After Trump

DavidTC in reply to Koz says:

Of course not. She ran as an American, and for this race that was good enough.

No she didn’t. She ran as ‘a Republican’.

You stand there and repeatedly say that Democrats are the problem by being mean and refusing to work with Republican, and at literally the same time you assert Democrats are not Americans.

You can’t do both of those at the same time. You simply cannot. Not a single person here is on board with that idea. Even other conservatives here think that is insane.

The point is, the voters in that district don’t think that way, that the only thing they should care about in politics is opposing Trump.

And here is the part where I, like always have to do when talking to you, point that my claim was actually disputing your claim that the Republicans can build some sort of coalition of ‘conservative/populist’ voters and rule for 25 years, and I pointed out that it is literally impossible to keep being elected and get a majority as a ‘populist’, because no ‘populism’ policy can never have a majority, or even a large minority, of government support. People run as populists, and then (if they succeed) change the conventional political wisdom and their position is not populist anymore, it’s just…normal.

At which point you introduced Karen Handel, which was, as far as anyone can tell, unrelated to any ‘populism’, as you have just admitted.

So to get back to the point, please point to anything that the Republican party is doing that will continue to make it ‘populist’ in the future. Especially without Trump.

As I said, the closest thing to populism the Republicans have is ‘repeal the ACA’. And it did, indeed, get them elected, over and over.

Of course, doing that is so against political wisdom that when they had the chance to do that, they punted (Because it actually was a really bad idea.) Instead they switched to ‘replace the ACA’, and at this point, with the Senate bill, they’re basically at ‘make the ACA very shitty and repeal the Medicaid expansion very slowly so the voters don’t notice’.

Which is, of course, the problem with people who run on really stupid populist ideas get in office enough that they can’t blame other people for failing to do their dumbass promises. Those ideas have to shift.(1)

So, anyway, enough about the populist thing they just got elected on. That isn’t going to work in the future, and yet you seem to think they can remain populists.

Please point to what populist position you think they will take next.

1) As always, when I talk about what people in politics ‘have’ to do, I am implicitly saying ‘Unless they want to become very very unpopular’, and thus I am excluding Trump, who does not understand any of this.Report

DavidTC in reply to Koz says:

The point being, is that the D’s the libs, some judges, parts of the deep state, etc,. are forfeiting their place in the modus vivendi of the mechanics of American politics.

That was an unintentionally revealing comment on your part.

I suspect you wanted to include examples of elected Democrats failing to work with Republicans, but the problem, and it is a fundamental problem of your entire theory, is the Democrats are not, in fact, doing that.

In fact, you keep making grand claims they’re going to do that, and running off and disappearing for a bit when it doesn’t come true.

We remember when you were talking about how the Democrats were refusing to confirm people in the Senate, and then…you just sorta went away when it turns out they were not doing that.

We remember how you complained that Democrats weren’t going to work with the Republicans on heath care, and then we actually got to that point, and wait a second, everyone can actually see the Republicans refusing to let Democrats participate at all. (They’re barely even letting all the Republicans participate!) Yes, the Democrats have started fighting back about that and delaying things in the Senate, but it’s clearly in response to being locked out of the process by Republicans.

So, at this point, your examples of liberals not working with Republicans and fighting them tooth and nail are ‘judges’ and the ‘deep state’.

I could actually say a lot about both those stupid claims, in that the judges have been across the politics spectrum, and ‘the deep state’ is actually “people close to Trump, who were hired by him, are leaking like a sieve in because that administration is completely dysfunction and basically everyone there hates Trump and is trying to use him for their own purposes”…which has nothing to do with any supposed ‘deep state’.

But I think a more important point against your claim is that it is completely nonsensical to think the voters will hold that against elected Democrats.

There’s no one out there saying ‘Man, top administration officials keep leaking horrible information about Trump…I was on the fence before, but I feel that I need to vote for a Republican for Congress in 2018, because that is somehow related, right? Those Democrats in Congress have to have something to do with all those leaks in the White House, right? Herp derp.’Report

DavidTC in reply to Koz says:

In particular, there’s no shortage of examples among the political class, in the resistance inside the executive or judicial branch, or at the activist voter level.

Weirdly, the voters do not vote for the political class. Or activist voters. Or the judicial branch!

They do, technically, vote for the executive branch, at least the head of it, but that actually seems to make even less sense than the things you normally say. Are you asserting the Republicans, because they have elected an incredibly poor leader who cannot keep control of his own people (Yes, despite what people seem to keep implying, most of these leaks are at the level where they basically have to be coming from Trump’s people, not civil servants.), will blame Democrats for that?

But, then again, you aren’t talking about leaks, you just keep mentioning ‘the deep state’ and how ‘the executive’ is turned against Trump, and have failed to give any actual examples of that.

You’re sorta batting 0 for 4 there.

The lack of votes for Trump’s cabinet

Oh no! The Democrats have, in absolutely no way at all, impeded things!

the lack of votes for Neil Gorsuch,

More Democrats voted for Neil Gorsuch than Republicans voted for Merrick Garland, so you don’t really get to pretend that’s something the Democrats started.

the shooting incident on the baseball fields

I literally typed something in my last post guessing you would mention that, and pointing out that, uh, a Democratic Congresswomen was shot in 2011 by a right wing nutjob, because I knew you would not remember that, because your memory recorded nothing that happened during the Obama administration except ‘They passed a health care bill’.

But I said to myself, hey, let’s try giving Koz the benefit of the doubt, and erased it.

That was dumb of me.

the campus riots against Milo, Charles Murray and Heather Mac Donald

Ah, yes, because campuses weren’t protesting speakers before that.

the litigation against the travel ban

Remember, folks, the ‘liberals’ are villains for standing up to unconstitutional laws.

And, yes, I am sure in your mind, Trump has temporarily won that…except he ‘
‘won’ that by basically removing the unconstitutional and illegal parts. (Whch were, to recap: Blocking people with existing visas, trying to restrict immigration in addition to tourism, claiming the right to exclude green card holders.)

Yes, there’s something he’s calling the travel ban that is about to go into effect, but it’s basically had all the stuff that was actually objectionable removed, and what is headed to the Supreme Court is basically the ‘restrict travel visas from certain countries’ that pretty much everyone thinks he could have gotten away to start with, or at least he could have gotten away with if he hadn’t stupidly revealed religious animus as a motive for it during the campaign.

Whether or not someone can present an unconstitutional justification for an otherwise constitutional executive order at one place, and then later claim they did it for constitutionally-permissible ones latter, is unknown. But even if Trump manages to get away with that, that was a very small part of what he originally tried to do and the lawsuits stopped.

it’s very clear that libs’ hearts and minds are in the wrong place at all levels of society.

And by ‘wrong place’, you always means ‘a non-conservative place’.

As I have mentioned before, no matter how much you likes to pretend the left’s anger and hatred outstrips the right’s, one party nominated a politician who regularly had mobs chanting about imprisoning people, and the other did not.

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BTW, I think everyone needs to remember, at all times, that according to Koz, every single liberal, in fact, every person that seems to be on their side, is representative of liberals. Someone brings a lawsuit because their wife has been barred from reentering the country? That’s all liberals doing that.

I mention that not to argue with it (That is pointless.), but to remind everyone that, in a discussion with Koz, anything any conservative does is entirely representative of conservatives, and something they can control.

Lawsuit against cooking a cake for a gay couple? That’s literally some sort of endorsed conservative position. Sean Hannity pushing the Seth Rich conspiracy theory? That’s a conservative position. Milo Yiannopoulos praises underaged sex…hrm.Report

DavidTC in reply to Koz says:

These voters are politically motivated by good jobs, immigration, trade, and the safety net in a communitarian sense

A thing they were very motivated by that you mysteriously left out: Better health insurance than Obamacare, or at least better than higher premiums that they think is due to Obamacare.

Weird you forget that, considering your theory that, uh, it caused a huge political shift and is the reason that people switched to voting Republican in the first place. Anyway.

And the fundamental problem is that the Republicans do not actually have a plan to do any of those things.

In fact, they’re going in a backwards direction on both health insurance and the safety net. (I am not exactly sure what part of the safety net you think Republican voters are for, but it’s hard to figure out any part of the safety net they plan to make better or increase. Even stuff that is traditionally middle-class like unemployment insurance.)

Meanwhile, it is almost impossible to figure out any way they can make any positive improvements on jobs. Trump might run around making doing stunts and talking about how he saved microscopic amounts of jobs, but that only works for so long.

Of course, it’s fairly easy for the government to create jobs, but they’d have to spend money to do so. Which they won’t.

And I don’t know what you mean by trade exactly, but any reduction of trade is going to increase prices, making things worse.

About the only thing Republicans can actually do anything in the direction their base wants is immigration, and there have been several dumbass promises in idiotic directions they have to untangle before they can start making movement on that.Report

DavidTC in reply to Koz says:

As rebuttal to that article, I point to:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/01/democrats-new-crossover-voters-romney-clinton-215211

As it points out, for all the fetishing of Obama-to-Trump voters, a large amount of people also switched the other way, from Romney-to-Clinton.

And I know the somewhat dubious idea that those people will switch back to being Republicans when Trump is gone, but it is equally possible to argue the exact same thing about Clinton, and Clinton won’t be on the ballot in 2020, and Trump will. (Well, presumably.) So, uh, that’s sorta bad for the Republicans there.

Likewise, Clinton is not going to be president in 2018, and Trump will. (Again, presumably.) Considering that midterms usually are ‘opposing party expresses their dislike of the president’, that doesn’t look that good for Republicans.

