The most startling aspect of President Trump’s immigration executive order may be the cavalier process by which it was shaped: Trump’s inner circle plowing ahead, leaving behind or steamrolling the agencies and officials who would implement it and have expertise on how to craft it. The result was chaotic, cruel, and apparently lawless enforcement that ended with deportation orders of vetted migrants and lawful U.S. permanent residents.
The substance of the policy, at least how it was enforced, was also a gross overreach. Beyond the deportations, which have been halted by courts, the entire policy strikes me as overbroad, cruel, and unneeded.
It’s perfectly possible to separate the run-and-gun sloppiness from the substantive idea behind the order. But both the ramshackle rulemaking and the policy’s overreach seem to have the same source: paranoia in the Oval Office.
Why would the White House skip consultation with the Department of Homeland Security (including Customs and Border Protection), or with the State Department*? Maybe Trump, Stephen Bannon, and Steve Miller were just in a huge hurry to get this order issued in Trump’s first week.
More likely, Trump and his inner circle of pitchfork populists simply didn’t trust the agencies.
Trump’s team has advanced a handful of executive actions through a normal and time-consuming process that involves consulting with many experts and lawyers and working with the relevant agencies. This immigration order was different. The agencies, it seems, were excluded, as we explained in our editorial.
So why didn’t the White House trust the agencies? Did their disdain for “the swamp” convince them that they could trust only their own counsel? Did they fear an agency might block the rule as illegal or try to tailor it more narrowly? That sounds like the kid who won’t ask his parents for advice on an undertaking because he knows it’s a bad idea.
Or did Trump, Bannon, and crew decide that any benefit to be gained from consultation and review was smaller than the risk of a leak?
If this thorough distrust and even disdain for the rest of the executive branch is the explanation, then it’s deeply dangerous.
Yes, career bureaucrats, for reasons good and bad, can make life difficult for good elected officials and agency heads. Yes, a draft of this order would have leaked, generating bad press. But if the White House was convinced it was doing to right thing for the country, it could overcome these obstacles, especially because the president has final say on executive orders.
“Drain the swamp” shouldn’t mean “make it up as we go along.” Governing is a serious and complex business. The federal government is complex and massive beyond comprehension. Just because Bannon, as I do, wishes the government were smaller and simpler doesn’t mean it is okay to try to run it like a start-up out of the Oval Office.
This isn’t Trump’s little real estate company. This isn’t Bannon’s media company. This isn’t something one can run just by being as smart as Trump thinks he is.
There is such a thing as expertise. Trump may believe he knows how to fight the Islamic State better than the generals, but his ego isn’t the whole story here. He could have run his executive order through the normal process, accepting good input and rejecting the the “stupid,” but refusing to even go to the agencies reeks of the same paranoid desire for secrecy that defined Hillary Clinton’s inner circle.
Paranoia is also embedded in the substance of the order.
Yes, our border is central to our anti-terrorism efforts. Yes, it’s extremely difficult to vet migrants from countries in meltdown, such as Libya and Sudan, which is part of why we currently have such stringent standards for refugees. Our current vetting system may require reform. Surely, it always requires maintenance and upkeep. But there’s no evidence at all that jihadists are streaming across our borders at the moment.
The (reportedly) deliberate decision by the White House to block and deport aleady-approved entrants, including lawful permanent residents, is a telling detail here.
Only a paranoid mind would look at college professors, parents, and students returning home to the U.S. from abroad and think that national security required we send them all back.
You can’t treat everyone as a terrorist just because you could imagine them being terrorists. This is something conservatives should understand.
A government insisting on reducing gun deaths to zero would be a government that tramples on basic rights. A police force set on reducing crime to zero would be abusive, as would an IRS dead-set on collecting every possible penny.
Similarly, demanding we do everything possible to prevent every potential terrorist attack requires we treat everyone as a potential terrorist. In this mindset, there’s no room for privacy and there’s no room for refugees or immigrants. Fear of bad guys, when allowed to grow unchecked, crowds out room for good things.
The Sunday after Trump’s executive order was the Sunday when Catholics’ weekly Gospel reading was the beatitudes. “Blessed are the merciful,” Christ says at Matthew 5:7, “for they shall be shown mercy.” These moms, these infants, and these old blind men detained in airports and sent back to Syria are perfect targets for mercy.
These arguments against the process and substance of the executive order aren’t left-wing arguments. Respect for process, intellectual modesty, limited government, and mercy — they are the hallmarks of conservatives and Christians.
Paranoia, however, doesn’t leave room these virtues.
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* This story originally suggested, per media reports, that the White House skipped consultation with DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. Subsequent reporting has refuted that report.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
