The ongoing feud between Mr. Trump enforcing the law and ballot-harvesting liberal urban welfare pimps breaking it has hopped another speedbump. Left-Wing crime capitalists protect illegal alien drug lords and human traffickers. Trump says, if you won’t help us with criminal-aliens we’ll cut your federal funds.
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The lefty media squawks, you can’t do that. The Democrat leadership howls, that’s not legal. The water-carrying party apparatchiks repeat the refrains like parrots whose cages are papered perennially with the works of Marx and Engels (or Sanders). Almost ready to yell “vote suppression” before realizing that would be giving the signals away to the other team.
The matter of withholding federal funds from non-complaint municipalities has worked its way, as such matters do, into the courts where opinions are like a**holes. That means everyone’s got one.
Which deserves a momentary sidebar. Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor recently vented her feelings about Mr. Trump and all these emergency stay requests from the White house.
“It is hard to say what is more troubling,” Sotomayor wrote, “that the Government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the Court would grant it,” she wrote.
The Latina Justice Sotomayor, a liberal justice without question, was then effortlessly taken to the proverbial woodshed (with all due respect) by Sen. Ted Cruz who remarked that this was “a little bit like an arsonist complaining about the noise from the fire trucks.” In other words, if lower-court liberal justices didn’t go about abusing their authority and issuing nationwide injunctions (a record-setting 55 in just 3 years – Bush and Obama between them over their 16-years in office saw a combined total of 32 such acts by lower courts), the Dept. of Justice would not need to bother the Supreme Court.
So, opinions from the court of the left are why we are here, not that our black-robed judges (or justices) are partisan or anything like that. Which brings us back to the point. Articulated here by Judge Reena Raggi, of the 2nd circuit.
“There is something disquieting in the idea of states and localities seeking federal funds to enforce their own laws while themselves hampering the enforcement of federal laws, or worse, violating those laws,” she wrote in the opinion for the three-judge panel.
And just for good bipartisan measure.
She pointed out that the Trump administration’s stance is not new, and that the Obama administration began to take similar steps at the end of its tenure.
Ouch!
The matter will still need to make its way, more than likely, before Justice Sotomayor and the gang, but this partial victory gives DOJ discretion to withhold certain federal funds based on existing law and the administration’s intention to honor it.
The ruling clears the way for the government to withhold Byrne Justice Assistance Grant money from some of the plaintiffs — New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Washington, Massachusetts and Virginia — though not all of them.
To get this money they need to follow the law.
The Trump administration issued guidance saying that to comply with that, localities needed to certify that they were in compliance with the law, that they would honor information requests from Homeland Security, and that they would allow immigration authorities access to their prisons and jails.
I don’t expect full compliance. Even liberal judges are prone to breaking the law to protect criminals who are also here illegally. A court victory is hardly any guarantee of whole-hearted compliance.