Saying ‘Our voters will come back in eight years’ is…not a very strong position to be taking, even if it didn’t also mean ‘…after watching eight years of Trump break things’ or ‘…after watching Trump get impeached’.Report

DavidTC in reply to Koz says:

But primarily, this was the data point that GA-6 was supposed to test, and the results weren’t good for your team.

I don’t see how you got that as a result.

GA-6 proved that Romney-to-Clinton voters have also mostly stopped voting for other Republicans. Trump won the district by 1.5 points, and Handel won by 3.6.

If anything, that proves the opposite thing than you would want it to…that the problems some Republicans have with Trump are resulting in them having problems with the entire party. They are not compartmentalizing Trump in one place and Republicans in the other. The two are instead tied together.

GA-06 especially makes this point when you consider this was a special election, where there are supposed to be a Republican boast due to turnout. We don’t really have any way to figure out what the turnout is ‘supposed’ to be in a special election, but if this was a midterm, it should have tilted somewhere 2 to 3 points towards Republicans.

So Handel’s ‘slight improvement’ over Trump in reality probably signifies no Republican movement at all. That district is basically voting exactly where it should be voting if it was a 51% Republican/49% Democratic district…it’s voting that in the presidential, and slightly more Republican at specials and midterm.

Which while this is technically a ‘win’ for Republicans, it should cause panic considering what those percentages used to be!

When Trump’s polling is taken into consideration, this makes things looks pretty bad for the midterms. He’s lost 15 points in net approval since the election, where he (along with Congress) were basically tied. (Congress’s general approval is also crap, but that, weirdly, is always crap and seems to have no bearing on the election.)

Of course, GA-06 leaves it as an open question if voters that originally liked Trump but now dislike him also will tie Congressional voting to him. I.e., just because people who originally turned on Trump turned on all the Republicans at that time doesn’t mean that later people who turn on Trump will turn on all Republicans.

Except we’ve had other races that did answer that question! And the answer is pretty much yes.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

“when the Executive exercises this power negatively on the basis of a facially legitimate and bona fide reason, the courts will neither look behind the exercise of that discretion, nor test it by balancing its justification against the First Amendment interests” of the plaintiffs.

Except there’s still a problem there. Several, actually.

First, the reason stated was to ‘give time to conduct a review about terrorism‘, not anything to do with religion. Even if the government can filter non-Americans by religion, that doesn’t mean it can claim to filter them by nationality but actually have the secret intent of filtering them by religion.

But let’s, for the purpose of this discussion, talk about the ‘minority religion’ refugee priority instead, because that actually was a stated reason and religion test, instead of retroactively trying to justify the entire thing under a claim that was explicitly discounted.

Secondly, as I’ve pointed out when talking about that priority, that (And also an outright ban) would require the government deciding who is, and who is not, in what religion.

Just like, in the case you cited, the government had to define what was, and was not, promoting ‘the economic, international, and governmental doctrines of world communism’.

But the problem is that the government is entirely free to define political beliefs, or speech, or anything like that. They can define ‘world communism’ if they want!

They just can’t normally make laws ‘restricting’ those things. You want to assert they can make laws toward immigrants that violate free speech, well, I point out that it is not 1952, a time that was about a decade from the courts being okay with detaining Japanese-Americans who had committed no crime, and I wouldn’t be 100% sure this is still how the court feels about this topic…but let’s just pretend it does.

The problem is that the government can’t define religions. In any manner. They can define ‘communism’, but they can’t define ‘Christianity’. The government cannot say ‘Christians officially believe X, Y, and not Z’. That’s ‘respecting’ a religion.

But, you want to respond, they’d only doing it to ‘non-Americans’, so they can.

Except they’re not. They’re defining religions for everyone…they’re just only using them in rules against non-Americans. It doesn’t matter if the government only intends to apply those definitions to people outside the country…it is taking positions on religions that people hold within this country.

Part of my religion (Everyone’s religion, in fact!) is determining who is following it! I’m not just making that up as some sort of weird ‘religions freedom’ claim, there have been literal wars over claims that different people are or are not following specific religions. This is not some made-up new belief.

So you might stand there and assert that the government has the right to say ‘We can give priorities to Christians’, and maybe, in some non-functional sense, it does have that right, but it can’t use it.

Here’s the hypothetical: A refugee from Libya is trying to enter the country, and the government does some basic religion tests, asks his beliefs, and he truthfully says he considers himself a Christian because he believes certain specific things, and the US government agreed he was Officially a Christian, so he gets prior- hold on a damn minute, repeat that last bit. ‘Officially a Christian’?!

The US government just took an official position that someone is a Christian!

I don’t care who the government does it to, I don’t care why they do it, I don’t care if it harms that person or not, I don’t care if it’s constitutional to do that ‘to them’ or not.

The government IS NOT ALLOWED IN ANY FORM WHATSOEVER to say someone is, or is not, a Christian and doing so is a serious violation of my constitutional rights as a Christian to define my religion as I see fit, and I will haul them into court for it for the harm done to me.

I will demand their definition of Christianity exactly matches mine as a Baptist, with every theological nuance correct as I understand them…and BTW there’s a Catholic standing next to me demanding the same thing.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

And actually, the government defines who is a Christian all the time. They process their tax status and everything.

No. The Federal government says what is a church or not for tax purposes, not who is specifically members of what religion.

Defining a church is reasonable constitutional, as long as the government’s rules about what is and is not a church are based in secular grounds and not aimed against specific religions. Which has caused problems a few times with non-traditional religions like Wicca where there is much less structure, but whatever, it usually gets worked out. And Universal Life Church has removed the idiotic ‘must be an ordained minister to marry people’ problem that churches that do not have ‘ministers’ had by ordaining anyone who wants.

Defining what a church is is….mostly workable.

Defining a religion is something else entirely, and completely off limits. What religion beliefs comprise what religion is utterly outside the scope of government.

You want to argue that the government could prioritize the arrival of members of a specific church, sure! I think that’s a stupid idea for a church, but it is probably constitutional, and we have actually based various immigration rules on membership in organizations before.

I mean, technically, actual members of the Nazi party still cannot enter this country. We’ve outright barred non-American members of that organization. Likewise, we’ve often had specific visas easy to get for members of certain aid organizations, like the Red Cross.

But that’s not what Trump’s EO said. It didn’t say anything about members of churches.

It said members of minority religions.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

In court, the judge has to determine what your religious beliefs are and how important they are to you, and whether they are fundamental or incidental to your faith.

You know what word weirdly didn’t appear in your post? RELIGION

The government can look at your religious beliefs, and try to determine how fundamental they are to what you believe.

What they cannot do is say ‘We have classified you as a Methodist, and Methodists do not believe that about contraceptive, so you are not allowed to claim you believe otherwise.’

The courts can take a look at your beliefs, and decide how serious or important they are.

The courts cannot take a look at your religion and decide whether or not you fit within the boundaries of the religion that you can claim to be…in fact, they can’t even write down any such boundaries.

Your beliefs, even your ‘religious beliefs’, are not the same as your religion.

I swear, it’s like everyone here is unaware that different words mean different things.

Trump literally used the sole determination that the government cannot do.

He could have prioritized people who were members of ‘minority churches’, although I guess technically that would be almost everyone as surely no church is attended by most of the people in a country.

He could have even, in theory, prioritized people who had ‘minority religious beliefs’, although that seems both exceptionally easy to lie about, and requires the government somehow figuring out what beliefs the vast majority of people in another country have. So it’s impractical, but possibly constitutional.

Or he could have done the sane thing and just prioritized refugees who were ‘people being prosecuted by others for religious reasons’, which is obviously allowed by law as it is literally part of the refugee law. (So he’s just be putting that as prioritized over ‘being prosecuted for political reasons’ and other reasons.) Note this wouldn’t require the prospective refugee to be a member of any religion, or hold any specific beliefs. It would just required them to be attacked or threatened due to other people’s religious beliefs.

He instead prioritized members of minority religions. Thus requiring the US to figure out what religion that people are…which is literally the one thing, the only thing, that the US government is forbidden from having an opinion about.

And, BTW, no, the courts cannot decide if the Nation of Islam is really Muslim or not. But it’s a bit moot, because literally no court would say that ‘Muslims and only Muslims can wear a hijab’. The determination would be off belief, not religion.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

The judge asks you if you are a Catholic.

The judge asks no such thing. The judge asks you how you are impacted, and you explain how this violates your religious beliefs. (Or, rather, you have all this written down when you sue.)

You do not need, at any point, to explain what religion you are. You can if you want to, but don’t need to.

Or to put it another way:

A dedicated Catholic heavily involved in the Church, hell, let’s say it’s the Pope himself, sues the US government because he is required by state law to dispense birth control pills. (The Pope is moonlighting in a US pharmacy.)

The judge says ‘And this violates your religious beliefs?’

And the pope says ‘It is forbidden under Catholism, and I am a Catholic.’

And the judge tilts his head and says ‘That is not actually relevant. Does it violate your religious beliefs.’

And the Pope hangs his head and says, ‘No. I don’t actually believe in that. I know it is the official position of the church, but I do not personally believe this causes any harm in any real way’.

Well, tada, case dismissed.

Meanwhile, the person working next to the Pope is also suing the government for the same reason, and she’s a Wiccan.

Wicca doesn’t traditionally have any such beliefs about birth control, as far as I know, but she thought long and hard about this and has come to the conclusion that birth control actually is destroying life, which is sacred to her, and she can no longer use it or provide it to people.

And she explains this to the court, and, wow, she actually has a case.

It’s nothing to do with the ‘religion’, and everything to do with beliefs. Yes, people often explain their religious beliefs in terms of their religions, assuming the religion is common enough that people will understand that, but that has jackshit to do with the actual law.

