Executive orders and judicial lawlessness

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meet your new dictator, Ed Chin

Less than three months ago the left had no problem when Biden used his executive authority to unilaterally extend the refugee visas he’d previosuly passed out to almost a million of his 23 million invited guests:

AP: January 10th 2025

Biden extends time in US for 800,000 Venezuelans, Salvadorans as Trump readies immigration crackdown

MIAMI (AP) — About 600,000 Venezuelans and more than 230,000 Salvadorans already living in the United States can legally remain another 18 months, the Department of Homeland Security said Friday, barely a week before President-elect Donald Trump takes office with promises of hardline immigration policies.

Biden’s administration has strongly supported Temporary Protected Status, which he has broadly expanded to cover about 1 million people. TPS faces an uncertain future under Trump, who tried to sharply curtail its use during his first term as president. Federal regulations would allow the extensions to be terminated early, although that’s never been done before.

But now, and without citing any judicial authority to do do (because there is none), a federal judge has assumed command of this country’s immigration law. Where are the howls of outrage from Larry Tribe and his ilk?

Judge Blocks Administration From Revoking Temporary Protected Status of 350,000 Venezuelans

The course of true foreclosure never did run smooth

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17 Highland Road, listed at $1.699 million, was reported under contract last October, but rather than proceeding to final sale, it’s been reactivated today and is once again free to accept offers.

The property’s been the subject of a foreclosure proceeding since 2022, (which is how long it’s also been listed for sale, beginning then at $2.3 million), and the latest sale date by auction was supposed to be April 5th, but apparently, that’s no longer operative. The land conprises 4.92 acres and, although I don’t know how much of that is truly useable, I’d think a building lot up here, with or without a salvageable house, should be worth somewhere close to this ask. My guess is that it’s the foreclosure suit and, possibly, a non-cooperative defendant that’s holding things up.

Throwing open the gates and keeping them open was always a deliberate policy

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Screw the country, it's all about them

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Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla — primary her

Trump agenda upended after GOP rebellion shuts down House floor

A fight over proxy voting for new parents is at the heart of the issue

A normally sleepy procedural vote ended in drama for the House of Representatives after a rebellion by nine Republicans against their own party forced chamber proceedings for the week to grind to a halt.

It puts the future in question for two key bills backed by the Trump administration that were slated to get a vote on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively.

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters that votes were canceled for the rest of the week in comments condemning the mutiny.

"It's a very disappointing result on the floor there, a handful of Republicans joined with all the Democrats to take down a rule. That's rarely done. It's very unfortunate," Johnson said. "That rule being brought down means that we can't have any further action on the floor this week."

It's an embarrassing setback for House Republican leadership, who put on a full court press for both pieces of legislation.

A "rule vote" is not an expression of support or opposition for any specific measure. Rather, it's a procedural hurdle, normally falling along party lines, that allows for the House to begin debate and eventually vote on whatever bills the rule is covering.

In this case, the "rule" would have allowed for debate and floor consideration of bills that would have limited district judges' ability to levy nationwide injunctions and would have mandated proof of citizenship to register to vote, respectively.

… "I think that today is a pretty historical day for the entire conference and showing that, yeah, the body has decided that parents deserve a voice in Washington and also to the importance of female members having a vote in Washington D.C.," Luna told reporters after the vote.

I do wish politicians wouldn’t make it so easy to hate them.

Riverside sale

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45 Wesskum Wood Road, listed in February for $3.9 million, went to highest and best, and closed today at $4,204,500.

The buyers have moved here from Brooklyn, but that’s okay, everybody has to come from somewhere. Heck some of my own ancestors lived there, and although we haven’t quite lived down the ignominy — it just happened in 1650 or so — most of the better people of Greenwich will speak to us now.

Those darned Israelis! If they hadn’t cut off Hamas’s food supply, those hostages would have all enjoyed a holiday at the hands of their hosts.

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Revising history, or restoring it?

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Spiked: It was the woke elites who ‘purged’ America’s museums, not Donald Trump

Don’t believe the media hysteria: Trump’s executive order on history and truth deals a welcome blow for sanity.

Brendan O'Neill
chief political writer

This month’s Doublespeak Award goes to the BBC. President Trump is spearheading a ‘purge’ of America’s top museums, it breathlessly reports. The madman in the White House has instructed the Smithsonian Institution to put back all ‘memorials and statues’ that were ‘improperly removed’ from federal property in recent years, the Beeb says. Hold up. Call me a stickler for linguistic accuracy, but isn’t a purge when you tear monuments down, not when you put them back up?

