Thanks Judge For The Review

The FBI and Hillary, Again

4/27/2017 - Judge Andrew Napolitano Townhall.com

Last weekend, The New York Times published a long piece about the effect the FBI had on the outcome of the 2016 presidential campaign. As we all know, Donald Trump won a comfortable victory in the Electoral College while falling about 3 million votes behind Hillary Clinton in the popular vote.

I believe that Clinton was a deeply flawed candidate who failed to energize the Democratic Party base and who failed to deliver to the electorate a principled reason to vote for her. Yet when the Times reporters asked her why she believes she lost the race, she gave several answers, the first of which was the involvement of the FBI. She may be right.

Here is the back story.

In 2015, a committee of the House of Representatives that was investigating the deaths of four Americans at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, learned that the State Department had no copies of any emails sent or received by Clinton during her four years as secretary of state. When committee investigators pursued this -- at the same time that attorneys involved with civil lawsuits brought against the State Department seeking the Clinton emails were pursuing it -- it was revealed that Clinton had used her own home servers for her emails and bypassed the State Department servers.

Because many of her emails obviously contained government secrets and because the removal of government secrets to any non-secure venue constitutes espionage, the House Select Committee on Benghazi sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, which passed it on to the FBI. A congressionally issued criminal referral means that some members of Congress who have seen some evidence think that some crime may have been committed. The DOJ is free to reject the referral, yet it accepted this one.

It directed the FBI to investigate the facts in the referral and to refer to the investigation as a "matter," not as a criminal investigation. The FBI cringed a bit, but Director James Comey followed orders and used the word "matter." This led to some agents mockingly referring to him as the director of the Federal Bureau of Matters. It would not be the last time agents mocked or derided him in the Clinton investigation.

He should not have referred to it by any name, because under DOJ and FBI regulations, the existence of an FBI investigation should not be revealed publicly unless and until it results in some public courtroom activity, such as the release of an indictment. These rules and procedures have been in place for generations to protect those never charged. Because of the role that the FBI has played in our law enforcement history -- articulated in books and movies and manifested in our culture -- many folks assume that if a person is being investigated by the FBI, she must have done something wrong.

In early July 2016, Clinton was personally interviewed in secret for about four hours by a team of FBI agents who had been working on her case for a year. During that interview, she professed great memory loss and blamed it on a head injury she said she had suffered in her Washington, D.C., home. Some of the agents who interrogated her disbelieved her testimony about the injury and, over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, asked Comey for permission to subpoena her medical records.

When Comey denied his agents the permission they sought, some of them attempted to obtain the records from the intelligence community. Because Clinton's medical records had been digitally recorded by her physicians and because the FBI agents knew that the National Security Agency has digital copies of all keystrokes on all computers used in the U.S. since 2005, they sought Clinton's records from their NSA colleagues. Lying to the FBI is a felony, and these agents believed they had just witnessed a series of lies.

When Comey learned what his creative agents were up to, he jumped the gun by holding a news conference on July 5, 2016, during which he announced that the FBI was recommending to the DOJ that it not seek Clinton's indictment because "no reasonable prosecutor" would take the case. He then did the unthinkable. He outlined all of the damning evidence of guilt that the FBI had amassed against her.

This double-edged sword -- we won't charge her, but we have much evidence of her guilt -- was unprecedented and unheard of in the midst of a presidential election campaign. Both Republicans and Democrats found some joy in Comey's words. Yet his many agents who believed that Clinton was guilty of both espionage and lying were furious -- furious that Comey had revealed so much, furious that he had demeaned their work, furious that he had stopped an investigation before it was completed.

While all this was going on, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clinton's closest aide, Huma Abedin, was being investigated for using a computer to send sexually explicit materials to a minor. When the FBI asked for his computer -- he had shared it with his wife -- he surrendered it. When FBI agents examined the Weiner/Abedin laptop, they found about 650,000 stored emails, many from Clinton to Abedin, that they thought they had not seen before.

Rather than silently examine the laptop, Comey again violated DOJ and FBI regulations by announcing publicly the discovery of the laptop and revealing that his team suspected that it contained hundreds of thousands of Clinton emails; and he announced the reopening of the Clinton investigation. This announcement was made two weeks before Election Day and was greeted by the Trump campaign with great glee. A week later, Comey announced that the laptop was fruitless, and the investigation was closed, again.

