Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney denounced judicial activism against President Trump’s executive orders on immigration on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily, with an eye toward preventing further atrocities like the Manchester bombing.
Gaffney said it was ironic, if not “downright bizarre,” that the “anti-constitutional misconduct” of judges to “impose their sense of national security in place of that of the commander-in-chief” would happen so close to the “horrific, barbaric jihadist attack” on children in Manchester.
He noted that suicide bomber Salman Abedi’s parents immigrated from Libya, and he himself had just returned from a trip to Libya – “a failed state, thanks in part to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, lest we forget” that was on the list of nations from which President Trump wished to temporarily suspend travel and immigration.
“This is the kind of place that President Trump has quite sensibly said we want to be able to screen, very carefully, people coming from there. We want a pause, not a ban. We want a pause in immigration from places like Libya in order to establish that the people who we are admitting from it are not jihadists of the kind that just killed children and young adults by the score in Manchester,” he said.
“Increasingly, what we’re seeing in the way of judicial tyranny – supplanting the commander-in-chief with their judgment as to what is in the national security interests of the United States – is out of touch with the sentiments of the American people, and more importantly, completely inconsistent with what is required to protect them,” said Gaffney.
In another ironic twist, Gaffney noted the ultimate fate of Trump’s travel ban would likely be decided by another lone judge, the quintessential “swing vote” on the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy.
“If he does, once again, come down on the side of sensible conservative thinking and practice and the Constitution and the law, I think the Supreme Court will repudiate what’s been done in these lower courts,” Gaffney predicted.
“If, on the other hand, he decides that his place in history is going to be advanced by coming down on this anti-constitutional line, stripping effectively the president of responsibilities that are vested in him, both by the Constitution and by federal statute, then it will be a very bad day for the Republic, and I think the president will have to come up with another plan,” he said.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.