Can’t catch a break in the courts.

Via Stars and Stripes:

A federal appeals court on Friday ruled in favor of a controversial Trump administration ban of transgender personnel in the military, though the policy can’t be implemented yet because of ongoing lawsuits.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said a lower court judge erred in blocking the policy, also known as the “Mattis Plan,” which was named for former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis who drafted its specifics. The policy originated from a proposal in 2017 by President Donald Trump.

While Friday’s ruling isn’t final, the three-judge panel concluded public interests outweigh the injunction to halt the policy.

“Although today’s decision is not a final determination on the merits, we must recognize that the Mattis Plan plausibly relies upon the ‘considered professional judgment’ of ‘appropriate military officials,’” the ruling states. “In light of the substantial constitutional arguments and the apparent showing that the policy accommodates at least some of Plaintiffs’ interests, we think that the public interest weighs in favor of dissolving the injunction.”

A White House effort to ban transgender people from military service has been mired in confusion, chaos and a web of litigation nearly two years after Trump fired off tweets that ignited the controversy, experts have said.

For now, a 2016 Pentagon policy to open the military to transgender individuals remains in place, but a Trump administration effort to reverse that plan has created a chilling effect for potential recruits and heightened fears for some servicemembers, some advocates for transgender personnel have said.

On Friday, the Defense Department lauded the appeals court ruling.

“The department is pleased with the D.C. Circuit’s decision. However, the department remains bound by three other court orders that require continued implementation of the [former Defense Secretary Ash] Carter policy,” Pentagon spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell said. “The department will continue to adhere to those orders.”

Keep reading…

President Donald Trump used the words of former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for a border barrier and against illegal immigration to advocate Sunday for the same things.

“We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country,” Barrack Obama said in 2005 while still a U.S. Senator from Illinois.

“I voted numerous times when I was a senator to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in. And I do think you have to control your borders,” then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told a town hall audience in 2015 according to the Weekly Standard.

President Trump referenced Obama and Clinton Sunday in defense of the need to build a wall at the southern border, something reinstated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused this week to give any funding for.

“We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked…” Barrack Obama, 2005. I voted, when I was a Senator, to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in…” Hillary Clinton, 2015.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2019

“The only reason they do not want to build a Wall is that Walls Work!” the president said Sunday. “99% of our illegal Border crossings will end, crime in our Country will go way down and we will save billions of dollars a year! A properly planned and constructed Wall will pay for itself many times a year!”

….The only reason they do not want to build a Wall is that Walls Work! 99% of our illegal Border crossings will end, crime in our Country will go way down and we will save billions of dollars a year! A properly planned and constructed Wall will pay for itself many times a year!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2019

President Trump has made clear he requires $5.6 billion in border wall and security funding in the partial government funding bill. Democrats including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have this week flat refused any funding for the border wall. 

Vice President Mike Pence led Saturday meetings with staff of Congressional Democrat and Republican leadership, Senior Advisor to the president Jared Kushner, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and members of White House Staff. While Pence reaffirmed the president’s commitment to building the border wall and securing the border, Democrat representatives demanded more information from DHS.

Trump was briefed on the meeting before announcing “Not much headway made today. Second meeting set for tomorrow. After so many decades, must finally and permanently fix the problems on the Southern Border!”

The president headed to Camp David Sunday for meetings on the wall, North Korea, and China. “We have to build the wall or we have to buld the barrier. The barrier or the wall can be of steel instead of concrete if that works better,” he told reporters as he departed the White House. “This is a very important battle to win from the standpoint of safety, number one, defining our country and who we are. Also from the standpoint of dollars. This wall will pay for itself many times through the course of the year.”

He re-emphasized the importance of building a southern border barrier, “It’s about stopping human traffickers, it’s about stopping drugs. So we have to have it.”

Michelle Moons is a White House Correspondent for Breitbart News — follow on Twitter @MichelleDiana and Facebook

TEL AVIV – Israel is expected to demand $250 billion in compensation from eight Arab states as well as Iran for assets left behind by Jews who fled or were expelled from those countries after the State of Israel was founded.

“The time has come to correct the historic injustice of the pogroms (against Jews) in seven Arab countries and Iran, and to restore to hundreds of thousands of Jews who lost their property what is rightfully theirs,” Israel’s Minister for Social Equality Gila Gamliel, whose ministry is handling the issue, said Saturday.

Israel released official estimates of the total property and assets lost in the Arab world in anticipation of President Donald Trump’s imminent peace plan, Hadashot TV news reported. A peace deal with the Arab world will likely be conditional on receiving compensation from those countries, the report said.

The first two countries on the list are Tunisia and Libya, with a combined total of $50 billion worth of Jewish property.

Israel will also seek another $200 billion from Morocco, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Iran, the report said.

More than 850,000 Jews fled or were forcibly driven out of 10 Arab countries following violent Arab rioting over Israel’s establishment.

