They’re Coming For The Children

This is being a strange and terrifying day. Before we get into the full text of this article, we would like to set the tone by asking you to watch this clip from the 1993 Oscar-winning movie, Schindler’s List.

If you’ve watched the movie before, you already know the tragic story. The little girl doesn’t survive. Ladies and gentlemen, this is where we are as a nation. The President wants to deport children who are rightfully US citizens under the 14th Amendment. If he has his way, they would be rounded up, with or without their parents, and …. You don’t want to know.

This new fear is being stoked by the administration’s action this afternoon. In emergency applications filed at the high court on Thursday, the administration asked the justices to narrow court orders entered by district judges in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Washington that blocked the order President Donald Trump signed shortly after beginning his second term. The order currently is blocked nationwide. Three federal appeals courts have rejected the administration’s pleas, including one in Massachusetts on Tuesday.

The issue that SCOTUS is being asked to decide is how far-reaching a lower court’s order can be. The Trump administration’s emergency applications are aimed at pushing back on nationwide injunctions, judicial orders that can block a policy or action from being enforced throughout the entire country, rather than just on those parties involved in the litigation. The tool has been used by both Democratic and Republican administrations, and a debate over such injunctions has simmered for years.

Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general, called the government’s request a “modest” one. “Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current administration,” Ms. Harris wrote.

Well, duh! Do you think that might be because the illegal activity on the part of the White House has reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current administration? This is all legal posturing and the problem is that it might just work and the effect would reach further than the issue of birthright citizenship.

So far, that argument has not fared well in the courts. A federal judge in Seattle called Mr. Trump’s executive order “blatantly unconstitutional.” Roughly two dozen states, as well as several individuals and groups, have sued over the executive order, which they say violates the Constitution’s 14th Amendment promise of citizenship to anyone born inside the United States.

What the administration is attempting to do is go ahead and begin deporting people from the states that are not involved in those lawsuits. However, some legal analysts are saying that should the high court take the president’s side in this issue, they are effectively stating that the Constitution can be interpreted differently in each state. In that situation, regional district courts would only be able to govern the state in which their located, pushing a larger number of cases up to SCOTUS.

The high court could carve out a decision that is tailored to apply only to the three cases involved, but it would still be considered precedent for lower court rulings in other cases, such as trans rights and abortion.

Resistance to this effort has to step up now. We cannot allow these apartheid-loving goons to gut the US as Germany did to Europe. We can’t turn our back and ride away on our pretty little ponies.