On Monday, December 7th, Donald Trump the Republican frontrunner for President, released a statement to the press calling for (if he were president) “a total and complete shutdown of muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” This was a bold statement that not everyone agreed with, in fact, many politicos and pundits on both the left and the right called it racist, xenophobic, unconstitutional, etc.
The White House, in its infinite wisdom, trotted out Josh Earnest, the current lapdog mouthpiece of liberal bull$hit, to not only denounce Trump, but to literally tell the press that, “what Donald Trump said yesterday disqualifies him from serving as President.” They called him un-American for espousing an idea…when in actuality calling for someone to have punitive restrictions enacted on them because of their exercise of free speech is the real un-American activity here. In fact, I looked in the Constitution, and I couldn’t find anywhere where it said if you say something the party in power hates, you’re disqualified from running for office. Nothing at all…in fact all I found was the right to free speech. So no matter what you think of Trump’s idea, any rational American would have to argue that he has the right to make it, even if it disgusts them. The real question to answer is this: the media has been shouting from the rooftops, MSNBC, CNN, etc. that Trump’s idea of a temporary moratorium on Muslim entry into this country is unconstitutional. That is what the media would like us to believe.
Well it seems that strangely enough, we have a section of U.S. code that deals with “Inadmissible Aliens” actually U.S. Code, Title 8, Chapter 12, Subchapter II, part 2, 1182…a long look up, for sure but there is a whole section on terrorism (1182,a, 3, B) but then there is a caveat for the President in general (1182,f) that says, “Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, [emphasis mine] he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”
This isn’t new, in fact, this part of the U.S. Code was passed in 1952 during the Eisenhower Administration. But I guess the constitutionality of the U.S. Code should be in doubt and Trump should be disqualified from running for President. But wait didn’t we have a situation that used this bit of U.S. Code? Let’s see…
It seems that during the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979, President Jimmy Carter, rounded up all 50,000 Iranian students in the country at the time and then ejected 15,000 of them, then banned all Iranians from travelling or immigrating to the U.S….if I recall correctly wasn’t the overthrow of the Shah in Iran about hard line religious Imams taking control and establishing a theocracy? It was.
An appeals court said of his decision, “The present controversy involving Iranian students in the United States lies in the field of our country’s foreign affairs and implicates matters over which the president has direct constitutional authority.”
They also clarified that, “Distinctions on the basis of nationality may be drawn in the immigration field by the Congress or the executive. So long as such distinctions are not wholly irrational, they must be sustained.
So not only would a President Trump be able to ban all muslims from travelling to America for business, pleasure, or relocation, he could do it legally, and while it would certainly be interesting to see how the banning of an entire religion would work out as it covers many nationalities over most of the world, it would certainly be warranted seeing the amount of Islamic terrorism taking place around the world and the dangers it poses to American citizens.
It might not be popular with the liberal left, of even the moderately center, and while I personally would harbor some reservations of a ban on 1.1 billion people for even a limited amount of time, it would certainly be legal, defensible, and Constitutional.