The valuations released Saturday are the result of research conducted over the course of the past year and a half by the Israeli government and an international accountancy firm.

“One cannot talk about the Middle East without taking into consideration the rights of the Jews who were forced to leave their thriving communities amid violence,” said Gamliel. “All the crimes that were carried out against those Jewish communities must be recognized.”

The Palestinian Authority has demanded more than $100 billion in compensation from Israel for property deserted by Arab residents after the founding of the state. Furthermore, the Palestinians have also maintained “the right of return” for millions of the descendants of those original “refugees” — a demand that would spell the end of the Jewish state by demographic means.

Jews who were persecuted in Arab lands arrived in Israel destitute and did not receive refugee status from the UN or other international bodies.

Any compensation received from those eight countries would be funneled to a special fund, the report said.

In 2014, Israel passed legislation to mark November 30 as a memorial day for the departure and expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and Iran.

“It is not for nothing that this day is marked on the day after the 29th of November,” Netanyahu said on November 30, 2014, referencing the date of the UN’s partition resolution in 1947. “The Arab countries, which never accepted the UN declaration on the establishment of a Jewish state, compelled the Jews living in their territories to leave their homes while leaving their assets behind. … We have acted — and will continue to act — so that they and their claims are not forgotten.”

President Donald Trump gave a long-overdue lesson to the White House press corps about the Constitution’s limits on executive power — limits the media largely ignored under President Barack Obama, because they agreed with Obama’s policies and wished to see him succeed politically.

Trump pointed out that Democrats had lost interest in negotiating over the future of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program when a federal judge in San Francisco ruled last year that the Trump administration’s decision to cancel the policy was unlawful.

Republicans have always considered DACA unconstitutional, because Obama created it in defiance of Congress, and because he did so by extending his powers of prosecutorial discretion to an unprecedented number of cases, numbering nearly a million beneficiaries.

Barack Obama himself believed it was unconstitutional and unlawful. As former Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) documented in his 2013 memoir, Obama “had been telling the entire immigrant-rights community for nearly a year and a half that he couldn’t do it.”

Nevertheless, amnesty activists tried and failed to push Obama to act, until Republicans — Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in particular — threatened to outflank him.

After Congress rejected Democrats’ proposals for a “Dream Act” that would eventually grant citizenship to illegal aliens brought to the country as minors, Rubio proposed a more moderate bill that looked likely to pass with Republican support.

“Some of the activists say they are open to Rubio’s effort,” the Washington Post reported at the time.

Rather than face the political setback of having to sign or veto a Republican bill to help “Dreamers,” and risk Latino support, Obama decided to declare DACA, which critics called the “Dream Act by fiat.”

When Trump’s first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, announced the end of DACA, he noted the Trump administration believed the policy had always been unconstitutional:
“[T]he executive branch, through DACA, deliberately sought to achieve what the legislative branch specifically refused to authorize on multiple occasions. Such an open-ended circumvention of immigration laws was an unconstitutional exercise of authority by the Executive Branch.”

But the media had never shown much interest in whether DACA was constitutional or not. Instead, they have focused on how ending DACA might harm “Dreamers” — who are often portrayed in glowing terms as patriotic, high-achieving Americans in all but name.

At the same time, they have often speculated — or even presumed — that President Trump is an authoritarian leader who would do anything to protect and increase his power.

On Friday, Trump pointed out that DACA was unconstitutional — and that if the Supreme Court disagreed, by rejecting the Trump administration’s appeal of the lower court’s decision, it would be giving him potentially unlimited power (emphasis added):

We discussed [DACA] a long time ago … You remember those discussions. But where it really ended is when the judge ruled against [the cancelation of DACA]. And it was — I said, as soon as that happened, ’cause that was a shocking decision, it was shocking to the Democrats and it was more shocking to the Republicans. It was an incorrect decision, it was a political decision made by a judge — and I know a lot of people don’t like when I say it, but try going there sometime to the Ninth Circuit and try winning a case. Not easy. Everybody files right in the Ninth Circuit. The fact is, it was a terrible decision, and incorrect decision. When that decision came down, when that judge ruled the way he ruled, I said, as soon as I heard it, I said, “You know what’s going to happen? We’re never going to hear from them again.” And that’s exactly — that’s what broke up the DACA deal. Yes, we had a pathway [to citizenship], we had many things — that was getting close to being a deal. … we were getting close. And I said as soon as that decision came down, that incorrect and horrible decision — I mean, there’s been a number of them made lately — but I said, “You’ll never hear from them again.” I called up. I said, “Hi, it’s President Trump. What is going on?” They say,”President trump?” We don’t know who that is.” It was over. The deal was over. That’s what killed the DACA deal. It was nothing else. It was the judge’s decision. And if the Supreme Court does what, really, everyone thinks from a legal standpoint it should be doing — if they don’t allow the President of the United States, which is me also, because if President Obama is allowed to do that, I’m allowed to do it also. Can you imagine? If the Supreme Court overrules that wrong executive order [by Obama], we’ll have a deal very quickly on DACA and other things. And the Democrats want that and so do we. But once he ruled that way, it was something you couldn’t really negotiate.