You have to prove that you are, to a federal judge, or you don’t have standing. A Methodist cannot sue on behalf of a Catholic in a case where only Catholics are impacted.

A Catholic can’t ‘sue on behalf of a Catholic’ either, what the hell are you talking about?

The people who sue in Federal court, the actual plaintiffs, have to be impacted. You can’t sue just because you’re the same religion as someone impacted.

You seem to have some fantasy version of the First Amendment in your head.

You seem to have a fantasy version of how courts work in your head.Report

DavidTC in reply to DavidTC says:

And, BTW, I know it sounds like I’m nitpicking, but while there being a fuzziness in regards to the right to practice a religion, and the government interaction with religious institutions, and all sorts of vagueness in the law…

…the US government having to determine who is, and is not, in a specific religion, as Trump’s EO requires, is way way way past that fuzziness.

As I said, it’s something that if you actually think ‘How would the US government do this?’, you immediately blanch.(1) It’s not what religious beliefs they publicly say they hold that we can test the sincerity of, it’s what ‘religion’ they are, which means the US government has not only has to honestly determine a bunch of people’s (In another country!) religious beliefs (Even private ones, unlike the stuff people are making court cases out of) and how sincerely they hold them, something which is usually a rather longish trial…

…they then have to figure out what religion those beliefs officially indicate someone is a member of, which means the government needs to categorize all that shit, and draw lines between religions.

And it also means they need to figure out if various different sects of a religion count as the same religion or not. here are a lot of people who call themselves Muslims being persecuted by people who call themselves Muslims. But they could also correctly be called Shia Muslims and the people persecuting them Sunni Muslims. Or they could be called mainstream Sunni Muslims and the people persecuting them are Wahhabist Sunni Muslims.

Please, US government, tell me the Official US Stance whether those are the ‘same religion’ or not. Interject yourself directly in matters of religious doctrine, because there can’t possibly be any sort of constitutional rule against that.

I mean, they’re all foreigners, so have no constitutional protections…oh, wait, I’m informed that there are approximately 8 million US Muslims who presumably do have some sort of right to not have the US government define what beliefs, exactly, their religion is composed of, even if the government just applies those definitions to non-Americans.

1) Unless you think the US government is just going to take their word for it (And can never dispute their statements.), which just makes his order very very stupid at the intended idea of keeping out ‘terrorists’.

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And, frankly, I think I have made my point about as well as I possibly can about how Trump’s order prioritizing ‘members of a minority religion’ as refugees is about as non-functional as possible and couldn’t possibly be implemented without massive constitutional problems. Because, again, Trump is a total idiot, and neither he, nor whoever wrote that EO (Bannon, I guess.), have any idea how constitutionally freedom of religion works, or where the tripwires are, and they didn’t bother to even vaguely run it by a lawyer.

And so I’m done here.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

If I start reciting part of the Lord’s Prayer or the doxology, can you reflexively carry on with it?

So your idea is that the government will present a general knowledge test, and declare that people have certain knowledge are one religion, and people who do not have certain knowledge are not?

First, congrats on randomly picking the worst possible example as the first ‘test’, as not only are there two different versions of the Lord’s Prayer in the Bible (Matthew 6:9–13 and Luke 11:2–4), but also three different translations of those are in common use (Trespasses vs. sins vs. debts.)

Hey, what are you going to do to refugees who refuse to recite it in front of people, citing Matthew 6, which says people should pray in secret…and of course, even if a person doesn’t apply that rule generally, they might still have an objection to a fake recital to prove who they are.

And, of course, this assumes refugees have weirdly memorized part of the Bible in a non-native language, which is just dumb.

Then you are a Christian, not a Muslim.

You think people who can recite the Lord’s prayer are how Christianity is defined? Are you on drugs? There’s a lot of disagreement exactly on how to decide who is a Christian or not, but no one, in the entire history of Christianity, has used ‘memorized the Lord’s Prayer’ as the definition!

The Lord’s Prayer is basically the ‘sample prayer’ given in the Bible. While most Western denominations use it in some ritualistic manner, not all denominations do…and I have no idea idea if the Eastern-tradition Christianity you find in, duh, the Middle East often recite it.

Being able to recite the Lord’s prayer is pretty good evidence you have grown up in a place where the culture is a) Christian, and b) Western.

This is all ignoring the rather larger problem that you have now officially said that the Baptists, the Catholics, and the Latter-Day Saints are all the same religion. Yeah, have fun with those lawsuits.

It’s no harder than figuring out who was Russian and who was German in WW-II. The vast panoply of characters and events they carry around in their heads is almost completely different.

This law isn’t about determining who grew up in the West vs. who grew up in Muslim nations. That is easy.

This law is about determining, among people who grew up in Muslim nations, which are Christians. It’s about refugees!

Just like non-Christians in America (Like you, I believe.) are familiar with Christian theology despite not being part of it, Christians in Syria are going to be familiar with Muslim theology. Um, duh. It surrounds every part of their life.

Now, it is perhaps true that Muslims in Syria would not generally be familiar with Christian theology, whereas Christians would…but a) trying to figure out exactly what sort of generally knowledge a Syrian Nestorian Christian layperson would know is lots of fun for the government to officially lay out, and b) are we literally asserting that Muslims are incapable of learning what Christians believe? I mean, we’re trying to keep out terrorists, right?

Furthermore, you seem to have decided this is for sorting out Christians from Muslims.

In actuality, the largest ‘minority religion’, in Syria for example, at 11.3%, are Alawites. Alawites, because you certainly don’t know, assert they are Shia Muslims, but other Shia Muslims disagree for some reason I don’t understand. These are not to be confused with Alevism, which is another somehow dubious Shia Muslim classification, or Ismailism, which is the same sort of thing. Meanwhile, there are 3.2% of other (more ‘legitimate’) sorts of Shia Muslims in Syria.

But the most fun is perhaps the Druzes. They are only 3.2%, but are dis-proportionally persecuted. And their religion is, uh, weird, in that it seems to steal from basically a bunch of other religions, mostly Islam. But they are generally not considered Muslims (Not even by themselves), except a few people do.

And the Druzes are not to be confused with the Yazidis, who are less Islamic in origins and are a sort of weird monotheistic mix of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and while they are almost a microscopic amount of the Syrian population at 0.2%, as you might suspect ISIS hates them and they are a fairly large target, hence refugees.

Maybe we can get some sort of ruling from you at this point exactly where you are drawing the lines of ‘a minority religion’….in Syria.

I’m sure it will be easy to come up with tests for those groups, and I’m really really sure that no terrorist could ever come up with the correct answers just by, uh, spending a month or so studying them. (Especially since the US has almost none of them so the questions are basically going to be off a script.)

And then we can move on to the other countries!

But of course that’s just Congress. The President was left free to use his pen and phone to do whatever he wants. ^_^

Perhaps you object to that interpretation, and would argue that the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from respecting an establishment of religion, not just Congress.

No, I would say that the first amendment also forbids Congress from delegating their powers to another branch of government that then violates the first. And the president’s control of immigration is entirely delegated.

The president can do whatever he wants with religion in regard to inherent powers he has. (Well, he’s still subject to the Equal Protection clause, so not really.)

But he can’t be told by Congress ‘We have written a law that says you get to decide things’ and then decide them for or against a certain religion. Congress cannot do unconstitutional things merely by saying that another branch of the government can do them.

Which is sorta obvious. Congress can’t pass a law saying the president can make a list of disallowed speech and punishments, and then claim ‘Congress shall make no law….abridging the freedom of speech’ doesn’t apply, because they didn’t actually abridge anything or punish any speech at all, they just let the president do it.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

Again, if you can’t tell a Christian from a Muslim in ten minutes of questioning, you must not have any familiarity with either religion.

Of the six countries in the original travel banned that had priority given to ‘a minority religion’, while all of them do have Christians, exactly one of them appear to have Christians as the largest minority religion. Pretending the ability to distinguish out Christians solves the problem is idiotic.

The largest minority religion in Yemen, of course, is Shia Islam. Likewise, the largest minority religion in Iran is Sunni Islam.

The ‘largest’ minority religion in Somilia is some sort of animism, practiced mostly by the Bantu ethnic group. Others, to confuse the issue, do some weird mix of Islam and animism. Sudan has ‘African Traditional Religion’ as a religion tied with Christianity. And I already explained about Syria’s largest minority religion being Alawites.

But hey, the largest minority religion Liybia is, indeed Christianity.

Boom! You just outed yourself as a Christian. No Muslim in the history of Islam could have given your reply.

Really? You’re asserting that no Muslim could learn the Lord’s Prayer? Is this akin to how the Fairies in a Midsummer’s Night Dream mentioned how they could hear the churchbells to show they were not demonic?

See, here’s the other problem…you keep pretending that this some sort of guessing game, like some sort of murder mystery, where random people might claim thing but can be tripped up.

In reality, these are either refugees or, apparently, terrorists. If they are terrorist and lying about their religion, they presumably prepped for that!

Which means you can’t just ask a few random question, especially since, as I pointed out, they are from entirely different cultures. You’d have to have religious experts.

So, anyway, the government, after asking all sorts of questions about deeply persona beliefs, discovers that…someone claiming to be a Christian doesn’t believe in eternal damnation for the unsaved! But…all Christians do, don’t they? It’s in the Bible…isn’t it? They quickly page through the Bible, trying to figure this out, and there are a few verses that seem to indicate that, but it turns out there are other versions disputing that. So, wait. Have the wrong people been let in this entire time?!

Additionally, some of these minority religions are either completely unknown in the US, so people really could just read the Wikipedia page and make up anything (Do you have any idea what you would ask someone claiming to be an Alawites to figure out if he really is one?).

