WhatFinger


Congress does need to fix this, but there’s little political incentive for Democrats to do so. They are going to get more mileage out of maintaining the status quo and bashing Trump for i

Trump to Congress: If you want us to stop separating families at the border, then change the law that tells us to


Dan Calabrese image

By —— Bio and Archives June 19, 2018

Comments | Print This | Subscribe | Email Us

Trump to Congress: If you want us to stop separating families at the border, then change the law that tells us to During the Obama years Congress got used to the idea that the president would simply ignore laws he didn’t like, or didn’t agree with, or could get more political mileage out of attacking. The idea that the president is supposed to enforce all laws on the books, and that problematic laws are the job of Congress to fix, is consistent with the Constitution and with the way things have typically worked, but it’s apparently going to take some readjusting for the Beltway crowd.
President Trump isn’t backing down, though. We told you yesterday this is not what the media and the left are trying to tell you it is. It’s the 1997 Flores agreement that forbids the government from hanging onto children while their parents are being charged, and as we told you yesterday, the whole problem here concerns situations in which the parent is being charged with a crime. If you don’t want to keep the kids in the cell with the parent, then you’ve got to send them somewhere else. The left and the media want the president to simply ignore what the law says. He’s not going to do that, because fixing this is their job, not his:
In remarks from the White House on Monday, Mr. Trump said Democrats were to blame for a lack of progress on immigration legislation. Earlier this year, the GOP-controlled Senate failed to break an impasse over immigration, with several measures coming up short. “If the Democrats would sit down, instead of obstructing, we could have something done very quickly,” Mr. Trump said in remarks from the White House East Room. “We’re stuck with these horrible laws.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said responsibility lies with Mr. Trump. “This was done by the president, not Democrats,” tweeted Mr. Schumer. “He can fix it tomorrow if he wants to, and if he doesn’t want to, he should own up to the fact that he’s doing it.” Other administration officials echoed Mr. Trump’s push for legislation. At a sheriffs’ conference in New Orleans, Attorney General Jeff Sessions suggested ways that the policy could be ended. “If we build the wall, if we pass some legislation, we close some loopholes, we won’t face these terrible choices,” he said.
At the same gathering, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen also defended the policy and said the administration had asked Congress “to allow us to keep families together while they are detained” as an alternative. A decades-old court settlement bars the U.S. government from jailing migrant children. Until recently, the result was that families who crossed the border seeking asylum were often released into the U.S. while their cases are pursued. Critics have called the policy inhumane, both in separating children from parents and because of the conditions in which children are housed. Mr. Sessions described past policy as effectively guaranteeing that an adult bringing a child would be immune from prosecution. “Word got out about this loophole and the results were predictable,” he said, encouraging more border crossings with children.
It was the Obama Administration that started, in 2014, ignoring the Flores agreement and jailing the kids along with the parents. That was counter to what the law says, but typical of Obama, he knew he’d be hailed as a humanitarian hero for it. And as Jeff Sessions explained, a lot of these families are now coming across the border together precisely because they know current U.S. law doesn’t allow the kids to be jailed. What they didn’t expect was that the parents would be locked up without the kids. Congress does need to fix this, but there’s little political incentive for Democrats to do so. They are going to get more mileage out of maintaining the status quo and bashing Trump for it. That’s why Schumer pretends Trump could fix this easily. Sure he could. By ignoring the law like Obama so often did. But it’s not the president’s job to ignore the law. It’s Congress’s job to fix it, and someone should tell Schumer that it’s his caucus that’s responsible for this happening even one more day.



Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives | Comments

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.


Sponsored