abated-I have some troubling news to report. Thanks to the indefatigable attorneys at Judicial Watch we continue to discover weapons implicated in violent crimes which can be traced back to the ATF’s gunrunning  obscenity. Although most of the devastation and loss of human life has been confined to Mexico and Latin America, gang-related violence involving Fast and Furious firearms has struck American cities as well.

You can read the Judicial Watch press release describing one such incident, which occurred in Phoenix, Arizona last year. Despite the usual obstruction and resistance by this administration, it was also able to obtain crime scene photos that reveal the identities of the victims and the serial numbers of lethal weapons our Justice Department placed in the hands of ruthless criminal entities. Even if the mandarins of the Washington press corps prefer to bury one of the greatest Executive crimes of the past five decades, it’s reassuring to know that those who care about the Constitution and journalism refuse to give our teflon President a free pass.

As we pointed out on Monday, one of the few viable options for Republicans seeking to stop this administration’s unlawful, patently unconstitutional expansion of its policy of wholesale amnesty is withholding congressional funding. Of course, what would a sensible proposal for reining in the imperial presidency be without a GOP leader doing his best to thwart it? In this case, that individual is Appropriations Committee chairman Hal Rogers, who is floating an absurd proposal to enact all of the President’s funding requests, including those which would facilitate his latest unlawful quid pro quo for undocumented citizens. 

 To add insult to injury, it appears that one of the major donors to Mr. Rogers has a huge financial stake in the enactment of any mass amnesty, which would include the printing of scores of work permits. Here’s a link to a page where you can get in touch with Mr. Rogers, in a neighborly fashion, of course, and express any concerns you might have over this unsettling coincidence.

With the horrific ritual slaughter of yet another American journalist, it’s become clear that the Islamic State, after briefly pursuing the hearts and minds strategy, has reverted to form. Whether we call them ISIL, ISIS, Al Qaeda in Iraq, or the Combatant Vanguard, the essence of this group of sociopaths remains the same, i.e. a nullification of civilization. Which is why preventing any of these death cultists from entering-or returning to-the United States is of the utmost urgency. 

Of course, our government has shown no inclination to limit our exposure to future Islamic terror plots. To the contrary, it has repeatedly invited thousands of refugees from states which have served as assembly lines for ISIS, Hezbollah, and al-Shabaab jihadists to resettle inside of our country. To add insult to injury, the Department of Homeland Security has absolutely no clue where 6,000 foreign students who have overstayed their visas are at this moment. We can only hope they aren’t pursuing the same path as one of the more notorious foreign students to come to our shores.

Whether or not the battalions of the Islamic State have the capability of enacting a 9/11-style terrorist assault on this country remains to be seen. However, our immigration control system is the least of their worries, as the most recent terror alert makes abundantly clear. Kudos to Judicial Watch for bringing to light the unmitigated failure of this administration to protect the lives of American citizens. The fact that the President and his allies are more concerned about placating the ethnic grievance industry-and gleaning the votes it represents-than ensuring America’s security tells you all you need to know about this administration’s misplaced priorities.