Hey, remember that mix of ‘Islam and animism’ I mentioned above? I wonder exactly how many Somilian Bantu are in America, to legitimately recognize another Somilian Bantu. Have fun with that.

Or, easiest of all, they can claim they’re the other major sect of Islam. The two parts of Islam have enough general familiarity with each other to be able to recite the doctrine of the other, and obviosuly one of them has to be in the minority. Or in your universe, are the two sects the same religion? That’s an interesting legal determination for the US government to take.

And you may think ‘Oh, the government can just ignore people who seem to not be able to recite their supposed religion perfectly, people trying to enter the country do not have constitutional rights anyway’.

But I point out, again, the second the government issues some sort of rule that, even if people call themselves Christians, if they don’t believe in X, Y and Z, or if they believe in W, they are not Christians…

…a lot of us Christians in America will be firing up the lawsuits, on the grounds the US government cannot dictate our religion’s belief to other people and doing so harms all members of that religion. (And there’s almost a certainly you can find some people calling themselves Christian who do not hold those beliefs, although that isn’t really a barrier anyway…I’m a Baptist, and thus I believe the US government has no right to dictate what is and isn’t correct Christian beliefs even if they randomly happen to match my beliefs letter-prefect.(I don’t think _anyone_ has the right to dictate that, but other people doing it do not harm me.))

Then that would mean the Constitutionality of the law should have been challenged. Not even the 4th or 9th did that.

That is not how constitutional challenges work.

To challenge the constitutionality of a law, you must have been harmed by the government. In fact, ‘laws’ are not challenged…actions of the government are challenged. When we say a law is ‘stuck down’, we’re technically wrong. The law still exists, it is just that the government has been barred from the action that the law is trying to do.

If Congress passed that ‘The President can make a list of things you cannot say and fine people for saying them’, and the president didn’t ever do anything, no one could challenge anything.

There are all sorts of laws that give the president broad rights, including things that would be clearly unconstitutional. That doesn’t make ‘the law unconstitutional’, it just means the law cannot be used that way.

The ‘priority will be given to refugees that are members of a minority religion’ part was only in effect for seven days, and it doesn’t appear to have actually happened.

What they have done is allow the President to limit the entry of foreigners from certain groups if their arrival is not in the US national interest

You keep skipping around from what we’re actually talking about. We are discussing whether or not prioritizing people from minority religions would be constitutional.

You asserted that it would be, and further assert it would be constitutional to ban people based on religion. So you keep wandering back to the entire order, which is being disputed on the grounds it does that.

However, the executive branch seems really sure that theory is not correct, because they’re very loudly arguing that they did not discriminate based on religion. Hint: If someone’s lawyers are desperately trying to argue that X is not true, you probably shouldn’t take the position that X being true would be completely fine and the courts would have no problem with it.

If the courts allow the new order to stand, it will because they don’t think it discriminates based on religion, not because they do but that’s fine!

Meanwhile, the ‘member of a minority religion’ prioritization was removed from the second order, probably because it was blatantly unconstitutional as I said, and it doesn’t seem to have been in effect to actually effect anyone.

So will never be tested by the courts.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

I am no longer talking about your incorrect interpretation of the first amendment, as I have explained that as well as I can. Nor will I be drawn into your discussions about how it should not have been Incorporated, whcih seems completely irrelevant when discussing the actions of the Federal government and immigration. (Although I will point out that your interpration of how things are supposed to work sounds like how I think the second amendment was supposed to work and thus that it shouldn’t have been Incorporated. Weird.)

But I will address your brand new claim, and then your brand new conspiracy theory:

The government has already been noting what religion they are, and we have been counting how many refugees of various religions have been allowed in.

That’s not the US government asking. That’s the UN and NGOs. The US government just sorta ends up with the results when the UN/NGOs finish what they are doing and they say ‘Hey, this guy seems to be a legit refugee, what country will take him?’ and the US government steps forward, gets handed paperwork, and does even more checks. (There’s a reason the process can take months. You first get vetted by NGOs, and then handed to the US via the UN, and then the US runs you through State and Homeland and other parts of itself.)

You want to assert that the US should legally erase their religious identification when it’s handed to them, feel free. No one really seems to care. Heck, maybe they do already erase it, because I’m not seeing the stats on the US government site: http://www.wrapsnet.org/admissions-and-arrivals/

It’s entirely possible that the stats everyone are using about the religion of refugees admitted into the US are because the UN publishes information on who the US accepts, not because the US keeps track of it.

Yet the percentage of the area’s Christian refugees allowed into the US is essentially zero. That was the State Department’s policy under Obama. Apparently you have no Constitutional issues with rejecting Christians because of their religion.

This is a right-wing myth. Well, actually, you got the myth slightly wrong, the right-wing claim is actually that Syrian Christians are being barred.

This is because, for an example of a country that was included in the first executive order (but not the second) are over 15% of refugees from Iraq are Christian, and the Christian population of Iraq is only 0.8%.

But almost no Syria refugees are Christians. Why? Well, it’s not due to any policy reasons, as there are no policies in that regard. And other countries do not seem to be getting Christians from Syria either!

In reality, there are two reasons why there do not seem to be hardly any Syria Christian refugees:

The first is that Christians generally do not support the rebels at all (As the rebels are all mostly Muslims groups.), so aren’t subject to Assad persecution. Syria Christians, in fact, are sorta being actively courted by Assad in any attempt to frame the revolution against him as entirely Islamist, which also is a way to keep the Russians on his side.

If you actually google this topic, you will find a lot of articles that are desperately trying to change Syrian Christian’s minds about this, claiming that Assad is not actually their friend, which I agree with…but, whatever the motives, he is not targetting Christians. They aren’t generally being persecuted by his government…for now. He probably will turn on them as soon as he doesn’t need them…although that does risk Russia’s wrath, so who knows. But he’s not turned on them yet, at least.

And that just leaves us with ISIS. But not a lot of Christians live in ISIS-controlled areas, so aren’t subject to ISIS persecution. Here’s a map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Syria#/media/File:Syria_Ethno-religious_composition..jpg

Admittedly, that’s from 1976, but the areas are generally correct-ish. The Christians live sorta pressed up against the Alewites, and neither of them want anything to do with ISIS. (The Alewites are a Shia sect, which means the Sunni-Wahhabi based ISIS loathes them, and they’re not even, like, ‘officially-correct’ Shia.) ISIS doesn’t have any sway there.

Now, those maps aren’t absolute, of course, I’m sure some Christians did live in ISIS-controlled areas, but they don’t need to claim ‘refugee status’, they can just move somewhere else! I mean, I’m sure the escape from ISIS is harrowing, but they don’t need to flee the country, they can just move into Assad-controlled territory. (A lot of them also seem to be moving to Lebanon, but they can do that just by moving there, not being ‘refugees’.)

With regard to the conspiracy theory that Trump and the far right (But I repeat myself) put out that Obama is somehow causing this instead…that cannot possibly be true, as the UN (And various NGOs) are actually in charge of refugees and processing them first, and they says there are almost no Syrian Christian refugee applications. So this can’t possibly be any conspiracy of Obama’s State Department…if it’s a conspiracy, it’s a conspiracy of the UN. Which raises two points:

a) Why is the UN only doing it to Syria? Because the Sudan has tons and tons of Christian refugees, and they’re making it through fine.

b) How exactly can the Trump administration ‘prioritize’ Christians if there’s a UN/NGO conspiracy not to pass them along to the US (or anyone else) anyway? I mean, if this was actually true, the solution is not to ‘prioritize’ refugee applications we aren’t being handed anyway, the UN needs to stop requiring applicator to have UN or NGO referrals in the first place!

And, of course, this conspiracy doesn’t make any sense as several of the NGOs working with the UN are, in fact, Christian organizations, and even more non-refugee aid organizations are Christian that would see the problem even if not involved, and if there actually were a notable amount of Christians being specifically ignored as refugees we would have heard screams of outrage from them (Much like we are hearing screams of outrage when we cut refugee admittance, and how they have been screaming for decades that the refugee system is operating vastly below the capacity it needs to operated.) instead of the only ‘evidence’ of this being statistics. But, that’s using my fancy-pants ‘logic’.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

Obama’s state department spokesman explained why we don’t take Christian refugees from Iraq and Syria, at some length.

Erm, we do take Christian refugees from Iraq. A I mentioned, over 15% of the refugees from Iraq are Christian…which is a bit astonishing from a country that is only 0.8% Christian.

A competent administration (which Obama’s was not) would have reached out to the places that were taking in Christian refugees, which were Christian churches, and hand out refugee applications there.

An even more incompetent administration, meanwhile, would propose setting up ‘prioritization’ of Muslims…in a system that you are claiming does not allow any Muslims in it.

Good thinking!

But Obama didn’t want to accept Christian refugees, so we didn’t do that.

He doesn’t want any Christian refugees, except for the vast amount of refugees we accept from the Congo Which is the largest source of refugees, and 93% of them are Christian.

The State Department’s second line of argument is that none of the Christians qualify as refugees because they’re not being victimized by a government. That’s true, as long as you don’t count the caliphate as a government, and as long as you don’t think people can be refugees because they’re fleeing from ISIS, al Qaeda, al Nusra, or any of the many Muslim militias who behead Christians.

There are basically three areas of Syria:

1) The ‘normal’ parts of Syria (Normal in the system that there are not bands of thugs roaming the streets murdering people.). This area include all the large Christian areas. Refugees…do not come from here.