At about the same time that the House Benghazi Committee sent its criminal referral to the DOJ, American and British intelligence became interested in a potential connection between the Trump presidential campaign and intelligence agents of the Russian government. This interest resulted in the now infamous year-plus-long electronic surveillance of Trump and many of his associates and colleagues. This also produced a criminal referral from the intelligence community to the DOJ, which sent it to the FBI.

Yet this referral and the existence of this investigation was kept -- quite properly -- from the press and the public. When Comey was asked about it, he -- quite properly -- declined to answer. When he was asked under oath whether he knew of any surveillance of Trump before Trump became president, Comey denied that he knew of it.

What was going on with the FBI?

How could Comey justify the public revelation of a criminal investigation and a summary of evidence of guilt about one candidate for president and remain silent about the existence of a criminal investigation of the campaign of another? How could he deny knowledge of surveillance that was well-known in the intelligence community, even among his own agents? Why would the FBI director inject his agents, who have prided themselves on professional political neutrality, into a bitterly contested campaign having been warned it might affect the outcome? Why did he reject the law's just commands of silence in favor of putting his thumb on political scales?

I don't know the answers to those questions. But the American public, and Hillary Clinton, is entitled to them.

Out of Chaos - Government Control

Apocalyptic liberalism

Victor David Hanson Washingtontimes.com

Shortly after the 2008 election, President Obama’s soon-to-be chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, infamously declared, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

He elaborated: “What I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

Disasters, such as the September 2008 financial crisis, were thus seen as opportunities. Out of the chaos, a shell-shocked public might at last be ready to accept more state regulation of the economy and far greater deficit spending. Indeed, the national debt doubled in the eight years following the 2008 crisis.

During the 2008 campaign, gas prices at one point averaged over $4 a gallon. Then-candidate Barack Obama reacted by pushing a green agenda — as if the cash-strapped but skeptical public could be pushed into alternative energy agendas.

Mr. Obama mocked then-Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s prescient advice to “drill, baby, drill” — as if Mrs. Palin’s endorsement of new technologies such as fracking and horizontal drilling could never ensure consumers plentiful fuel.

Instead, in September 2008, Steven Chu, who would go on to become Mr. Obama’s secretary of energy, told The Wall Street Journal, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

In other words, if gas prices were to reach $9 or $10 a gallon, angry Americans would at last be forced to seek alternatives to their gas-powered cars, such as taking the bus or using even higher-priced alternative fuels.

When up for re-election in 2012, Mr. Obama doubled down on his belief that gas was destined to get costlier: “And you know we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.”

Yet even as Mr. Obama spoke, U.S. frackers were upping the supply and reducing the cost of gas — despite efforts by the Obama administration to deny new oil drilling permits on federal lands.

U.S oil production roughly doubled from 2008 to 2015. And by 2017, the old bogeyman of “peak oil” production had been put to rest, as the United States became nearly self-sufficient in fossil fuel production.

Viewing the world in apocalyptic terms was also useful during the California drought.

In March 2016, even as the four-year drought was over and California precipitation had returned to normal, Gov. Jerry Brown was still harping on the connection between “climate change” and near-permanent drought.

“We are running out of time because it’s not raining,” Mr. Brown melodramatically warned. “This is a serious matter we’re experiencing in California, as kind of a foretaste.”

Foretaste to what, exactly?

In 2017, it rained and snowed even more than it had during a normal year of precipitation in 2016.

Currently, a drenched California’s challenge is not theoretical global warming, but the more mundane issue of long-neglected dam maintenance that threatens to undermine overfull reservoirs.

Mr. Brown had seen the drought as a means of achieving the aim of regimenting Californians to readjust their lifestyles in ways deemed environmentally correct. The state refused to begin work on new reservoirs, aqueducts and canals to be ready for the inevitable end of the drought, even though in some 120 years of accurate record keeping, California had likely never experienced more than a four-year continuous drought.

And it did not this time around, either.

Instead, state officials saw the drought as useful to implement permanent water rationing, to idle farm acreage, and to divert irrigation water to environmental agendas.

