“Separated From My Child—And Nobody Cares” is the current column. It’s now on Townhall.com (slightly abridged), but on WND.com and The Unz Review, au naturel.

An excerpt:

The late Charles Krauthammer was right about the rules of good writing. The use of the first-person pronoun in opinion writing is a cardinal sin.

To get a sense of how bad someone’s writing is count the number of times he or she deploys the Imperial “I” on the page. Krauthammer considered a single “I” in a piece to be a failure.

Use “I” when the passive-form alternative is too clumsy. Or, when the writer herself has earned the right to, because of her relevance to the story. (The story itself, naturally, should have relevance.) The second is my excuse here.

As a legal immigrant to the U.S., now an American citizen, I have a right to insert myself into the noisy narrative.

As a legal immigrant who was separated from her daughter, herself a legal immigrant, the onus is on me to share a scurrilous story that is part of a pattern:

America’s immigration policy—driven as it is by policy makers and enforces—exalts and privileges those of low moral character. It rewards law-breakers, giving them the courtesy and consideration not given to high-value, legal immigrants.

The same U.S. immigration law enforcers who cater so kindly to each illegal immigrant—the kind that is a drain on the country and has no right to be in the country—stripped my daughter of her American permanent residency privileges.

A young person travels alone and gets bamboozled at the border-crossing in Blaine, Washington State. So, they strip her of her green card.

That’s our immigration story.

My girl was studying in Canada. She got intimidated at the border and gave the wrong answer to her petty American inquisitor. So, she was quick-marched into a small booth and peppered with more questions meant to terrify.

With an intimidating display of machismo, the burly men of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) bullied a young girl into relinquishing her right of permanent residency (also the road to citizenship).

La Bandida was at bay. America was finally safe.

More fundamentally, hers was not an ill-gotten green card.

The principal sponsor, a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, had entered the US on an O-1 visa. Unlike the H-1B visa, the 0-1 visa doesn’t replace Americans; it adds to them. For it is granted to those with “extraordinary ability in the fields of science, education, business or athletics.” The O-1 necessitates “a level of expertise indicating that the person is one of the small percentage who has risen to the very top of the field of endeavor.”

Not by deceit did my child gain her green card. But by deceit is how the swarms on the border will get theirs. The squeaky wheels squatting on the southern border, funneled daily into the interior to create facts on the ground, are not refugees or legitimate asylum seekers. Rather, they are merely from what President Trump has termed “s–thhole countries.” By that criteria, Americans could be forced to welcome the world.

A refugee, conversely, is an individual who is …

… READ THE REST. “Separated From My Child—And Nobody Cares” is the current column. It’s on Townhall.com slightly abridged, and on WND.com and The Unz Review, as is.

UPDATE (8/13/018):

Secretary #KirstjenNielsen is fierce and brilliant. Beautiful ice lady. https://t.co/UklurMzBck

— Ilana Mercer (@IlanaMercer) August 9, 2018

Amy Coney Barrett: How can one fail to be impressed by this 46-year-old mother of seven, former Notre Dame law professor and clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia?

Speaking on Fox News (7/5), constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, certainly an intellect, intimated to Jason Chaffetz that none of the justices on Trump’s list quite matches Neil Gorsuch for intellect. Turley sagely advised that the president “choose intellect, not optics.”

As Micky Kaus grumbles, the Federalist Society vets for Roe v. Wade. But do they vet for Flores? Making sure Trump doesn’t pick a Bushesque act-of-love justice seems like Job #1 for border controllers right now.

Ted Cruz and Rand Paul support Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), for reasons they don’t specify. They say he has fine principles. Well, what are Lee’s principles?

Principle is important. So is intellect.

This Washington Post item is crammed with grammatical mistakes. Mismatched subject and verbs, for example. Disgraceful. But here is, “Trump narrows list for Supreme Court pick, with focus on Kavanaugh and Kethledge.”

Quite correct: Republicans have had the chance to consolidate a conservative majority on the Supreme Court and … FAILED, REFUSED, or chose to break bread with the opposition, rather than keep the faith with the base and the original Constitution. As the author of this New York Times Review of Books essay suggests, the “mishaps” of previous republican presidents in appointing justices to the SCOTUS suggest “something less than full-throated judicial conservatism on their part.”

… In retrospect, it is remarkable that a strong conservative majority on the Court has not emerged before now. Since 1980, Republicans have held the presidency for twenty-two years and Democrats for sixteen. Ronald Reagan, who campaigned on the platform of choosing conservative judges, appointed three justices—Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Kennedy—and elevated William Rehnquist to the chief justiceship. That should have established conservative control. Yet O’Connor turned out to be a centrist, controlling the Court for a quarter-century by casting the decisive fifth vote in controversial cases. When she retired in 2006, Kennedy assumed her position as the swing justice and unexpectedly emerged as a liberal hero, voting, for example, to extend constitutional rights to detainees in Guantánamo Bay and marriage rights to same-sex couples.

George H.W. Bush also had the chance to consolidate a conservative majority. He appointed Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall but also replaced William Brennan with David Souter, who underwent a subtle yet significant evolution from Burkean conservative to Burkean liberal. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama each got two justices confirmed, which maintained the Court’s balance. That conservative control has been so long in coming reflects either miscalculation by Reagan and George H.W. Bush or (more likely) something less than full-throated judicial conservatism on their part. …

… THE REST IN “Tipping the Scales by Noah Feldman.”

Judge Napolitano is a left-libertarian. Always said so. On this site, I have often  exposed and argued against  his lefty exploits. Here he essentially asserts that if X trespasses into your home, you can’t, in natural law, remove him. Crap. I hazard that, were you to research this bit of Napolitano legalism, you’d find he’s hiding/finessing certain aspects of due-process jurisprudence.

UPDATE (7/2): I might not have phrased my words above well. Responses on Facebook certainly indicate so. My bad. I am a huge proponent of natural law. However, I think Napolitano here is not articulating natural justice at all, but is full of it. His is more legalism than natural law. I am sure there is a state-passed law somewhere that judges like him can use to criminalize what President Trump is doing. I doubt it’s natural law. Where in natural law does it imply that trespassers have to be kept in their natural clans and formations? That nonsense would be the purview of the positive law, most certainly “international law.”

Of course, “Libertarian and leftist protest over any impediment to the free flow of people across borders is predicated not on the negative, leave-me-alone rights of the individual, but on the positive, manufactured right of human kind to venture wherever, whenever.”—ILANA (May 1, 2009)