2) The rebel-strong areas, places Assad is bombing, and occasionally, chemical gassing. People in those ares can claim refugee status, as they are being attacked based on their political beliefs. These areas do not have a lot of Christians in them, or a lot of minority religions in general.

This is where the vast majority of Syrian refugees are coming from. They are Muslim, but they are not fleeing anything because they are Muslim…they are fleeing because they live in areas that rebels are based, and Assad doesn’t particularly mind killing innocent bystanders, as we have seen.

3) The ISIS-controlled areas. This area is a war zone with quasi-government borders, and people generally just get killed by ISIS if they are not happy. They cannot walk out and claim refugee status, not because they would not be granted it, but because they cannot walk out!

Of course, there are always ways to sneak cross such a large border, but the people who do eventually escape would be people who publicly were Sunni Muslim so didn’t get killed at first, but felt threatened that ISIS would eventually take issue with ‘how good a Sunni Muslim’ they were. Everyone else, all the Christians, Shias, and any other non-Sunni Muslims, probably just got shot in the street immediately when ISIS took over. Corpses cannot claim refugee status.

What is actually happening is, in advance of ISIS, Christians anywhere near them are packing up and flying to Lebanon, or moving to the Christian areas. Same with other religious minorities. Muslims might be willing to risk it .vs giving up all their stuff…no one else is.

You are asserting that the State Department is, instead, saying that these people are showing up, but it is denying them refugee status. Please produce evidence of the State Department saying this. 56 Christians actually sounds about right of ‘The US’s share of Christians who got trapped, managed to hide their status, and eventually sneak out’.

By checking the stats published by the Department of State, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, Office of Admissions – Refugee Processing Center, that maintains a wildly detailed religious database.

Hey, fun fact….that data actually proves the UN is gathering it, as I said.

Howso? Because they spell it ‘Moslem’. And ‘Suni’.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

You must have Christianity confused with Zoroastrianism, because there are a heck of lot more Iraqi Christians than that. Tariq Aziz was Christian. It’s the third most common religion there, and even the far less numerous Yazidis make up 3% of the population.

Dude: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Iraq

The Christian population massively dropped in Iraq since 2003, thanks to the invasion, losing about 2/3rds of them due to fleeing. And the country never stabilized enough for them to want to move back before ISIS showed up.

Current estimates put the Christian population at under 500,000, which, is indeed about 0.8% of the population. And almost all the ones remaining have ended up under the protection of the Kurds and have absolutely no reason to flee further.

So, there were plenty of Iraqi Christian refugees, they just already happened. They’ve been moving out of Iraq or into Kurdistan since 2004 or so!

Basically, 99% of Iraqi Christians were either already a refugee and now is living somewhere in America or Australia or something…or they’re an ‘internally displaced person’ in Kurdistan, so none of them are going to show up as new refugees.

Iraqi non-Kurdish religions have literally run out of Christians to persecute.

Cubans don’t go through the UN to get here. In fact, very very few refugees go through the UN to get here.

Pssst…those people who show up on the shore in Florida? They are not refugees…they are asylum seekers. That is not the same thing.

Refugees are people who are approved in advance to come to this country. All refugees show up with paperwork…and they have an organization here to meet them, and a house to live in, and someone to teach them how to fit into this country, and some sort of way they can earn money.

Anyone else? Not a refugee.

The total amount of people from Cuban who immigrated to the US in 2016 were 56,406.

The grand total of Cuban refugees from Cuba in that time people were…432.

And contacting UNHCR is basically way you can become a refugee.

Basically, the way it works is, before the US will even talk to you, there has to be determination that you are, in fact, a refugee, which means they (and everyone else) will point you at the UNHCR, who will say ‘You are now officially a refugee.’ (There are also some NGOs that basically work for the UNHCR that can certify that instead. ) At which point they can talk to different places and try to find someone willing to take them.

I have found exactly two ways to skip the UN or their NGOs. The first is when a blanket determination is issued by the president that ‘Everyone who is fleeing X shall be considered a refugee’, and refugee can then skip the UNHCR if they can produce some evidence they qualify. I can’t seem to find this ever happening, just people talking about how it ‘can’ happen.

Also, apparently, US ambassadors can refer people to the US as refugees personally. Note this different from someone showing up at the embassy of the country that is persecuting them and claiming asylum there because they’re now ‘in the US’. To be a refugee would require someone fleeing to another country (Not the US) and somehow getting the ambassador from the US to that second country to authorize their processing.

Neither of those hypothetical exceptions seem to ever happen. And they would present some weird problems considering that the UN is still normally involved in the process even after the US starts working with the refugees, which means they’d still sorta have to go through the UN anyway or wouldn’t get some help.

So, yes, in reality, all refugees are first processed by the UN.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

Then why is their religion tracked by the US State Department Refugee program?

Did you miss the part where I said it isn’t?

Here is where they keep their stats:
https://www.state.gov/j/prm/releases/statistics/

Follow that link. Click Reports. Look at Cuba refugees in 2016. 432 of them.

You can show up here and ask for asylum, and if we grant it you become a refugee. Russian athletes used to do this all the time. Cuban athletes still do.

*sigh*

The only site that *I* have found, because you seem completely unable to provide any links at all, are entirely listing refugees who come here via the refugee programs, which means they actually filled out UN paperwork, which means the US government didn’t ask their religion.

I have not found anywhere that lists people who have show up and asked for asylum.

Moreover, all this is completely idiotic. As I said at the very start of all this, while I don’t think the US government is the entity asking what religion they are, (And the organization publishing that info is actually a quasi-non-profit operated by State) that is completely irrelevant to my point anyway.

The US government asking that of refugees is not a violation of anyone’s right except refugees, and they don’t have rights before they get here

What I have asserting that the US government questioning someone’s statement about what religion they say they are (Even someone with no rights) is a violation of the rights of other people in that religion.

If it just asks those people and believes them, it is not any sort of issue, anymore than it is an issue to ask what religion people are on the census and just publish those results. (Although Americans have a right not to answer that…as do, I suspect, refugees.)

We admit a lot of Iraqis on the Special Immigrant Visa, as refugees, with no UN involvement at all. That’s how the military gets their Iraqi translators here.

People on Special Immigrant Visa are not refugees, and I don’t know why you think they are.

Refugees, weirdly, do not seem to have any sort of visas in the US. They instead have refugee papers..or maybe those count as a visa (A visa is just government-issued permission to enter the country, and that is government-issued permission.), but it doesn’t seem to be any of the standard visas issued, unlike ‘Special Immigrant Visas’, which are.

Asylum seekers do not need visas, already being in the country. Or at least at the entrance to the country, where if they are allowed in, they presumable would be required to enter immediately, so don’t need paperwork to allow them to enter later.

The first criteria listed by the US government is religion.

No it’s not.

The first criteria listed by the US government is ‘a well-founded fear of persecution based on religion’.

That’s because our government can and does admit or not admit people on the basis of religion.

I can’t even imagine how you still think that is how it works.

The US government admits people because those people will be persecuted based on religion. It does not admit them ‘based on religion’, it is entirely determined by whether or not they will be persecuted. (Well, whether or not their belief they will be persecuted is ‘well-founded’. Refugees don’t have to literally prove something will happen in the future.)

That’s not just the US government, that’s literally the entire premise of refugees. It is entirely based on possibility of persecution for five specific things.

The law, and by the law I mean both US law and international law because the US basically developed the international law so it exactly matches, both make a very clear point that the actual status of those five things is irrelevant. If someone is being persecuted ‘because they are a Christian’ even though they are actually a Muslim, they are still entirely eligible for refugee status.

This is not even slightly up for debate. That is how refugee law is entirely structured and it makes deliberate points of saying that.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

Because the State Department says so. According to them, about 20% of refugees come through other channels, not the UN, and according to the State Department, religion is one of the criterion. Also, according to the US government, the religious vetting is extensive, even digging down into what church, mosque, or synagogue people attended, who ran it, and how often the attended, because religion is extremely important.

Please cite the State Department saying this.

But given the two inch federal rule book on firearms, on which the government cannot infringe, Trump could have required all US Muslims to start every prayer service with a dedication to Jesus Christ, the Lord and Savior, with a bow no less than 3.5 inches from the floor, but not repeated faster than 10 bows per minute, while not wearing a robe carrying any Islamic symbol, and with fleet splayed outwards, with exceptions for people with less than two intact legs.

If you think this, you have no idea of any of the court rulings on the first amendment in this country and it is completely pointless to talk to you.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

So you cannot explain why you think that people on Special Immigrant Visas are refugees. Got it.

And you keep ignoring any distinctions I have made about what the US government can or cannot do under the law.

So here’s the summary, and I’m done:

1) The US government cannot demand that Americans identity themselves by religion, or the government assign people religion, or do anything to people based on those assignments. (People can assert religious beliefs under the law as part of their civil rights, and if they do so the courts will check those ‘beliefs’, but the courts will still remain silent on what religion they are or if the religion truly espouses those beliefs.)

The government can also ask for that information and have it collected voluntary. It can’t require that information or argue with it.

2) The US government can possibly demand that non-Americans that want things from the government (Such as a visa) tell it their religion. I actually don’t think it requires it, and I’d like to see evidence that the government rejects applications where they refuse to tell, but whatever.

What the government can’t do is argue with those statement. It cannot say ‘You put down Christian, but you said you regularly attend a mosque and pray to Allah and follow the five pillars of Islam, so we’re asserting you are a Muslim.’

Note this is different than asserting that applicants have lied about their mosque attendance or their beliefs, which the government can. The government can say ‘You claim to attend this Christian church, but have actually attended this mosque’. That is perfectly fine.

