Sanctuary Cities Ruling Continues Troubling Trend (Long Article)

RUSH: I have to talk about this judge, folks, and what’s happening here, because remember the piece that I shared with you from Daniel Greenfield, “The Civil War is Here” about the left simply respecting no authority other than its own, no authority in the Constitution, they do not respect the authority of election results. And this is now the third or fourth Trump executive order which has been stayed by Obama — well, one was a Bush 43 appointed judge. The others have been liberal Democrat judges mostly appointed by Obama.

And depending on where you go today and last night, you can find analysis of the judge’s decision, “You know, it’s a nothing burger, folks. I mean, the judge’s order is irrelevant because it doesn’t stop what the president wants to do, because what the president’s order is is not establishing any new law,” all of which is true. So from a legal standpoint, it may be a nothing burger, but it is far from a nothing burger politically. It is a huge deal politically, what these judges are doing.

It is beginning to look like there is a coordinated effort among some in the federal judiciary to simply, what’s the word, ignore President Trump’s authority as commander-in-chief under the belief that he is not fit for office, under the belief that he’s a maniac, under the belief that he’s insane because he had syphilis or whatever the hell fool notions these people believe. It appears now that there is a coordinated effort to thwart and oppose President Trump at every opportunity the judiciary has to do so.

We’ve obviously got judge shopping going on. I mean, these requests for stays and lawsuits happen in San Francisco or Seattle, where the appeal will go to the Ninth Circuit. This is not done haphazardly and randomly. And it is part and parcel of what we’ve been talking about, and that is the ongoing effort by the left to delegitimize the election, to simply say, “We don’t accept it. We refuse to accept the outcome of the election. Donald Trump is president, and we in the federal judiciary are gonna do everything we can when we have the chance to stop this president in his tracks from accomplishing anything he seeks to accomplish that we can stop.”

The actual ruling yesterday, which we’ll go through here in a second, may in fact be nothing legally, but politically I think this is huge, because that’s what this is. These judges are not ruling on the merits of the law. They are not ruling on anything judicial. They are ruling as pure political participants. And they are enforcing their own policy preferences in their efforts to use their power to thwart and stop the president of the United States.

By the way, greetings, and great to have you. Here’s the phone number if you want to be on the program: 800-282-2882. And the email address is ElRushbo@eibnet.us.

Okay. So what was this executive order? In the strict sense of the executive order, there was nothing new in it. There was no new appropriation of money. There was no new law. There was no new executive action. All this executive order was, essentially, was a statement that existing federal law regarding the funding of sanctuary cities would be enforced. That is all this executive order was. Some people might say, “Well, then it’s a bogus executive order. Trump’s just grandstanding.” Maybe.

You might be able to get away with saying that this was simply a climb to the mountaintop and a shout that says “Listen to me, we’re gonna start enforcing the law,” which is all that Trump has been doing when it comes to immigration. There is no new immigration law in this country. All there is and what’s all of all of this controversy and all of this roiling everybody is the decision by the Trump administration to enforce existing law, be it regarding the border, be it illegal entry and deportation, be it what to do about criminal illegals, be it what to do about sanctuary cities.

All this is is the enforcement of existing law. The reason why it looks so extreme to some people or outrageous is that we haven’t been enforcing immigration law. We have been behaving under the Obama administration as though there isn’t any immigration law and that whatever Obama wants to do is fine. And you will note that whenever Obama did create executive orders that did create new law, there wasn’t a judiciary mobilized to stop him.

There was one judge in Texas by the name of Hannon who did, but in every other case of Obama executive orders, the judiciary just rolled right over. But here with Trump, they are — it’s hard to say that it’s conspiratorially unified. It is what it is. Liberals are liberals and they do not need memos back and forth to be told what to do. They do not need instructions.

They are liberals, and, as such, they know that they exist to stop Trump. They believe, nobody has to tell ’em, Trump is illegitimate. They believe, nobody has to tell ’em, that Trump’s election was illegitimate. These are the kind of people that believe the Russians really did impact the election and therefore Trump and everything he’s doing is illegitimate. Whenever they have a chance to stop it, they’re gonna do it.

