With all due respect to Nolan, an argument that the statutory language saying that the "Attorney General" may grant asylum to people meeting certain requirements gives the president or his administration uncontrolled power to deny asylum at will, or as Nolan suggests, suspend all asylum grants, is quite a stretch.
Can Nolan point to any US court decision (I am not talking about courts in communist or fascist countries here - of course, they would go along with whatever the Leader wants) which has upheld this kind of totalitarian power?
Granted, Judge Brett Kavanaugh might very well uphold such power, based on reports of decisions and writings which would indicate that he views the president as someone with the effective power of a dictator, totally above the law.
This is why his confirmation to the US Supreme Court could prove to be a disaster, not only for immigrants, but for our democracy. It is frightening to read reports of plans to move ahead with his confirmation hearings on a "business as usual " basis, as if nothing exceptional were at stake.
With this cheerful thought, I will close my ilw.com comments until the beginning of September and wish all ilw.com readers a good month of August.
I am not going to waste any more time trying to educate Roger. If he wants to understand why "may" means that granting relief is discretionary, he can do some reading on how that term has been interpreted by the courts. It wouldn't hurt if he read the provisions on withholding and on Torture Convention relief too so he can see examples of the language used for mandatory grants of relief.
He also should read the Supreme Court's travel ban decision's interpretation of the president's power to keep aliens out of the country pursuant to section 212(f) of the Act.
I cannot argue with Nolan's point about the broad power given the president to exclude immigrants, even when doing so violates the freedom of religion of US citizens, in the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision upholding the latest version of Trump's Muslim ban. That decision could be the beginning of the end of democracy in America as we know it.
Some of Trump's avowedly white nationalist supporters (and I am not by any means implying that everyone who supports or defends Trump is a white nationalist or white supremacist) may no doubt pleased to see the president being granted more and more power to keep legal immigrants from entering the United States because they have the "wrong" color, religion or national origin - just our laws provided for 40 years beginning in 1924.
But authoritarian power to ban, exclude or expel unpopular minorities never confines itself to those groups for very long.
If any US president is given the power of an emperor to ban unpopular immigrants for any reason he (or she) chooses (as the Roman emperor Tiberius expelled the Jews from that city in A.D. 19), merely by using the magic words "national security" to paper over obvious racial or religious hatred, as in the Muslim ban case, it is only a matter of time before opponents of that same president will start to disappear in the middle of the night, as is the norm in Vladimir Putin's Russia.
If and when that happens, independent historians (assuming there are any left) could well look back on the Supreme Court's Muslim ban decision as the tipping point where it all began.
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Can Nolan point to any US court decision (I am not talking about courts in communist or fascist countries here - of course, they would go along with whatever the Leader wants) which has upheld this kind of totalitarian power?
Granted, Judge Brett Kavanaugh might very well uphold such power, based on reports of decisions and writings which would indicate that he views the president as someone with the effective power of a dictator, totally above the law.
This is why his confirmation to the US Supreme Court could prove to be a disaster, not only for immigrants, but for our democracy. It is frightening to read reports of plans to move ahead with his confirmation hearings on a "business as usual " basis, as if nothing exceptional were at stake.
With this cheerful thought, I will close my ilw.com comments until the beginning of September and wish all ilw.com readers a good month of August.
Roger Algase
Attorney at Law
He also should read the Supreme Court's travel ban decision's interpretation of the president's power to keep aliens out of the country pursuant to section 212(f) of the Act.
Nolan Rappaport
Some of Trump's avowedly white nationalist supporters (and I am not by any means implying that everyone who supports or defends Trump is a white nationalist or white supremacist) may no doubt pleased to see the president being granted more and more power to keep legal immigrants from entering the United States because they have the "wrong" color, religion or national origin - just our laws provided for 40 years beginning in 1924.
But authoritarian power to ban, exclude or expel unpopular minorities never confines itself to those groups for very long.
If any US president is given the power of an emperor to ban unpopular immigrants for any reason he (or she) chooses (as the Roman emperor Tiberius expelled the Jews from that city in A.D. 19), merely by using the magic words "national security" to paper over obvious racial or religious hatred, as in the Muslim ban case, it is only a matter of time before opponents of that same president will start to disappear in the middle of the night, as is the norm in Vladimir Putin's Russia.
If and when that happens, independent historians (assuming there are any left) could well look back on the Supreme Court's Muslim ban decision as the tipping point where it all began.
Roger Algase
Attorney at Law