It can even demand people tell them what mosques they attend, or even delve into their religious beliefs. It couldn’t do that to Americans (At least not without some sort of suspicion of a crime), but it can do that to non-Americans.

What I am asserting is that the US government cannot forcibly name their religion, or claim they have mislabeled it. Even for non-Americans.

I say that they can’t do it based on the first amendment straight up, based on the ‘respecting an establishment of religion’, but if you do not find that palatable, be aware that it’s still almost certainly a violation of the first amendment indirectly, because it would harm Americans’ freedom of religion if the US government started trying to define what is, and isn’t, the correct beliefs and behaviors of a specific religion, even if it only applies those rules to non-Americans.

3) Because the government cannot forcibly name anyone’s religion, or argue with people about what religion they ‘truly’ are, any ‘religion-based determinations’ are completely fucking stupid as a matter of law.

4) The US government can interact with faith-based organizations within the US as long as it does it in a strictly neutral manner, and those organizations do not promote their faith on the taxpayer dime. They can do the same with organizations outside the US.

5) The US government mostly can run around having conversations with religious leaders however it wants, inside and outside the US. It sometimes gets a little too religious and some atheist organization sues to be included, and they usually are, but in general the US can talk to whoever it wants, for whatever reason it wants…it’s the ‘doing things’ that it’s restricted from.

6) The government also cannot demand people pray in certain ways, an idea so idiotic I can’t understand how you think it.

And there. I am done unless you have something to say about one of those things. Please write the number of which you are disagreeing with.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

Additionally, if Iraqis on the Special Visa program weren’t refugees, why would they freak out about Trump’s first EO?

Because the EO was written by a moronic gibbon who set it up in such a way that it could stop people who has already been issued a Visa from entering the country, which was what the clusterfuck at the airport was over.

If there were Iraqis who had Special Immigrant Visas trying to enter the country that weekend, they were blocked, not because they were refugees, but because Trump is a complete moron who doesn’t know how any of this works.

There was 100% agreement that such interpreters were refugees being processed by the State Department.

Oh good grief. That article actually pretty clearly explains what is going on if you read between the lines.

As I have said before, refugees do not appear to have visas, per se. They have their refugee paperwork, which acts like a visa, or perhaps you can argue it really is a visa (A visa is just permission to enter the country), but that’s unrelated to the Special Immigrant Visas being issued to Iraqi interpreters.

Those people are gaining entry under the immigration system, not the refugee system. They are not met with the local NGOs and provided housing and given a way to find jobs, instead, the US government just gives them money.

You want to assert that morally they are refugees, go ahead. But they are not legally.

Since 2014 , since the US has shut down the Special Immigrant Visa(Actually possibly starting before that), it appears that there is a refugee waiver called ‘Direct Access’ for Iraqis who did work with the US have to skip the UN refugee certification. They can apply directly. Those guys are refugees. (And that is why, specifically, that Trump removed Iraq from the list of countries we won’t accept refugees from.)

None of this is actually important. I was just saying that SIVs are not anything to do with refugees.

The US government can and does demand that immigrants or refugees answer the question “what is your religion?” They can refuse to answer, and they can say they don’t know, or are atheist. If their religion is irrelevant to their application and status, we can accept that refusal, and that goes into the statistics, too. There is no category for “did not ask.” And if they’re applying for refugee status based on being persecuted because of their religion, and they won’t answer questions about their religion, then it’s “application denied.” A reason for entry must be deemed valid.

You are sooooo close to being right.

If they are being persecuted because of their religion, they do not have to state what religion they are…but they do have to explain why people are persecuting them.

The easiest way for them to do it is to just say ‘Because my religion is X and they do not like X’. That is probably how most people approach the issue, especially considering the culture they are from, where they are officially divided up by religion by the government.

But they could says ‘They are persecuting me because they believe I am Christian’, and then, if asked if they are Christian or not, say they don’t want to answer that.

Or even ‘They are persecuting me because they believe I am not a Sunni Muslim’, and they could claim to be a Sunni Muslim also. Or refuse to answer their religion.

Both of those are entirely valid answers and the US cannot bar people from being a refugee just because they say they are being persecuted for being one religion, but then go on to say they are ‘actually’ another religion, or then refuse to state their religion.

Refugees just need to produce evidence (To whatever evidence level the process requires), that the people persecuting think there is have some religious disagreement, with them. The fastest say to do that is, obviously, just for them to state they are, in fact, that other religion that the persecutors think they are, and that is probably what happens 99% of the time…but they do not have to do that.

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And this isn’t some weird situation where I’m claiming the first amendment restricts the US government from making determination based on certain questions in refugee process. It would, but those questions aren’t supposed to be determinate, because this is how the refugee process works everywhere, because we designed it. The entire concept of refugees under international law is from the US. Based partially on, as you said, our guilt over turning away Jewish refugees in WWII…which is exactly why we don’t try to determine the actual religion of people.

Because hypothetically sending outspokenly atheists of Jewish heritage, or Jews who had converted to Christianity but were not ‘believed’ by the Nazis, back to die just because they refused to list their religion as ‘Jewish’ would have been really stupid.Report

DavidTC in reply to Koz says:

That’s entirely possible, maybe even most likely, but I think we have to recognize that there’s at least some chance that Trumps EO’s will be upheld in toto.

It is completely impossible for the courts to do that, because Trump dropped his original executive order and did not try to defend it in court. What is in court now is his second executive order.

And this isn’t really to you, Koz, you’ve barely said anything on this….but I really wish everyone (A lot of people on the right and even some confused people on the left) would stop thinking this is a chance for Trump to ‘prevail’ because they keep confusing the two orders. Trump already lost pretty badly, having entire things he was trying to do wacked down so hard he didn’t even try to defend them, and is now on his second try.

I mean, I already made a little list and everything up there to show people, and yet, everyone seems to think we’re talking about ‘Trump’s travel ban’. To recap for people, here is what has been slapped down, and why: Applying it to green card holders. (Basic constitutional reasons.) Making exception for members of minority religions. (Religious determination cannot be made by government) Applying it to current visa holders. (Basic rule of law and functioning of the government!!) Restricting immigration by country (Control of immigration is not a power delegated to the president by Congress, and also basing it on country of origin is currently barred by law.)

All those, challenged in court, had some court stays based on them…and were removed from the new ban. In fact, the green card thing was so obviously unconstitutional it was sorta removed from the old one!

What Trump has left, in his new order, is some screwing around with the refugee program and the tourist visa program, both of which the president could normally do without any quibble at all! So now the test is if the courts decide his yammering about ‘Muslim bans’ as a candidate thinks that impacts what he can do in that regard.

So those two things probably will survive, as basically the only other option would strip him of some delegated power and that’s a weird place to be. But it’s not any sort of ‘victory’, it’s Trump reducing his executive order until it was eventually contained only probably constitutional things, and…barely getting that through (If he even does) because he announced way too clearly, in front of everyone, he was doing those things for constitutionally impermissible reasons!

(And he was always able to tell the State Department how to vet visas, I don’t think anyone even challenged that in court, although saying the government should EXTREME VET them sounds like he wants people to be vetted by Rob Liefeld comic characters.)

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Seriously, people on the right asserting Trump might ‘win’ in the end…is this how desperate you are to claim his failure is a victory? If he gets shot down here, can he issue a third attempt asserting ‘People who openly confess to being members of terrorist organizations to Border Patrol are barred from entry!’, call that his ‘travel ban’, and you guys will herald that passing through the courts unchallenged with ‘At long last, a victory for Trump’s travel ban!’? Trump can basically just keep rewriting an executive order until eventually he manages to not write an unconstitutional one, and that retroactively makes all the protests and court decisions against his previous poorly implemented, and partially unconstitutional, executive orders stupid?Report

DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

Trump stakes out extreme positions, gathers up everyone who believes anything like that, and then slowly walks back that position until there’s a “compromise” that is still a lot better than what he originally started with, which is typically nothing.

You’re acting like he’s actually ‘doing’ that, instead of just that being the inevitable result of his behavior. I think there’s plenty of evidence that isn’t any sort of ‘plan’ on his part just from how he reacts to things.

Part of the problem with this theory is that the ban was so poorly implemented that the courts literally placed it on hold for that, which everyone forgets. The original stay wasn’t about ‘Can the president block people from coming from certain countries?’, it was about ‘Can the president remove people from the country who have already arrived at airports holding legal permission to enter the country?’.

And the court, in a really obvious decision that should startle no one who understand how the rule of law works, said, ‘Uh, no, the government cannot decide to randomly not honor permission slips to enter the country that it has just issued and people spent a lot of time and effort getting from the government, and time and effort flying here to use them. That is incredibly stupid and harmful, it is justified by nothing, and no, we won’t allow it.’

I.e., if this was a strategy, it was a really really really stupid one. If he had just ordered State to stop issuing all visas to people from those countries moving forward, he still would have technically been in violation of immigration law, but it wouldn’t have resulted in the epic nonsense we got at the airports.

And if he’d just limited it to things that were constitutional if done for permissible reasons (Just tourist and refugees.), he might have gotten still sued for talking about a ‘Muslim ban’ on the grounds that was secretly what he was doing…but there probably would have been no stay, and the courts would probably be a lot happier with him.

So, as a strategy, it was completely disastrous. He would have been much better running this stuff by his own government, having actual knowledgeable people look at it, and finding out what he can and cannot do, and just doing that. He’s accomplished nothing the way he did it, because, uh, he’s not actually ‘negotiating’ with anyone…he’s being judged by courts! And the best case scenario is that they come to whatever decision they would have come to anyway….and worst case all this screwing around with threatening green card holders and already-issued visas pisses off the court so badly that they judge his motives to be deliberate harm to Muslims, so that they come to a worse judgement for him than they otherwise would have!

