Law and Disorder: Trump Steps In
There were 1,025 of them in Minneapolis alone — buildings, homes, businesses, all damaged by the state’s three weeks of rioting. A colored map shows each spots of destruction, so dense it’s like looking down at a metropolis from a nighttime flight. “It’s going to take a long, long time” to even quantify all the wreckage, officials say. And it’s not over yet.
There were 1,025 of them in Minneapolis alone — buildings, homes, businesses, all damaged by the state’s three weeks of rioting. A colored map shows each spots of destruction, so dense it’s like looking down at a metropolis from a nighttime flight. “It’s going to take a long, long time” to even quantify all the wreckage, officials say. And it’s not over yet.
President Trump can’t walk into Minneapolis and try to stop the city’s violence. He can’t tell the city council to reconsider its ridiculous move to defund the police. But he can do his best to bring the situation under control using the power he has. Police reform, he’s decided is a good place to start. And in an executive order earlier this week, he tried to start a much-needed conversation about rebuilding trust and creating the kind of law enforcement communities can believe in.
“Americans want law and order," the president insisted at his Rose Garden press conference. "They demand law and order. They may not say it, they may not be talking about it, but that’s what they want.” So instead of targeting the brave men and women who provide it, let’s enact standards, he said, “as high and strong as there is on earth.”
Among other things, the White House’s Scott Turner said on "Washington Watch,“ the president wants to promote closer ties between law enforcement and the community. He wants to make sure that we’re training officers well, treating any "mental illness, addiction or homelessness.” He also wants to ensure that the kind of tactics used against George Floyd are never witnessed again. “So that type of trend is addressed in the E.O.,” Scott pointed out, “and the use of excessive force.” If officers do, he warns, they’ll be held accountable.
One of the president’s other directives is creating a national database to track the officers who’ve had offenses or faced “disciplinary action or criminal convictions or termination so that they can’t move from force to force freely. There will be accountability and transparency.” At the end of the day, Scott pointed out, we need more information sharing, especially between police departments. The idea, he insisted, is to start tearing down walls — not just in the field itself, but in the country.
As someone who spent more than 10 years in law enforcement, I commend the president for getting out front on this. Unfortunately, I can say from experience that the brutality Americans witnessed in May is real. It happens. I’ve seen it. In fact, I’ve called it out back when I was a police officer — and it cost me. But it’s important to remember what so many politicians, being led by extremists, have not, which is: it’s not the norm. It’s the exception. Still, I believe, the president is taking appropriate steps.
I policed the inner city for a good part of my career, and in my experience, those residents wanted us there. They’d come up to our cars in the neighborhoods, and we’d have good conversations — nothing like you’re seeing today in places like Seattle and Minneapolis, where the officers are the bad guys. But sadly, over the course of time, barriers have been erected between the police and the community, and in the absence of relationship or communication, fear has gripped both sides. Now, some people, obviously, have exploited this. But, as Scott pointed out, that fear causes people to do irrational things. “And we have to get back to… a sense of security on both sides.”
“When I was a little kid,” he remembered, “firemen and policemen were like our heroes. And that’s what we have to get back to.” The president’s executive order gets the ball rolling, but, as Scott said, it can’t do everything. Nothing can replace personal responsibility on either side. It all comes down to people on the local level, reaching out and rebuilding those relationships in good faith.
Originally published here.
Holding the Court in Contempt
At a time when Congress is lucky to scrape together an 11-percent confidence rating, a majority of Americans have expressed an unusual level of faith in our justices. Maybe they still believe SCOTUS is above the political fray. But trust in the court may become increasingly difficult after Monday’s “legislative” decision by six justices to redefine the meaning of biological sex.
The Supreme Court wasn’t built to write laws — so it shouldn’t be any surprise that they’re lousy at it. Justice Neil Gorsuch himself said the court would make rotten legislators, and then, to everyone’s surprise, set about proving it. Together with five other activists, he didn’t just decide to ignore the plain text of the law when he ruled men could be women — he ignored the plain facts of humanity. And, as far as Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) and others are concerned, set America’s future down a path of absolute chaos.
“Justice Gorsuch took a meat cleaver to the issue of how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should apply to LGBT individuals,” Senator Lee argued on "Washington Watch.“ And because of that, he says, Congress is going to have to "figure out how to clean up the mess.” And it’s a big one. “The biggest problem,” he insisted, “was that he made a legislative determination. He effectively rewrote the law. And when you rewrite the law through a judicial opinion, that’s a very crude way to operate. It’s not precise and it leaves… all sorts of questions [especially for] for religious institutions… completely [unanswered].”
And the justices knew it. The majority was quite clear that all of these other issues their ruling created would have to wait for another day. “Unfortunately,” Senator Lee shook his head, “what that really means is we’re going to leave that for a lot of other days… I’m convinced that not only my children, but my grandchildren’s generation will still not see the end of litigation resulting from the Bostock decision. Because when you take this kind of cleaver to federal law, it’s going to take not just years, but decades to iron out all the details. And there are going to be some real heartbreaking stories in the wake of it.”
