The haters are in charge of immigration “reform”, Sahil Kapur reports for Bloomberg Politics. President-elect Trump has chosen for his transition team the notorious Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, author of Arizona’s “Papers, Please” law, which allows police to stop anyone they suspect of being in the U.S. illegally. Hey, no danger of racial profiling there! Unsurprisingly Kobach is also a big expert on “voter fraud.”
Rep. Paul Ryan, brave as always, says “I’m in favor of securing the border, and I do believe that you have to have physical barriers on the border. I will defer to the experts on the border as to what is the right way to secure the border.” Sure, Paul! You’re only Speaker of the House! What do you know?
There’s more not to like on our new president’s transition team, including Dan DiMicco, described by Keith Bradsher of the New York Times as “a longtime steel executive and trade critic, to oversee trade issues during his administration’s transition. Mr. DiMicco writes a blog, liberally sprinkled with exclamation points, that blames America’s industrial decline on cheating by trade partners, particularly China.”
Still not depressed? Over at the American Conservative, Dan Larison reminds us that three of Trump’s leading advisors/henchmen, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, and John Bolton, “have all been boosters of the totalitarian cult and “former” terrorist group, Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), which seeks to replace the current Iranian government with its cult leader. Trump has made denouncing the nuclear deal a major part of his indictment of Obama’s foreign policy, and Iran hawks in Congress will be eager to torpedo it.”
Dan points out, here, that repudiating the deal would make no sense, because Iran has already gotten most of the carrot. Repudiation would leave them free to build a bomb if they wished. But, of course, Trump et al. aren’t interested in making sense. What they need is an enemy to bully and harass and threaten with regime change and Iran will fill the bill perfectly.