All he has actually done is a) had a bunch of really public failures, and b) possibly harmed his own case for the possible legal stuff he wanted to do. (Which, let’s recall, is only in court anyway because he idiotically doesn’t know how to talk in dogwhistles and constantly talked about banning Muslims from entering the country!)

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But, anyway, let’s pretend this is a strategy. He tries as much as possible, and then back off. Okay. Is it a strategy we should be okay with?

As a strategy, this would seem to be be all well and good for a politician to do, purposefully, as part of the legislative process. Ask for a lot, settle for less. At some point his reputation for settling for less will probably catch up with him, so I’m not sure how good this will work, but it seems ethically fine as a strategy.

But is rather problematic when done via executive order, by putting them into effect and waiting for the court to strike down the unconstitutional parts! The ‘negotiate for what is allowed’ is okay when it happens within the legislative process, it’s not okay when that works by ‘trying to deny constitutional rights to people’. The system is ‘checks and balances’, not ‘the executive tries to do whatever crazy blatantly unconstitutional thing it wants and the courts have to constantly block that’.

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Of course, that’s pretending it’s a strategy. I don’t think it is. And I know I just argued it wasn’t a strategy by saying it was a very stupid one, but the actual reason I don’t think that is a strategy is that I do not think Trump is capable strategic thinking, or he wouldn’t constantly screw himself over with his own tweets. Trump is a bundle of random impulsive that has trouble seeing past the current person talking to him.

So he goes from no loaf of bread, to arguing that he deserves your entire loaf, to settling for only some.

TRUMP WILL PRETEND HE NEEDS WAY MORE FOOD THAN REALLY NEED, DESERVES ALL OTHER FOOD. PEOPLE WILL OFFER HIM ONLY SOME OF THEIR FOOD TO SHUT TRUMP UP. TRUMP WILL GET MORE FOOD THAN OTHER CAVEMEN WHO DID NOT PRETEND.

So less a strategy than some sort of animal cunning. Something a particular bright lemur would do.Report

DavidTC in reply to DavidTC says:

And, incidentally, my point was not that Trump’s ‘travel ban’ was unconstitutional.

My point was that parts of it were clearly unconstitutional, which allowed the entire thing to get halted by the courts, because Trump is a complete and total incompetent moron who didn’t bother to run it past anyone with the vaguest knowledge of ‘What rights do green card holders have?’ and ‘Does it make any sense at all to try to vet people who have already been issued visas?’ and ‘Does it make sense to vet people by the Border Patrol, which has no access to classified information, no knowledge of how terrorist ties work, and doesn’t do that sort of thing at all?'(1) and ‘How is the US government supposed to determine if someone is a member of a ‘minority religion’ in their home country, considering we have no way to officially determine what religion someone is, and trying to set that up sort sounds blatantly unconstitutional?’.

(Along with the other problems, like, oh, not telling the State department it needed to stop issuing visas that the US government wasn’t going to honor, which is obviously a behavior that is really going to piss the courts off.)

If Trump had just restricted allowing in new refugees, and stopped issuing new travel visas to people in certain countries, and increased vetting on immigration visas, if he had just done those probably legal parts of his order…well, he might be in court still based on his campaign comments, but there probably wouldn’t have been the complete pushback from the courts, which screamed in horror at his obvious moronic bill and the results it was having and just shut the entire thing down, instead of carefully trying to separate out the hypothetically legal parts from the blatantly illegal parts.

1) Seriously, this is perhaps the crowning example of how stupid the order was: Trump literally use the wrong government agency for this. Having the Border Patrol ‘vet’ immigrants for ties to terrorism is just completely nonsensical. They don’t have any knowledge of that! The State department works with the CIA (As it does in many ways.) and knows that sort of stuff. The Border Patrol are the damn ticket takers of America. They make sure you have a ticket, your name and ID matches what is on the ticket, and that you aren’t bringing in outside drinks.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

Again, the administration won 9-0 because he has the power to do what he did.

Yes, George, he won, if you completely ignore all the parts of his travel ban, like the immigration discrimination and green card blocking and religious discrimination and blocking people with exist visas, that the courts bitch-slapped entirely out of existence.

If you ignore all those parts, which he didn’t even try to defend, he ‘won’.

I mean, he ‘won’ in the sense that the Supreme Court has said ‘Parts of this, with modifications so they don’t adversely impact people, can go into effect while we look at the legality of the case’.

So, less ‘won’ and more ‘possibly has a defendable case in court’, I guess. Kinda weird definition of winning, especially since even if he wins there, he sorta already lost like two-thirds of what he was trying to do.

But it’s Trump’s Build-Your-Own-Reality game show now, and all he has to do is refine victory into ‘Some part of what I was trying to do, in the end, might be legal!’

*starts chanting to the rhythm of ‘We’re #1’* We’re not total failures! We’re not total failures! We’re not total failures! *gives two-handed hi-fives to everyone* WOOOOO!!Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

There is no religious discrimination in the ban. In fact, it doesn’t even mention any religion or include any religious terms.

It certainly did mention specific religions. It didn’t mention them by name, but it certainly singled specific religions out:

Sec. 5. b. …prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.

You think that’s constitutional merely because they don’t name that religion?

Let’s turn this around: Do you think it would be constitutional for the US government to say ‘People who are a member of a majority religion in each state shall be fined $1000 dollars.’?

No. It is obviously not constitutional. Likewise, the US deciding to give priority to someone on the basis of them being a member of a religion is equally unconstitutional, even if that religion is decided ‘statistically’.

In fact, the US deciding what ‘the religion of[an] individual is’ is, by itself, not constitutional. The US cannot decide what religion someone is or is not.

But you’re about to say ‘But being attacked due to being a member of a religion can already give someone refugee status’. No, it cannot.

Being attacked or oppressed by someone because the oppressor believes they hold certain religion beliefs is grounds for refugee status. Nothing requires the refugee seeker to actually hold those beliefs, or even actually be a member of the religion the oppressor thinks they are.

Unlike Trump’s stupidity, which just straight up says priority determined by what religion someone is, which is something the Federal government is constitutionally barred from making a judgement about what people might be, or basing any decisions off that.

As I have said repeatedly, if Trump wasn’t dumber than a sack of bricks, there were ways he could have gotten some of this through the courts.

With refugees, he could have said something like ‘We should prioritize people from those countries who face religious-based discrimination’ and gotten mostly what he wanted, although he would have probably gotten a few minority-sect Muslims also. (Which, frankly, he would have gotten anyway, because trying to figure out if different sects of Islam are the same ‘religion’ is one of those questions the courts would run screaming from, it’s utterly inappropriate for US courts to weigh in on that, and there is absolutely no statutory or case law on this topic because it is not something that is possibly within constitutional grounds.)

But he, and his people, are too dumb to understand the rules they operate in.

It does not block green card holders.

Homeland security, at first, said it did not block green card holders. The administration corrected them, repeatedly, and said that it did, and Homeland started saying that also.

Until everyone suddenly started saying it didn’t do that. Probably because everyone realized it was super unconstitutional. Except…they still kept doing it, even after asserting they weren’t!

‘Another Homeland Security official told CNN the green card holders who are returning to the US will still go through additional screening and national security checks upon landing. However, the government is trying to ease their entry back into the US. Unless they have a significant criminal history or links to terrorism, they will be allowed back in the country after going the check the official said.’ -http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/29/politics/donald-trump-travel-ban-green-card-dual-citizens/index.html

The US government cannot ban green card holders from entering the US because it thinks they have ‘significant criminal history or links to terrorism’. The US government cannot ban green card holders from entering the US at all. US green card holders have as much constitutional right to enter America as American citizens do. End of story. If the person has committed actual crimes, they can be arrested, but barring that, the US government cannot do anything.

The government also cannot subject them to ‘additional screening and national security checks’ in a weird discriminatory manner even if it then lets them all in! The government can’t pretend it has the right to violate someone’s constitutional rights…but that person got lucky and the government won’t this time.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

So, you’ve decided to just smoothly move from ‘The executive order didn’t discriminate on the basis of religion’ to ‘the executive order did discriminate on the basis of religion but that was totally legal’.

Alrighty.

This just in: It’s perfectly Constitutional for the US to bar entry on the basis of religion, nationality, or political beliefs. We’ve done it in the past. We even bar entry on the basis of diseases, and we have barred entry on the basis of IQ.

Pssst: The US government isn’t constitutionally barred from making laws respecting an establishment of county (Kinda illegal to have a State Department if so), or any particular political belief, or the existence of disease, or IQ. The US government can recognize all of those, and discriminate on all of those. (Although it is be somewhat difficult to discriminate based on political belief without actually discriminating based on political speech.)

The US government is barred from respecting an establishment of religion.

In the past we often would bar entry from regions that were considered backwards or prone to violence. We would even bar entry on the basis of race.

The US government is not barred from recognizing race. (In fact, it sorta has to, under the 15th amendment.)

People within the jurisdiction of the US have equal protection of the laws, which generally means that the law has to treat Americans of all race equally but it would, indeed, be perfectly constitutional to bar black people from entering the country. It would almost certainly be illegal under current law, but it would probably be constitutional.

The problem is that there is no ‘jurisdiction’ requirement for the first amendment.

‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…’.

It doesn’t say ‘People under the jurisdiction of the US blah blah’.

It says the US government cannot, in any manner whatsoever, base any laws at all off the idea that religions exist. No law can respect the fact that a religion has been established, aka, that it exists.

And before you get any ideas about the fact that an executive order is not a law, please note that Trump claimed he had the right to do that under a US law, and it was enforced by agencies created by US law.