RUSH: So we have, I think, a dire circumstance. I don’t think this is a nothing burger. I don’t think that this is nothing to get all excited about. In the legal sense the judge did not stop the enforcement of existing law. “Well, Rush, the media –” the media is not telling the truth about it because I don’t think the media understands what happened here. All that the media sees is that another judge told Trump to go to hell, and they love it and that’s all that matters. Now they can report another judge told Trump he can’t do what he wants to do because Trump’s irresponsible, Trump’s illegitimate, thank God for the judge, and that’s the narrative.

But that’s not what the judge did. That’s not what his executive order was. His executive order was a pure, 100 percent political statement, and it contained what every other judge that has stopped Trump to date has contained. “Well, you know, he said during the campaign he was gonna ban all Muslims. And he said during the campaign that he was gonna kick people out of sanctuary cities.” So the judge cites that stuff as evidence and justification for doing what he’s done here to theoretically stop Trump.

But even in this order the judge admits that there’s nothing new here. In this order the judge admits that he’s not stopping anything. If you read the whole thing — reading the whole thing is a slog, which is why the Drive-Bys are not going to do so. The judge’s name is Orrick. You might have heard the name because he’s the guy that found against the people that created the videos, the secret videos exposing Planned Parenthood for chopping up babies and selling body parts. He found against the people who conducted those secret video tapings. He’s an Obama fundraiser, he’s an Obama donor, he’s a bundler, 200 grand. He worked in the Justice Department.

So he’s a full-fledged down-the-line, perfectly flaked and formed modern-day leftist extremist. But if you spend the time on the exact order — for example, the judge acknowledges that the construction of the Trump executive order, the way it’s written and what it proposes, he acknowledges that. He agrees with it. The executive order that Trump is ballyhooing here is simply a reinforcement of existing law. There’s nothing new in this executive order. It’s just Trump announcing that we’re gonna be enforcing the law.

And some leftists are saying that Trump’s simply trying to score political points with this, and it may be. It could be that Trump wants everybody to know that he’s a new sheriff, there’s a new sheriff in town, and this law that’s been ignored, we are gonna enforce it. But the judge acknowledges that. The judge in his ruling acknowledges that the Trump executive order does nothing more than call for the enforcement of already existing law. The judge admits this! This judge is trying to embarrass Trump. Thing was rolled out, this executive order was rolled out with, you know, a lot of pomp, a lot of circumstance.

And this judge makes it clear in the ruling that he wants Trump brought back down to earth. He wants it known that Trump is pretending, that Trump is trying to do something here that he’s not doing. He’s not doing anything new, and the judge wants to expose Trump here as effectively writing an executive order that doesn’t do anything, other than proclaim we’re gonna follow the law.

And as I said, he spends a lot of time quoting stump speeches made by Trump and his campaign aides. You know, this is the way Trump, when he campaigns, the way he sells policy and the way he makes promises, those things are now being considered to have been legal utterances by a man who was not president. Trump is being held legally to concepts he only stated as a candidate. Like a Muslim ban, there hasn’t been a Muslim ban, but the judge here says, “He wants to. He wants to do that, and he wants to kick all these sanctuary citizens out and he wants to take their money away, and so I’m gonna make sure he can’t do it.”

In one of the — my buddy Andy McCarthy calls it one of the most disingenuous passages in the ruling — the judge asserts that the executive order directs the attorney general and the Homeland Security secretary to ensure that sanctuary jurisdictions are not eligible to receive federal grants. That is not true. In fact, that is an out-and-out lie. I don’t know purposefully or not, that’s a bit far, but it simply is not true. In quoting, the judge omitted the key passage in the executive order, which actually states the following: “The attorney general and the secretary of Homeland Security, in their discretion and to the extent consistent with the law, shall ensure that jurisdictions that willfully refuse to comply with the law are not eligible to receive federal grants.”

