David Cole, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University Law Center is the newly appointed legal director at the ACLU, where he’ll oversee a nationwide legal network of 300 lawyers who are organized to fight President Trump. Director Cole has a confident prognosis for the left: Trump can be stopped.
Stopped from what exactly Cole doesn’t say. Cole points to the George W. Bush administration, a period that Cole argues saw a raft of court decisions (along with some intrepid journalism and civic action) that eventually froze the administration’s agenda in its tracks. Cole and the ACLU was silent during the Obama years. Socialists and big government types are mutually supportive.
Cole mis-characterized President Trumps travel ban as a blatantly discriminatory executive order targeted at Muslims, designed to disfavor one religion and favor another, Christianity. Here’s a flash. Christians do not call America “The Big Satan”. It’s accurate to say that not all Muslims are Terrorists but most Terrorists have been Muslims so a ban that doesn’t include terrorist Muslims who want to murder Americans wouldn’t help America. Why is Cole so obdurate?
Cole continued: “We are planning challenges to the expansion of what’s called expedited removal, which is a kind of summary proceeding that is currently used for people at the border—the rumor is that they intend to expand that, raising serious due process concerns. We’ve also been advising sanctuary cities on their rights to decline to participate in this crackdown. Dense. Not helping or helpful to America or American’s.
If you had said that on 9/11, Bush and Cheney were not going to be able to do whatever they think is necessary to respond to the crisis, people would have said: Who’s going to stop him?
Yet he was forced to curtail each of these measures.
And how did that happen? A large part is owed to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed major cases in the Supreme Court on behalf of enemy combatants.
The whole idea of checks and balances is that there may be people who, absent those checks, would overreach. In some sense, checks and balances were put in place to deal with people like Donald Trump.
So if Donald Trump attempts, for example, to ignore an order of the Supreme Court or to ignore some kind of action by Congress, I think our institutions are sufficiently strong that his administration will be delegitimized. The institutions will survive and Donald Trump won’t.
This is a haughtiness, an anti-American-ness and a hubris difficult to grasp.
TRUMP IS A THREAT. . . .
COLE FINISHES WITH THIS: “I don’t think we’ve seen a president that poses as grave a threat and as widespread a threat to basic civil rights and civil liberties in American history.”
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