All of it was perfectly Constitutional, because the Constitution gives wide latitude to the legislative and executive branches on determining who is allowed to come to America or become an American. The people born on the soil of the United States get to exercise their fundamental right to determine who they admit to their group.

First, the Constitution does not give ‘wide latitude’ to the executive about immigration. The Constitution literally gives the executive no power at all over immigration. The Legislature has all constitutional power there, the Executive just has whatever power Congress has delegated it.

Second, it’s not anything that might possibly be called ‘wide latitude’. One of the jobs of Congress, as listed, is ‘To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization…’.

That’s it. Uniform rules. That’s all it says. It has exactly as much ‘latitude’ there as it does to build post offices.

But perhaps more importantly is what is also in the constitution, and it’s later so it wins any hypothetical ‘latitude’: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…

That’s pretty much the end of the story. Congress is not allowed to make laws that acknowledge particular religions exist. It doesn’t matter if those religions are outside the US or inside.

By your arguments, it would have been unconstitutional to prioritize Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.

It would have unconstitutional. It would have been completely constitutional to prioritize Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany over, say, Buddhist refugees from Nazi Germany. It would have been entirely legal to prioritize refugees who were fleeing based on someone attacking them because that person didn’t like their religious beliefs, but not based on the specific religion of a person. (Although that makes little sense here…Nazis did not care what religion Jews were, or if they were entirely atheist.)

Just because it’s possible to come up with a situation where (you think) we get a better outcome if the constitution was violated does not make a violation constitutional.

Heck, the declaration of war against Japan would be unconstitutional because it disproportionately discriminated against followers of the Shinto religion, and thus could’ve been struck down by a district court in Hawaii.

My claim has nothing to do with ‘discrimination’ at all. (Also that’s not how discrimination works, but that’s moot here.)

I am not arguing that the US government cannot ‘discriminate’ against members of a religion. I mean, it generally wouldn’t be able to do that anyway under the equal protection clause, but as you point out, that only applies to US jurisdiction.

But there’s a more important reason it can’t do that with religion. A larger reason: The US government literally cannot observe what religion someone is. It is unseeable and unknowable to the US government. No determination can be made of their religion, and no part of the law can hinge off that determination.

That is what the first part of the first amendment says. ‘The religion that a person is’ is something literally cannot intersect with the government in any manner whatsoever. It has nothing to do with who has the religion, nothing to do with jurisdiction.

There’s no restriction on it because it is a blanket ban on religions existing as an concept within US law. The US congress cannot conceptually use ‘religion’ for anything. There is nothing about jurisdictions that is relevant there. They can’t conceptually exist for US citizens, they can’t for non-citizens, they can’t for fricking rabbits if we somehow find out they have religions.

And, yes, I’m sure you will find some random unconstitutional examples where ‘religion’ slipped in on the fringes of US law, but there’s a rather large difference between the US government asking people their religion on a voluntary census question and writing that information in a book somewhere, and the US government making a legal determination on someone’s religion to decide if they can or cannot do something.

Also note that recognizing the legal corporate person of ‘a church’ is not the same as recognizing a religion. (The peyote law exception is, weirdly, worded that way. You don’t have be a believer in a religion, or believe in anything at all…you just have to be a member of the Native American Church and have enough Native American ancestors. It’s membership in a private organization+race discrimination, not religious.)Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

The Bill of Rights is jurisdictional. They don’t apply to foreigners. If they did, everybody in England would have the right to keep and bear arms. The Saudi Arabian government wouldn’t be allowed to fund Mecca over a Christian church.

As I have just spent a lot of time pointing out to you, the Bill of Rights is not magically ‘only jurisdictional over Americans’.

The bill of rights has some very different ways of creating rights, and pretending they all create the same category of protected people is utterly wrong as a matter of law.

For example, the sixth amendment only applies to accused (of a crime) people. People who are not accused of crimes do not have the right to a lawyer. (Well, they don’t have that right under the 6th. They probably can claim ‘freedom of association’.)

The 3rd amendment appears to apply to houses, which is a bit surreal. It probably should be considered to apply to ‘owners of houses’, but even that is odd…you don’t seem to have any right to object to the US government quartering soldiers in peacetime in the house you are renting!

But that’s sorta minor technicalities. What isn’t minor is that there is absolutely no discussion about ‘jurisdiction’, except, weirdly, the 13th and the 18th. (No slavery, or booze, is allowed within the jurisdiction of the US. Glad we repealed the correct one of those.)

There are basically two sorts of amendments, groups of people that the bill of rights applies to, and neither of those groups has anything to do with US jurisdiction at all. (And later we got a bunch of amendments covering ‘US citizens’ and various rights to vote, but that’s not relevant here.)

The first group are the ones that say ‘the people’ shall have a right. That’s the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and kinda 9th and 10th. The Courts have, indeed, said those are American people. (Which includes green card holders, for the record. They are ‘US nationals’, just not citizens.)

The US government can violate those rules for non-Americans, and must follow them for all Americans, regardless of location. It’s nothing at all to do with ‘jurisdiction’. The CIA cannot, for example, wiretap Americans without a warrant just because they’re outside the US.

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The other part is the amendments that just flatly bar the government from doing things. Either by saying ‘the government cannot do this’ or saying ‘these shall not happen’, or ‘the inverse shall happen’. These Bill or Right amendments are the 1st, 7th, and 8th. (And the 6th and the 3rd also do this, but have other rules about who they apply to.)

Those things apply to non-Americans also. They apply even to people in the country illegally. Non-Americans cannot be subject to cruel and unusal punishment, they can’t denied access to a lawyer if they accused of a crime, they can’t have soldiers quartered in their houses in peacetime, etc.

Those bans apply in all circumstances, even outside the jurisdiction of the US.

If the US government is forbidden by constitution from doing something, it can’t do it anywhere. Likewise, if it required to do something, it has to do it everywhere.

Granted, some of them don’t make sense outside the US, the US government does not impose bail in other countries, so can hardly impose an excessive bail. But just because those rights don’t, in practice, have any effect, does not mean they don’t exist. If the US government somehow imposes a high bail on me while I’m in Germany, I can sue them. It’s just…they don’t have a way to do that.

The first amendment is one of this. The first amendment does not give ‘the people’ the right to freedom of religion, which would mean only the American people.

It forbids the government from respecting (Aka, acting with regard to) an establishment of religion. This is operative in all jurisdictions, to the extent it makes sense. It is also oeprative towards all human beings.

Courts often have to weigh religious interests against secular interests, and to do that they have to look at religious beliefs, from Mormon, to Amish, to Muslim, to Catholic, to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Trump’s order didn’t say anything about religious beliefs. It said something about members of religions, which is an altogether different thing. There are massive, insurmountable, constitutional problems in the US government deciding who is a member of what religion.

Now now we get to my fun hypotheticals:

An Iranian man shows up and says he’s a Christian. You know, he prays to Mecca several times a day, follow the teachings of Muhammad and the Seven pillars of Islam…You know, he does all those things Christians do. And thus a minority religion in Iran.

Please explain the process by which the US government could assert he is not a Christian. Please explain it without the government trying to legislative what are officially the beliefs of Christianity. (And then, for the record, please state what the Official Government-Authorized Beliefs of Christianity are.)

And then explain what you’re going to do to next Iranian in line, who claims he is a Muslym, a religion of which he is the only member. It is exactly like being a Muslim, except that he, as an article of faith, believes the Prophet Muhammad is exactly 5’11” and one quarter inches tall, whereas all those Muslim heretics remain silent on his exact height!

Let’s have fun figuring out if that makes it a different ‘religion’ or not, and let’s remind ourselves that we’ve have Protestant religion split over very trivial phrasings of beliefs, so it’s not a crazy idea.

But maybe we figure all that out. Maybe we, absurdly, allow the US government to set up religions trials, deciding who is and is not a member of what religion, making a complete mockery of what this country stands for. We have written down everything that makes someone a Muslim, and everything that makes them a Christian, as part of the legal system of the ‘United State of America’. (In quotes because that sure as hell isn’t the United States of America I am currently aware of.)

…and the next Iranian shows up and says that he’s actually a Unitarian. Yes, all his beliefs within Unitarianism all happen to align exactly with Islam, but that is, undisputably, an entirely valid set of beliefs to hold within the Unitarian religion. Which is he is a member of. He has no evidence he’s a member, but that’s because there are no such churches in Iran (It being such a minority religion) that he basically is worshiping all by himself.

And now we’re utterly screwed. I mean, this guy appears to be factually correct in every possible way. There is no possible way to distinguish him from from a Unitarian, and Unitarianism does not appear to be the majority religion in Iran.

And again, the 9th Circuit upheld an injunction that states that it would be perfectly Constitutional for Obama to have issued exactly the same executive order, it just wasn’t legal for Trump to do it because reasons.

No, the 9th circuit court specifically said the ban was illegal because it exceeded Trump’s statuary authority. (Because, incorrect assertions aside, all power to regulate immigration is in Congress, and the President just has whatever discretion they give him.)

We conclude that the President, in issuing the Executive Order, exceeded the scope of the authority delegated to him by Congress. In suspending the entry of more than 180 million nationals from six countries, suspending the entry of all refugees, and reducing the cap on the admission of refugees from 110,000 to 50,000 for the 2017 fiscal year, the President did not meet the essential precondition to exercising his delegated authority: The President must make a sufficient finding that the entry of these classes of people would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

Further, the Order runs afoul of other provisions of the INA that prohibit nationality-based discrimination and require the President to follow a specific process when setting the annual cap on the admission of refugees.

It’s the 4th circuit court that said there were illegal discriminatory motives.Report