All that statement is is a statement of current law that is in the executive order, but what the judge left out in his ruling is the phrase “to the extent consistent with the law.” So in his ruling, the judge wants people at times to think Trump is trying a sneaky maneuver here and at other places in the order the judge is admitting that there’s nothing new here, no new ground being broken.

And even when this thing was being put together and argued, Justice Department lawyers emphasized that this executive order did nothing but reaffirm existing law. And it’s in the argument. But the judge refused to listen. He didn’t want that to be part of the evidence he would use for his ruling because what fun would be that be? What kind of excitement for a liberal judge could there be in stopping something that does nothing more than state we’re going to enforce federal law?

So the judge tries to make it look like that the Trump administration has much bigger plans that they’re not admitting to, and he goes back and cites campaign statements as evidence for what might really be going on here. This is so bogus. And it’s getting so tiresome. It has nothing to do with the law. This ruling was totally unnecessary. The executive order wasn’t really necessary, other than for Trump to make a statement about what their policy’s gonna be, because it differs from the previous administration, which was not enforcing immigration law. Trump wants everybody to know as often as he can say it that he is going to.

RUSH: To make this ruling suitable for the Drive-Bys to report it as a snub of Trump and an arrest, if you will, of Trump’s policy, the judge literally had to invent a violation. They had to invent, the judge had to invent a violation. In other words, the judge had to claim that the Trump administration was already in violation of law regarding sanctuary cities, which gave him the justification for shutting them down. If Trump is violating the law, then the judge is thoroughly entitled to stop Trump.

And I just happened to see in a panel discussion on CNN some completely uninformed woman talking about this, and she was referring to the part that I just shared with you, the judge’s opinion where he purposely leaves out the most important part of a paragraph in the executive order.

RUSH: Here, ladies and gentlemen, is what the media want you to believe about Trump’s executive order. They want you to believe that Trump decided on his own to take money away from cities that are sanctuary cities. They want you to think that Trump issued an executive order that will allow him and his emissaries to simply stop sending federal money to San Francisco, to New York, to Santa Clara. The media wants you to think that this is something brand-new.

They want you to think that Trump is behaving like a tyrannical dictator because he hates Mexicans and he hates immigrants and this is the way he’s gonna punish people who are only behaving in compassionate way and trying to help the downtrodden. And this mean-spirited SOB Trump, he’s just gonna go in there and he’s gonna take money away from these cities and everybody’s gonna starve and it’s gonna be horrible! And then they want you to believe that a brilliant federal judge spotted this and laid down the law and told this tyrant Trump, “You can’t do that!

“I, Judge William Orrick, am not gonna let you be a dictator. I’m not gonna let you be a tyrant. I’m not gonna let you take money from San Francisco. You can’t do it because I said so.” And they want to give the judge an award. None of that has happened. Not a shred of what that narrative is has happened. Trump created an executive order which explicitly says they are going to start enforcing existing law. There is already, ladies and gentlemen, existing law saying that under certain circumstances the federal government may withhold funds.

Why is El Rushbo so wordy? It’s not necessary.

The liberal leftist/globalist have come out and declared Trump is not their president. They declared they will not obey legitimate laws. This is a conspiracy by those in government, colluding with big media an the socialist in academia.

So there ya have it.

Why is El Rushbo so wordy? It’s not necessary.

So there ya have it.

Where is the GOP congress on this?

Trump shouldn't be having to issue any EOs.

The GOP should simply say: "We are going to enforce the law as written.".

No fuss, no muss.

The Congress has the power of the purse.

Judges don't have this power. BTW, how come a POTUS can issue an EO, and it is ruled "Unconstitutional" because Trump is only "one man" with an opinion that a judge doesn't like.

Therefore it CANNOT be enforced.

The country is A-Ok with that, yet "one" judge's rulings HAVE to be enforced across the country.

Since when has some Federal judge's opinion and power been greater that the POTUS?

I don't recall some pissant conservative judge overturning Obama's every EO.

How long do you think that would take to impeach a judge if every Obama move went straight to the 5th circuit and was ruled unconstitutional?

Why is the 9th circuit more powerful than all of the other circuits?

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