“As we have shown, Donald Trump attempted to overturn the presidential election. “It has become clear that the efforts Donald Trump oversaw and engaged in were even more chilling and more threatening than we could have imagined,” Cheney said. The president’s own top aides told him there was no evidence of widespread fraud in Joe Biden’s victory. The six hearings of the House of Representatives’ January 6 committee so far have pointed the finger at Trump for encouraging an armed mob of supporters to march on the US Capitol in an effort to slow and stop the counting of electoral votes. We must not do that, and we cannot do that.” “But to argue that the threat posed by Donald Trump can be ignored is to cast aside the responsibility that every citizen – every one of us – bears to perpetuate the republic. “One need only look at the threats that are facing the witnesses who’ve come before the January 6 committee to understand the nature and the magnitude of that threat. The 55-year-old noted that some in her party were embracing Trump and enabling his lies while others are choosing to look the other way because it is the easier path. And he is aided by Republican leaders and elected officials who have made themselves willing hostages to this dangerous and irrational man.” “And that is a former president who is attempting to unravel the foundations of our constitutional republic. “At this moment, we are confronting a domestic threat that we have never faced before,” Cheney told the audience. But this is not the case, and seriousness about the Constitution–and all the good things that it secures–requires us to admit this and to resist the temptation to invoke the Constitution in cases where it does not really speak to the question.The Wyoming congresswoman, ostracized by much of her party, was speaking on Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, a day after the January 6 committee’s latest explosive hearing. We now have a deep rooted tendency to think that everything that is objectionable must also be unconstitutional. Faced with this lack of any record suggesting a possible application of the Establishment Clause to immigration policy, any Court serious about doing its job properly–that is, serious about the limits of its own power and about the traditional presumption of constitutionality–would be in no position to strike down such a policy. And I am pretty confident that a search of the debates over the Establishment Clause would show that nobody at the time of its framing and ratification was thinking that it had any bearing on immigration policy. But I have never before now heard of any effort to apply the Clause to immigration policy. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from passing any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” There has been a lot of argument about what, exactly, this means. This argument is a little better, insofar as it is not immediately defeated by the obvious words of the constitutional provision in question. The other argument is that Trump’s proposed policy would violate the Establishment Clause. So this argument is pretty much a non-starter. People entering the country are not by that act holding a public office. But this clause bans legal tests for holding public office. I have seen people claim that Trump’s proposed ban would violate the No Religious Tests Clause of the Constitution. The problem is that the arguments for this claim are very weak. But some of them go further and claim it is unconstitutional. Trump’s critics have plenty of leeway to say that his proposal is mistaken, bad, or even un-American. I am not saying that Trump intends to achieve this effect, but it does seem to happen almost every time. Once again, Donald Trump has set off an explosion of public argument–this time over his call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country until, as he says, American authorities can figure out “what the hell is going on.” And once again, he has provoked those who want to criticize him into themselves saying things that are questionable.
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