Legal experts: Trump Can Defund Sanctuary Cities
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to cut off funding for “sanctuary cities” (including New York) that resist his call to help the feds’ deport violent criminals who in the country illegally. And despite critics’ claims this would be unconstitutional, two legal scholars assert it would “almost certainly pass muster at the Supreme Court.” In the Los Angeles Times, David Rivkin and Elizabeth Price Foley write that while Washington can’t force states and cities to carry out federal law — i.e., actual deportations — they can be made to disclose information. Which means “Congress can require state, local or university police to tell federal agents when they arrest an immigrant present in the country illegally.” So “withholding funds from cities and universities that provide sanctuary” for such criminals is constitutional.
Foreign desk: Bolton Would Be the Anti-Kerry
If media silence is the judge, then former UN Ambassador John Bolton “looks like the front-runner for secretary of state,” writes Eli Lake at Bloomberg. Yes, he has “some liabilities,” including “too close” ties with “the nuttier fringes of the anti-Sharia movement.” But there are “strong reasons” why “he would be a good fit” with Trump, including his “significant experience navigating the State Department.” He’s also been “a successful diplomat” with proven accomplishments and “takes a hard line with rogue states.” In “temperament and ideology,” he is John Kerry’s opposite — and “it’s worth asking what the Kerry approach has gotten us.”
Ex-diplomat: Taiwan Policy Has Long Been Broken
Jobn Tkacik, a retired Foreign Service officer who served in both Taipei and Beijing, says he is “pleasantly amused by the media kerfuffle” over Trump’s phone call with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-Wen. Writing at The National Interest, he recalls a similar brouhaha in 1980 when then-candidate Ronald Reagan called for re-establishing “official relations” with Taipei. Yet few realize that the United States “does not recognize, and never has, a ‘One China’ of which Taiwan is part.” What Washington acknowledges is “China’s position” that Taiwan is part of China, but the US “has not itself agreed to this position.” Trump’s phone call is a “fresh breeze” that clears the air of “misinformation that has enveloped Washington’s China policy for the last quarter century” — and which “hasn’t been working out too well for us.”
Retired Marine: Stop Saying US Has the Best Military
Defense Secretary Ash Carter is making a mistake when he says repeatedly that “today’s American military is the best the world has ever seen.” Col. (ret.) Gary Anderson, writing in Foreign Policy, says such “chest-beating breeds complacency.” Fact is, “in the absence of real mobilization exercises and readiness war games, we simply have no way of quantifying our capability to wage war in either Europe or Asia in the near term.” Anderson says today’s officers tell him “horror stories” about a “lack of lack of training opportunities and flight hours.” And many “fear disciplining people of other genders and races, believing they will be accused of racism or sexual harassment.” The next administration, he warns, can’t fix something until it knows “how broken it is.”
Policy wonk: Repeal Community Reinvestment Act
Ben Carson’s selection as Housing and Urban Development secretary “provides the chance to rethink a great deal of what the 1960s-era agency has done,” says Howard Husock says at National Review. He suggests Carson “push for outright repeal of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which mandates bank lending to low-income communities and low-income households” and was implicated “ the 2008 housing-finance crisis.” In the age of Quicken Loans and other online services, local banks are no longer the last word in mortgages, he notes. Yet they’re still “under pressure from regulators to make loans to low-income borrowers, regardless of whether they are repaid.” Says Husock: “Guaranteeing mortgages to any and all comers only causes problems down the line.”