Well before this year’s full spring snowmelt, more than 50 million acre-feet of water has already cascaded out to sea (“liberated,” in green terms). The lost fresh water was greater than the capacity of all existing (and now nearly full) man-made reservoirs in the state, and its loss will make it harder to deal with the next inevitable drought.

No matter: Progressive narratives insisted that man-caused carbon releases prompted not only record heat and drought, but within a few subsequent months also record coolness and precipitation.

And in “Alice in Wonderland” fashion, just as drilling was supposedly no cure for oil shortages, building reservoirs was no remedy for water scarcity.

In the same manner, neglecting the maintenance and building of roads in California created a transportation crisis. Until recently, the preferred solution to the state’s road mayhem and gridlock wasn’t more freeway construction but instead high-speed rail — as if substandard streets and highways would force millions of frustrated drivers to use expensive state-owned mass transit.

These days, shortages of credit, water, oil or adequate roads are no longer seen as age-old challenges to a tragic human existence. Instead of overcoming them with courage, ingenuity, technology and scientific breakthroughs, they are seen as existential “teachable moments.”

In other words, crises are not all bad — if they lead the public to more progressive government.

Serious Suggestions to Consider

The Immigration Juxtaposition Game

3/23/2017 - David Levin Townhall.com

The current human condition is a curious one. And I have to confess, I don’t actually understand our thinking a lot of the time. Certainly, not when it comes to politics. Like him or not, Donald Trump was elected largely because he vowed to make America great again and keep us safe. Two pretty good ideas in my book. Personally, I want as much of great and safe as I can get. I’m sure you do too.

But with Trump’s newest immigration ban, it seems progressives would actually prefer that we’re weak and at risk instead of great and safe. Frankly, I always thought America’s greatness was the very reason why everyone was trying so hard to come here to begin with. I always thought our greatness laid in our strength and resolve. 

But now, especially if you’re a Democrat, all things Trump are bad. Even great and safe. I’m pretty sure if it were left to Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the slogan “Make America Great Again” would be reclassified as hate speech if spoken in public or graffitied on a wall somewhere.

So earlier this week, in keeping with his campaign pledge to keep the country safe, the president’s latest iteration of his immigration ban hit the airwaves. And as fast as you can say “Obama in 2020”, two more politically motivated federal judges blocked it. Apparently, they felt the ban focused unfairly on Muslims simply because they were Muslims. But that’s wrong. Trump’s ban is not focused on all Muslims. Just those who use their religion as a rationale for terror and killing. And its goal is to stop them from ever entering the country. Fine with me.

In 2015, 28,328 people were killed in terrorist attacks worldwide. These attacks were all carried out by Islamic terrorists. There were also over 12,000 terrorist-related kidnappings and hostage incidents as well. Should governments not look to protect their citizens from this? Don’t you want to be safe in your own country? Frankly, it’s their primary job. And here in the U.S., that’s just what Trump is doing.

So, the president’s immigration agenda is back in the news once again. And the liberal outrage machine has turned the volume all the way up. It should be noted, however, that President Obama also issued a travel ban against many of the same countries when he was in office. That one, however, was somehow acceptable to the left. But now, with Trump in the White House, everyone is getting in the act. Lawmakers, the media, and professional protesters who are essentially against everything are all raging against Trump. Progressives are forcing the national conversation on immigration back into the limelight. In the media, the immigration ban has gotten so twisted and unrecognizable that it’s nearly impossible to determine what’s actually true and what isn’t, what was intended and what wasn’t. 

Of course, the Democrats opening move is the usual assortment of flaming labels and acidic tags that they affix to anyone or anything with an opposing view. First, they called it a Muslim ban. Then, identity politics. After that, racist, xenophobic, prejudiced, bigoted, and heartless. To Schumer, Pelosi & Co., Trump is a just a bloated manifestation of Satan in a $10,000 Brioni suit. And they see his latest executive order on immigration as the devil’s work.

But maybe we should try to look at it a little differently for a minute. Maybe we should change some of the words and players. What would happen if we swapped the word Muslim for the word lawyer in Trump’s travel ban? Or banker. Maybe architect or engineer. What if accountants were the terrorists beheading those poor hostages in the orange jumpsuits? Or if rogue psychiatrists were behind all the lone wolf attacks in the U.S. and France. Imagine if it were a bunch of grey-suited actuaries that attacked the World Trade center in 2001. Or if the ranks of ISIS were filled with angry dentists instead of religious zealots.  