Trump’s description of the case pointed out the problem that the Democrats, and the media, overlooked in 2012: namely, that if Obama were allowed to expand his executive powers by ignoring all constraints, including Congress, a future Republican president could do the same.

He also set a trap for his critics: if they disagree with his description of the constitutional problem with DACA, they are forced to trust him with the same sweeping authority they applauded under Obama, and to accept that he may not be the tyrant they have portrayed after all.

Though one might object to Trump signaling to the Court which way it ought to rule on a constitutional question, he is hardly the first president to do so. Obama, for example, did it in 2012, when he urged the Court to uphold Obamacare, arguing — bizarrely — that it was a “duly constituted law.”

How ironic that Obama — lauded by the media for being a “professor” of constitutional law — would imply he did not believe in the power of judicial review, while Trump — treated as some kind of fascist — would appeal to the constitutional restraints on his own power.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Notice exactly how many illegal aliens are caught every year? Imagine how many get through…

Via Twitchy:

For years, Lefties have been calling anyone who doesn’t believe that man alone is powerful enough to control the environment, ‘climate deniers.’ Some of these tolerant, lovely, peaceful people have even said those who don’t agree with their ideas on climate change should go to jail.

You just know they’re a hoot at birthday parties.

Anyway, newly-elected badass Rep. Dan Crenshaw came up with a new term for anyone and everyone claiming a wall won’t work and that there isn’t a real problem at the border.

Looking at you, Nancy Pelosi:

Keep reading…

This is Democrats’ idea of debating.

Louisiana Republican Rep. Steve Scalise came to the abrupt realization that Twitter is perhaps the last place for anyone to try to have a productive discussion about policies after engaging everyone’s favorite profanity-defending socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Scalise had taken to Twitter to blast Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” which would put an onerous financial burden on many Americans (as most Democratic “ideas” tend to do.)

In an interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes,” scheduled to air Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez had suggested a ludicrous 70 percent tax to help fund her socialist fantasies and Scalise, justifiably, took her to task for it.

Republicans: Let Americans keep more of their own hard-earned moneyDemocrats: Take away 70% of your income and give it to leftist fantasy programs https://t.co/NxJPSCqvrt

— Steve Scalise (@SteveScalise) January 5, 2019

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Unsurprisingly, Ocasio-Cortez responded on Twitter. Instead of offering anything substantive to argue for her point, she merely regurgitated tired leftist gibberish.

You’re the GOP Minority Whip. How do you not know how marginal tax rates work?

Oh that’s right, almost forgot: GOP works for the corporate CEOs showering themselves in multi-million💰bonuses; not the actual working people whose wages + healthcare they’re ripping off for profit. https://t.co/R1YIng2Ok1

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 6, 2019

“You’re the GOP Minority Whip. How do you not know how marginal tax rates work?” she asked on Twitter.

(Something tells me Scalise fully knows how marginal tax rates work, he just wanted to use Ocasio-Cortez’s rhetoric to illustrate how ridiculous she sounds.)

As leftist typically do, Ocasio-Cortez just jumped straight to the insults.

“Oh that’s right, almost forgot: GOP works for the corporate CEOs showering themselves in multi-million (dollar) bonuses; not the actual working people whose wages + healthcare they’re ripping off for profit,” Ocasio-Cortez added.

To his credit, Scalise initially seemed willing to engage with her on the topic. That is, until he saw the responses he was getting from Ocasio-Cortez’s mindless drones.

“Snipe his a–,” one Twitter user wrote. Another Twitter user wrote that Ocasio-Cortez has “better aim than James Hodgkinson.” Both were referring to the horrific incident 2017 where a gunman opened fire on a GOP baseball game and struck Scalise and nearly killed him.

RELATED: Ocasio-Cortez Plays the Sexism Card While Defending ‘Motherf—er’ Comment

Another classless dolt told Ocasio-Cortez to “kick his cane.”

That’s when Scalise decided to shut things down.

Hi @AOC. Happy to continue this debate on the Floor of the People’s House, but it’s clearly not productive to engage here with some of your radical followers. #StayClassy pic.twitter.com/lZCO3oiLUZ

— Steve Scalise (@SteveScalise) January 6, 2019

“Hi @AOC. Happy to continue this debate on the Floor of the People’s House, but it’s clearly not productive to engage here with some of your radical followers,” Scalise retorted before tacking on a “#StayClassy.”

Perhaps the crudity of the comments by Ocasio-Cortez supporters shouldn’t be a huge surprise, given how classless leftists can be, but even given that low standard, the comments made by Ocasio-Cortez’s “radical followers” were despicable.

It truly speaks volumes that these are the types of people attracted to Ocasio-Cortez and what she stands for.

Absolutely sickening.

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