Immigration

The latest Supreme Court term, which ended on Tuesday, surely must have been a deep disappointment for those who argue the court is in the thrall of political puppet masters. In decision after decision in the term that began October 6, the high court asserted a degree of institutional independence that undercuts the idea its jurists are merely politicians in judicial robes. At bottom, the issues before the court were characterized by Trump’s attempts to vastly expand presidential authority and efforts by states, political opponents and others to rein him in. In the end, the match was a draw.

Who could ever have imagined what was being unleashed on the world when Thomas Gage ordered 700 Redcoats to march out from Boston and seize supplies in the town of Concord? Who could have dreamed, 250 years ago, what would be built by the descendants of those 56 men who put their names to the Declaration of Independence while gathered in the Pennsylvania State House? The United States of America turns 250 having enjoyed a near-uninterrupted run of success unmatched in world history. By her 100th birthday, the US was already master of an entire continent. By her 200th, she had won two world wars, invented the airplane, the atomic bomb and the transistor; created the motion picture and rock ’n’ roll; become the first automobile nation and put a man on the Moon.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s tour to tout his new children’s book about the Declaration of Independence should have been uneventful. But then Gorsuch decided to talk about what America is. On Fox News, with the New York Times and in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Gorsuch kept staking out his view on what makes America special: America has no religion, no race, no people at all really, but instead a singular majestic idea. “We’re a creedal nation, right,” Gorsuch told the Times. “I mean, we don’t share a religion, we don’t share a race, we share an idea, OK? And that idea has to be passed down generation to generation through history, as we discussed.

Parts of the MAGA movement are unhappy with President Trump’s migration strategy. The administration has softened its policy on deportations following a public uproar over the ICE killings in January, it is said. The focus has been on removing only the most violent offenders. “The truth is the first year was not a year of mass deportation,” says Mike Howell of the Mass Deportation Coalition. “A conscious decision was made to go after the worst first, which was, we’ll call it a deviation, from the central campaign promise of mass deportations.” Such criticisms miss the point. The Trump administration has tackled the worst offenders to shore up support for its wider migration crackdown. And that crackdown has been wildly successful.

Donald Trump has had a career-long love-hate relationship with the press. On one hand, he popularized the phrase “fake news” and branded the press “the enemy of the people.” On the other, the President takes phone calls from virtually every reporter with his personal cell and is fixated on cable news and his print media coverage. Trump views journalists as friends, foes and foils, or some combination of the three. But if a story catches him at the wrong moment, the author could find themselves on the receiving end of a Trump-SLAPP. A Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or SLAPP, is a lawsuit filed with a tactical intent besides disproving a damaging story in a court of law. Usually the suit demands an attention-seekingly large sum in damages.

Despite a career of nearly half a century in public life, Enoch Powell is generally remembered for one utterance only: the so-called "Rivers of Blood" speech he made in Birmingham on April 20, 1968, in which he voiced his opposition to the race relations legislation being taken through parliament by the then Labour government. Powell was the Conservative opposition’s defense spokesman. His speech threw the leader of his party, Edward Heath, into a profound panic, and he sacked Powell immediately, initiating decades of assertions that Powell was racially prejudiced. Powell always said – entirely honestly – that he never made a speech about race: just speeches about immigration policy and his profound disagreement with how it was usually managed.