And what if Trump’s immigration ban didn’t actually include any Muslim countries on the list at all? Instead, it was western countries producing the majority of the world’s terrorists. What if countries like Germany and France, the UK, and Switzerland were producing a new breed of non-religious terrorist? A secular terrorist. An agnostic terrorist. Killer lawyers from Italy. Bomb-making engineers from Australia? Machete wielding investment bankers from Sweden. Now, people who work at investment banks like Morgan Stanley or big law firms like Baker & McKenzie would be targeted and detained at the airports as they hid anxiously behind their laptops in the airport lounge while plotting their next attack.

Sounds pretty crazy, doesn’t it?

But what if this was how it was? What if bankers and lawyers were the real bad guys? How would Trump’s immigration ban look to you now?

Pretty good, I bet.

Because if we took the word Muslim out from Trump’s executive order and substituted it with words like banker and lawyer, something tells me that those nutty progressives on the left might just be OK with it. One thing is for sure though. They certainly wouldn’t be able to accuse the ban of being xenophobic or racist anymore because it would have nothing to do with religion or ethnicity. And the liberals could no longer be morally outraged either (a staple of their game plan) because there would be no disadvantaged or marginalized groups being unfairly targeted in their eyes.

But bankers and lawyers? That’s an easy one. The progressives would be having their very own crazy, left-wing Mardi Gras celebration right there on the White House lawn. And let’s face it, nobody really likes bankers and lawyers anyway. I can already hear the protesters shouting “Keep out the criminals. Keep out the bankers and lawyers!”

So, as you watch the multitude of legal challenges for and against Trump Ban 2.0 emerge over the coming weeks, for just one minute, try not to think of it as a ban against Muslims. Rather, try to see it as an immigration ban against lawyers and bankers. It’ll definitely be easier for you to swallow that way. And remember, these are the really bad lawyers and bankers. The really dangerous ones. Secular terrorists with suicide vests wrapped around their torsos who want to come to the U.S. to attack you and anybody else they can take out.

But if Trump can somehow manage to get his immigration ban implemented, while we might end up with a few hundred thousand fewer bankers and lawyers, one thing is for sure. We’ll definitely be a lot safer for it. 

California A State of Extremes!

California Goes Confederate

2/9/2017 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com

Over sixty percent of California voters went for Hillary Clinton -- a margin of more than 4 million votes over Donald Trump. Since Clinton's defeat, the state seems to have become unhinged over Trump's unexpected election.

"Calexit" supporters brag that they will have enough signatures to qualify for a ballot measure calling for California's secession from the United States.

Some California officials have talked of the state not remitting its legally obligated tax dollars to the federal government. They talk of expanding its sanctuary cities into an entire sanctuary state that would nullify federal immigration law.

Californians also now talk about the value of the old Confederate idea of "states' rights." They whine that their state gives far too much revenue to Washington and gets too little back. Residents boast about how their cool culture has little in common with the rest of the U.S. Some Californians claim the state could easily go it alone, divorced from the United States.

Sound a bit familiar?

In December 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union in furor over the election of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln did not receive 50 percent of the popular vote. He espoused values the state insisted did not reflect its own.

In eerie irony, liberal California is now mirror-imaging the arguments of reactionary South Carolina and other Southern states that vowed to go it alone in 1860 and 1861.

Like California, South Carolina insisted it could nullify federal laws within its state borders.

Like California, South Carolina promised to withhold federal revenues.

Like California, South Carolina and other Confederate states bragged that their unique economies did not need the Union.

They boasted that "King Cotton" had created the wealthiest class in the United States. Silicon Valley now often assumes that Google, Facebook, Apple and others are near-trillion-dollar companies that are a world unto their own.

Slavery and the extravagant income from cotton warped the Southern economy and culture. A wealthy plantation elite, with its millions of exploited slaves, ensured that there would be virtually no middle, working or small-business class.