Yes, a new Orwellian diktat has dropped: war is peace, freedom is slavery, and reversing a purge is a purge. What the BBC and others are madly calling Trump’s ‘purge’ is outlined in his latest executive order. It’s titled ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’. It ‘targets’ the Smithsonian Institution, which oversees 21 museums in the US, 17 of which are in Washington, DC. It tells the Smithsonian to cut out the ‘anti-American ideology’, resist any exhibitions that ‘divide Americans by race’, and restore monuments that were toppled or hidden away in the service of woke ideology over the past five years.

Shorter version: stop purging. Imagine how drunk on the Kool-Aid of anti-Trumpism you would need to be to describe a plea to museums to stop erasing American history and stop hiding American artefacts as a ‘purge’. The clue is in the name, people: the order is about ‘restoring’ things, not purging them. It says the Smithsonian and its museums were once ‘global icon[s] of cultural achievement’, but of late they’ve fallen under the sway of ‘a divisive, race-centred ideology’ that depicts ‘American and Western values as inherently harmful’. And that stops now, it says.

Come on, this is not a McCarthyite stab at cleansing museums of ‘progressive’ thinking – it’s an effort to reverse the McCarthyism of those woke ideologues who cleansed DC’s wonderful museums of their traditional mission and even of some of their objects. The order doesn’t lie. Museums really did convert to the cult of shame-faced anti-Westernism that has been all the rage in right-thinking circles these past few years.

The order reminds us that the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum hosted a sculpture exhibition that informed visitors that ‘sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism’. So it was less ‘Look at this wonderful art’ and more ‘Can you believe this racist shit?’. It also reminds us that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture became so intoxicated by critical race theory that it started referring to ‘hard work’ and ‘the nuclear family’ as obsessions of ‘white culture’. What, so black folk aren’t interested in working hard or having a family life? Isn’t that a tad racist for a museum of African-American history?

That attack on ‘white culture’ was uncovered in 2020. The museum published on its website a chart on the ‘Assumptions of Whiteness’. It described ‘objective, rational linear thinking’ as a ‘white’ trait, too. What’s the real ‘purge’ here? The Trump administration expressing disapproval of such hyper-racial propaganda in a federal-funded museum? Or the museum’s own erasure of the late 20th-century belief that we should treat people as individuals rather than as members of a racial bloc with their own distinctive ‘traits’? It’s the latter, isn’t it? They purged the spirit of MLK, not least by suggesting black people don’t do ‘objective, rational linear thinking’, and Trump’s just asking them to stop.

The order tells us that the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Museum is planning to celebrate the ‘exploits of male athletes’ who play in ‘women’s sports’. It’s true. The museum believes there is no ‘monolithic experience of womanhood’ and it plans to ‘include transgender women’ – ie, fellas – in its documenting of ‘women’s history’. If it’s a ‘purge’ to say men should be excluded from the category of womanhood, I guess I support purges now. What next: accusing London’s Science Museum of a ‘purge’ because it has no exhibitions on the magical healing of witch doctors?

The order is especially angry about the cultural establishment’s turn against American history. It reminds us there have been eruptions of woke racialism even in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, the very place where the Declaration of Independence was signed saying ‘all men are created equal’. There was workforce training there by an organisation that advocates the dismantling of ‘Western foundations’. The park’s rangers were told to consider the ‘racial identity’ of the visitors they engage with. You don’t have to be a Trumpist to find it deeply depressing that in the heart of old Revolutionary America, the very spot where the modern ideal of equality was born, the fumes of the divisive new racialism have taken hold.

The cultural elites have engaged in a ‘widespread effort to rewrite [American] history’ with the aim of fostering ‘a sense of national shame’, the order says. Where’s the lie? We can see this Orwellian rewriting of history in everything from the institutionalisation of shame in DC’s once great museums to the 1619 Project, the New York Times initiative to reimagine the founding year of America as 1619, when slaves first arrived, rather than 1776, when independence from Britain was declared. The cultural elites have been hell-bent on reimagining America as a nation born from the sin of slavery rather than from the wonders of revolutionary democracy. Imagine spending years waging such a Stalinist assault on historical truth and then accusing other people of carrying out a ‘purge’. The gall.

There’s no denying it: museums have lost the plot. Last year the Biden administration brought in new regulations requiring museums to ‘obtain consent from tribes’ before displaying their cultural items. This led to museums around the US hiding away Native American objects and even closing down entire rooms containing tribal artefacts. Tell me, what’s madder: the existential hysteria of throwing blankets over old objects or the new administration’s call to ‘reinstate’ all monuments and memorials that were removed? The era of sniffy elite shame over American history is over, guys. You’ll just have to get back to enlightening visitors to your museums rather than treating us as targets for your arrogant moral re-engineering.