The "Unconstitutional" "Ban"

Mark Levin is not my favorite talk show host.  However, as an attorney well-versed on constitutional matters, I consider him an expert in that area.  Today he devoted almost his entire three-hour show to discussing how Trump's EO is NOT "unconstitutional."  The left has latched onto "unconstitutional" and has their rabid army of bots repeating the mantra over and over, while most of them have no clue what is actually IN our constitution.  Levin demonstrated this several times today on his program, insisting that callers complaining that it was "unconstitutional" cite Article and Section or Amendment that it violates.  Of course, none of them could.  :)

Hoping to find an article by ML, I did some cursory Googling and came upon this bit from last July (the final stretch of the presidential campaign).  This raised some political issues, which I shall address in a separate post.

Posts addressing the FACT that the recent EO is NOT A BAN ON MUSLIM IMMIGRATION are all over the board and have addressed it exceptionally well, so those points will not be repeated here.

This piece is PURE GOLD.  It lays out the recent history of presidential orders regarding immigration dating back to WWII.

Levin summed it up well on his show today:  "The US Supreme Court has ruled that the president has plenary powers."  Case closed.

Now, back to that supportive evidence:

"This week, Kellan Howell at Circa looks at some of the history behind other immigration bans and finds scant evidence that presidents – and particularly Congress – can’t do pretty much whatever they want when it comes to deciding who does or doesn’t get into the country.

It’s not the first time a U.S. president has moved to block specific migrant groups from entering the country, and there are loopholes in current federal law that could make Trump’s ban possible.

In fact, the last six presidents have shut U.S. borders for certain groups of people. Most famously, Jimmy Carter banned Iranians during the Iran hostage crisis.

Carter did this using his executive authority under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which gives the president the power to deny entry to immigrants that are deemed “unlawful, immoral, diseased in any way, politically radical etc.”

The list goes well beyond Carter. Reagan instituted five separate immigration bans, including the 1986 bar against Cubans coming into the states. And Congress has gone much, much further in the past, all with the blessing of the Supreme Court to set precedent. There was the Chinese Exclusion Act and the World War II ban on entry by Jews fleeing the Nazis. Nobody is pointing to those as particularly shining moments in the nation’s history, but in terms of the legal questions there is very little that either Congress or the President couldn’t do absent some drastic new precedent in the courts.

Of course, you can’t actually have a ban on Muslims but it’s not because of some legal barrier to doing so. The reality is that you can’t identify people by religion unless they choose to divulge their faith to you or you can spend the time to track down their entire history in whichever overseas hamlet they hail from and ask everyone where they went to church. But could you, for example, ban everyone coming from Iraq or Syria? There seems little doubt that you could and we’ve done the exact same thing in the past."

More legal info:

Today the source of the federal government's power to control international affairs generally, and immigration in particular, is accepted without question. For example, during the Iranian hostage ordeal of 1979B81, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the Attorney General's authority to order all Iranian students in the United States to report to INS offices and demonstrate the lawfulness of their presence in the country. Narenji v. Civiletti (D.C.Cir.1979). Similarly, in 2001, Congress authorized the President to “use all necessary and appropriate force . . . in preventing future acts of international terrorism against the United States.” 50 U.S.C.A. § 1541. Many cases refer to these powers as constitutional when, in fact, the powers are drawn from a more ancient foundation. The practically unlimited scope of the federal power over non-citizens may possibly be traced back to the undefined nature of its source.

http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/immigrationlaw/chapter2.html