Huge estates were surrounded by the impoverished shacks of servants. Hardscrabble farmers or small businessmen often fled westward to escape the shackles of wealth disparity.

The export-dependent Southern elite demanded unfettered free trade. It offered bitter resistance to Northern protectionism. South Carolina elites were opposed to federal infrastructure projects such as the building of roads, canals, bridges and reservoirs, and other such unwelcome "progress."

Confederates boasted that their antebellum culture was more romantic, natural, pristine, healthy and moral than was the bustle, grime and hyper-capitalism of Northern industrialism. Southern aristocrats believed that they were culturally superior -- in terms of music, art and literature -- to other Americans.

Of course, this is 2017, not 1860, and California is super-liberal, not an antebellum slave-owning society. Nonetheless, what is driving California's current efforts to nullify federal law and the state's vows to secede from the U.S. are some deeper -- and creepy -- similarities to the arrogant and blinkered Old South.

California is likewise becoming a winner-take-all society. It hosts the largest numbers of impoverished and the greatest number of rich people of any state in the country. Eager for cheap service labor, California has welcomed in nearly a quarter of the nation's undocumented immigrants. California has more residents living in poverty than any other state. It is home to one third of all the nation's welfare recipients.

The income of California's wealthy seems to make them immune from the effects of the highest basket of sales, income and gas taxes in the nation. The poor look to subsidies and social services to get by. Over the last 30 years, California's middle classes have increasingly fled the state.

"Gone With the Wind"-like wealth disparity in California is shocking to the naked eye. Mostly poor Redwood City looks like it's on a different planet from tony nearby Atherton or Woodside.

The California elite, wishing to keep the natural environment unchanged, opposes internal improvements and sues to stop pipelines, aqueducts, reservoirs, freeways and affordable housing for the coastal poor.

California's crumbling roads and bridges sometimes resemble those of the old rural South. The state's public schools remain among the nation's poorest. Private academies are booming for the offspring of the coastal privileged, just as they did among the plantation class of the South.

California, for all its braggadocio, cannot not leave the U.S or continue its states'-rights violations of federal law. It will eventually see that the new president is not its sickness, nor are secession and nullification its cures.

Instead, California is becoming a reactionary two-tier state of masters and serfs whose culture is as peculiar and out of step with the rest of the country as was the antebellum South's. No wonder the state lashes out at the rest of the nation with threatened updated versions of the Old Confederacy's secession and nullification.

But such reactionary Confederate obstructionism is still quite an irony given California's self-righteous liberal preening.

Last Paragraph, Great Questons

A Hole in the Constitution

4/6/2017 - Judge Andrew Napolitano Townhall.com

The issue of federal government surveillance of Americans has largely occupied Washington politicians and the media since President Donald Trump first accused the administration of his predecessor of spying on him while he and his colleagues worked at Trump Tower in New York City during the presidential election campaign and during the presidential transition.

Trump's allegations were initially dismissed as a diversionary tactic to get the attention of the media and the interest of the public off allegations made against the Trump campaign that it conspired with agents of Russian intelligence to facilitate Russian interference with the presidential election. Even some very smart colleagues of mine dismissed Trump's allegations, arguing that no one in Washington found them believable.

Then the director of the FBI, James Comey, and the director of the National Security Agency, America's 60,000-person-strong domestic spying apparatus, Adm. Mike Rogers, testified under oath that they knew of no surveillance of candidate or President-elect Trump at Trump Tower. When I heard these denials, I thought them to be odd at best and erroneous at worst because I was privy to credible chatter in the intelligence community that Trump's allegations were correct, and I knew that the FBI had revealed it was examining the activities of the Trump campaign to look for Russian involvement and that such an examination would surely find the surveillance of Trump that the intelligence community was chatting about.

Then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., revealed that whistleblowers from the intelligence community had approached him with evidence supportive of Trump's claims. He viewed this evidence and revealed that it showed surveillance of candidate and President-elect Trump, but it had nothing to do with Russia. Then Nunes' Democratic counterpart on the same committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who had complained loud and long that he had not seen the documents, viewed the same documents and afterward remained essentially mute.