How Gorsuch, a man who calls himself a textualist, could even arrive at such a conclusion is astounding. His whole logic, Lee said, is “tortured.” And now the American people are the ones who have to live with the pain. Like Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who gave a floor speech for the ages on the need for conservatives to rise up and refuse to take this, Senator Lee hopes this is an aberration for Gorsuch. But either way, Republicans in particular have to “go beyond just taking [nominees] at their word… We cannot take chances anymore. There’s too much on the line.”
When these vacancies occur, we can’t just take the establishment’s word for it. We need to know from the nominees’ record that they will not remake the law in their own image. If that makes the appointment controversial, so be it. Otherwise, as Senator Hawley told me on Tuesday, what’s the point in even passing laws? “I mean, we may as well just let the justices tell us what they think should be the right policy in any given case.”
In the meantime, plenty of liberals in Congress are hoping to move forward with laws — dangerous ones like H.R. 5 that build on the court’s extremism. A parade of smug Democrats took turns on the Senate floor yesterday demanding that Congress steamroll religious freedom even more by passing the Equality Act, which would mean an end to conscience rights, girls’ sports, privacy, women’s shelters, free speech, parental authority, autonomy in hiring and firing, and mandate for things like transgender surgery and treatment coverage and taxpayer-funded abortion.
“It’s one of the favorite tricks of the Left is to come up with legislation that has a title that… doesn’t sound at all menacing… Equality Act sounds nice until you stop and examine what it would actually do… The fact that this would openly threaten religious institutions and individuals throughout America who dare have divergent views, who dare act in conformity to their religious beliefs. This would end up having a punishing effect on them. To say nothing of what it would do to women’s athletics, what it would do to girls’ and women’s locker rooms, and restrooms in colleges and in public places. [It’s] scary.”
In the aftermath of the court’s legislating, a lot of people are asking: Why do we need Congress? Hopefully, in stopping horrible ideas like the Equality Act, we’re about to find out.
Originally published here.
Sinjar in the Crosshairs
He was only eight years old when ISIS fighters ripped him from his mom’s arms. “How do I feel?” he repeats blankly when a reporter asks him what it’s like to home again. “Really," he said quietly, "I don’t know how to feel.” Mazen spent five years starving under his captors, rising every morning with the knowledge that he was being trained to kill his own people. Until one day, last spring, when he was freed, sent back to a family he wasn’t sure was even alive.
Mazen is from Sinjar, where tens of thousands of Yazidis have lived since terrorists chased them up the mountain in 2014, executing thousands. Even now, mothers wait for sons and daughters who will never return — girls who are now women, sold into sexual slavery by the militant fighters. And yet, despite all the bloodshed and heartache, they are survivors. But Turkish forces, it seems, are determined to challenge that.
To the horror of Mount Sinjar’s refugees, the night skies have been full of explosions — the latest airstrikes to hammer an already fragile community. “[It’s] a war zone right now,” Yazidi activist Nadia Murad tweeted. “Turkish bombers fighter jets are bombing multiple locations. Over 150 Yazidi families had just returned to their homes. When will the Iraqi government and the international community apply some courage and political will to resolving security challenges in Sinjar?”
Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, hopes soon. “Turkey seems to be just continuing its long campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kurds. But the real problem and what’s really troubling is what the Turks are doing on Mount Sinjar,” he explained on "Washington Watch.“ "Now, it’s important to understand when we talk about Mount Sinjar, it’s not a little mountain. It’s a large mountain that’s about 50 miles long. And so you drive along valleys on either side of it. And on the mountain itself is where all these Yazidis live.”
These tortured people, he explained, managed to “weather the Islamic State, but many others are the refugees, the women, the girls who have been returning from Syria, liberated from ISIS. They’re trying to get their life together. And it’s not clear why the Turks are insisting on bombarding them. It really undercuts the development and it raises questions about whether Turkey is waging counter-terrorism — and it’s clear they’re not — or whether they’re pursuing a religious agenda and intolerant religious agenda.”
Imagine being a boy like Mazen, one of the few who made it out from ISIS alive, sitting in a camp on the mountain wondering if a bomb is going to take your life. It’s absolutely traumatizing. They’re already isolated, but the world is making them feel more so. “NATO,” Michael shook his head, “is being disturbingly quiet. When I was in Sinjar several months ago, right before the coronavirus hit, it was important that we not be there at night because that’s when the Turkish warplanes came.” But, as he points out, they aren’t just doing damage to the houses and camps. “This is an agricultural area. It’s a matter of planting crops. And whenever the crops would grow, the Turks would bomb them, and they would burn. So it is a deeply troubling scenario.”
What can the U.S. do? Well, if the actions President Trump took to free Pastor Andrew Brunson were any indication, we can impose tough economic sanctions until President Erdogan backs down. “It’s essential that we actually leverage economic pressure,” especially, Michael insists, since there’s obviously a religious agenda at work here. “Erdogan essentially comes from a Muslim Brotherhood background. And he’s seeking to impose his religion and his Islamism not only on Turkey’s Shiites and not only on Turkey’s Christians, but also the Yazidis as well. And it’s important to nip this process in the bud.” The sooner, for families like Mazen’s, the better.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