Before all this happened, unnamed sources released a portion of transcripts of telephone conversations between the Russian ambassador to the United States and retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, then Trump's national security adviser in the White House. The conversations had taken place before Trump was inaugurated. Though only excerpts were revealed -- excerpts intended to embarrass Flynn and taunt Trump -- they arguably showed Flynn counseling the ambassador to expect different treatment of American sanctions on Russia from the Trump administration than they had received from the Obama administration. However, that was an expectation that any rational person would already have had. This revelation and its aftermath did prove embarrassing to Flynn and to Trump, and Flynn resigned.

How did anyone obtain transcripts of conversations involving Trump campaign or transition officials? Here is the back story. The American public has permitted the most massive and thorough domestic surveillance apparatus in history to come about right under our collective and formerly freedom-loving nose. Beginning in 1978 and continuing up to the present, Congress has passed statutes that purport to confine domestic spying to foreign people communicating with anyone in America. Yet that confinement is a myth -- a myth accepted even by the Congresses that have authorized and reauthorized it.

In theory, spying in America is done pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and subsequent statutes that provide for the intervention of judges who issue warrants. In practice, the warrants are general warrants. They are not based on suspicion. They do not identify the person whose communications are to be intercepted. They permit the NSA to search where it wishes -- for example, in certain ZIP codes, area codes and service provider customer lists -- and retain whatever it finds.

On top of this subterfuge is the below-the-radar-screen behavior of the NSA, which looks to a Reagan-era executive order to justify its capture in real time of every telephone conversation and every computer keystroke of everyone in the U.S. since 2005.

That massive amount of raw data is stored digitally in NSA facilities in Maryland and in Utah, and it is available for examination by select people. One of the people who have access to it is the president's national security adviser. My colleagues at Fox News and at other media outlets have reported that Susan Rice, President Obama's final national security adviser, sought and obtained transcripts of conversations of people at Trump Tower, ostensibly looking for a connection to Russia. Rice has admitted this.

Yet in that process, someone revealed the name of an American whose communications had been examined -- known as unmasking. Unmasking is lawful in private only if necessary to comprehend a national security-related and lawfully intercepted communication. It is never lawful to leak publicly.

If unmasking is done for any non-national security purpose -- such as politics, curiosity, embarrassment or revenge -- or if it is from a surveilled conversation that was not national security-related, the unmasking is criminal. The use of intelligence data for political purposes is a felony. Its unlawful use is espionage because the identity of Americans surveilled is top-secret -- the highest level of classification. Someone unmasked Lt. Gen. Flynn and most likely President Trump.

The wrongful exposure of top-secret material is the same crime committed by Hillary Clinton when she placed top-secret emails in non-secure venues. Yet if the allegations against Rice are true, her behavior was arguably worse. Clinton acted with gross negligence. Rice's alleged behavior may have been intentional.

Michael Doran, who worked in national security in the George W. Bush White House, has argued that "somebody blew a hole in the wall between national security secrets and partisan politics." Yet this is far worse than a hole in the wall; it is a hole in the Constitution. Mass spying without suspicion and the select revelation of its fruits for political purposes is far worse than anything the government of King George III did to the colonists, and they fought a war to secede from his country.

How much longer will Americans permit the government to pull the wool over our eyes? Whatever happened to the constitutional right to privacy? Does the Constitution -- which requires a showing of some evidence of wrongdoing to a judge before the government may intercept any communications -- still mean what it says?

Another Judicial Usurpation of Executive Power

Judge Watson's Abominable Travel Ban Ruling

3/17/2017 - David Limbaugh Townhall.com

Anyone who understands the modern left could not be shocked by U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson's issuance of a temporary restraining order against President Donald Trump's executively invoked travel ban -- but that doesn't make the order any less outrageous.

The ruling was not just an exercise in judicial tyranny, as many have commented, but an act of jurisprudential nihilism and anarchy. Courts are not policymaking bodies but judicial tribunals that decide actual disputes on the basis of the facts and the law.

For decades, the courts have arrogated to themselves the power to act outside their constitutional authority by usurping the legislative function of writing and rewriting, rather than interpreting, laws and adjudicating their constitutionality.

Judicial activism overwhelmingly comes from left-wing judges, many of whom see their role as advancing a progressive policy agenda and exhibit little respect for the Constitution and rule of law when they might interfere with that agenda.

When President Trump issued his original travel ban, it was wholly predictable that some court would attempt to nullify it. In that case, its job was made easier by the arguable clumsiness of the rollout, even though most honest commentators believed that the underlying order passed constitutional muster.

Phony critics pretended the ban was stricken only because it was illegally crafted and opined that had Trump used greater care in composing the order, he would have faced no judicial obstacles. Others recognized this as a convenient excuse and said Trump would not be able to circumvent judicial obstruction merely by drafting a more precise order.

Alas, when the president issued a new order, it suffered the same fate as the first. Once a plaintiff was recruited for the cause, it wasn't hard to find a court to eradicate Trump Travel Ban 2.0.

What was less predictable, though, was the transparent speciousness of the court's reasoning in striking down Trump's lawful order. A self-respecting judge would be embarrassed by this sophistry, unless he derived his professional self-concept from his devotion to political causes through bastardization of his sworn judicial oath.

Chief Justice John Marshall, in establishing the judiciary's prerogative of judicial review in the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison, said, "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." He did not say, "The judiciary is superior to the legislative and executive branches, and accordingly, we have the right to just make stuff up."

Yet that's precisely what Judge Watson did. He issued the temporary restraining order mainly because the executive order purportedly violated the establishment clause, which Watson reduced to this formulation: "The clearest command of the Establishment Clause is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another." But even Watson admitted it is undisputed that the order "does not facially discriminate for or against any particular religion, or for or against religion versus non-religion." So it's not Trump's executive order that arguably violates the establishment clause; it's his alleged intent behind the order, which Trump supposedly revealed in his statements during the presidential campaign and otherwise concerning Muslims.

The judge says that to determine whether the order violates this clause, a court must apply the three-part "Lemon test." To show it has not run afoul of the clause, the government action must satisfy all three prongs of the test: 1) It must have a primary secular purpose. 2) It may not have the principal effect of advancing or inhibiting religion. 3) It may not foster excessive entanglement with religion.

Watson concluded that the order fails the first test -- the "secular purpose" prong -- so a court wouldn't even have to consider the other two tests. But it is painfully obvious that the primary purpose of Trump's executive order is secular; he has exercised his sovereign duty to protect Americans and America's national security interests. It is laughable and outrageous to suggest there was any other purpose -- much less a religiously discriminatory purpose -- to invoke the order.

On Page 32 of his 43-page screed, Watson cited the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling that "official action that targets religious conduct for distinctive treatment cannot be shielded by mere compliance with the requirement of facial neutrality."

But nothing in the order targets religious conduct for distinctive treatment! The order doesn't address any aspect of Muslim religious conduct, unless Watson was arguing that terrorism is protected religious conduct. The ban applies to just six nations whose entrants are believed to present a higher risk of harm to the United States. This is not about religion but about national security. The five pillars of Islam are wholly unthreatened by Trump's order.

Particularly disingenuous was Watson's statement, on Page 36, that "any reasonable, objective observer would conclude ... that the stated secular purpose of the Executive Order is, at the very least, 'secondary to a religious objective' of temporarily suspending the entry of Muslims." This is astonishing, even for a radical jurist. No reasonable person -- apart from a mixed-up, virtue-signaling leftist -- would conclude that the stated secular purpose is secondary. If you're going to consider Trump's statements, he is nothing if not a national security hawk. Moreover, Americans who voted for him based on national security concerns see this order as a national security imperative. They know, even if pointy-headed leftist judges do not, that presidents have a duty to protect the United States and that the greatest threat to its national security presently is from terrorists. I repeat: There is no religious objective to this order at all, much less a primary one. It doesn't apply just to Muslims, and it doesn't "target religious conduct" of Muslims.

On top of all this, Watson conceded that to issue the temporary restraining order, he had to determine that the plaintiffs had met their burden of establishing a strong likelihood of success on the merits of their claim, yet he never explained how there is a small likelihood, much less a strong likelihood, of success, especially considering that this would be, according to liberal Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a case of first impression.

The judge has written 43 pages of words -- just words -- designed to obfuscate the issue and justify the unjustifiable judicial usurpation of the sovereign power of the executive branch over national security.

This will not stand. Watson's order cannot stand.