Horowitz: Courts finally clamp down on executive actions … that deal with illegal aliens

It's almost as if the courts have been abolished. One governor after another has crushed our foundational liberties with impunity because of an unprecedented approach to confronting a respiratory virus. Every aspect of our lives and liberty has been stripped or thrown into chaos based on the capricious whims of executive fiat. Almost no court has intervened to protect the Bill of Rights. In comes a panel of judges for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals last Thursday and finally puts a stop to executive orders … but only as they relate to illegal aliens, not American citizens!

We now live in a country where American citizens have no right to open a business or to breathe free air without a mask, but illegal aliens have a right to be counted in the census and distort citizen representation! State governors can place interstate travel bans and restrictions on Americans in other states, but the president of the United States cannot prevent foreign nationals from breaking into the country and must even use their very presence in the country and their unilateral choice of state residency to add to the electoral totals of states like California. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

After the president was rebuffed by the courts in his attempt to count the number of U.S. citizens in the census, his backup plan was to at least discount those foreign nationals who are in the country illegally. On July 21, he released a memorandum instructing Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to supply the requisite information needed to ensure illegal aliens aren't counted in the census. After all, isn't one purpose of a census to know how many people can vote in a given area?

Yet, as we are being quarantined against our will and toddlers are being forced to mask up without any recourse in the court system, illegal aliens always get immediate representation in the courts. At the behest of New York's government, the Second Circuit issued an injunction on the order, claiming that the president engaged in "an unlawful exercise of the authority granted to the President." Suddenly, the courts are concerned with executive fiat that affects our lives!

Two of the three judges — Richard Wesley and Peter Hall — are Republican appointees. This is yet another case of Republican-appointed judges handing civilization-changing victories to the Left, a result that never occurs the other way around from Democrat-appointed judges.

The twisted irony about New York obtaining standing in this case and ultimately prevailing is that the reason why immigration policy was given over to the federal government was precisely to ensure that states don't admit undesirable aliens as a means of juicing up their representation in the national government. But that is exactly what states like New York and California are doing. They get to thwart federal law, thanks to numerous court rulings, and criminalize the enforcement of immigration law, thereby ensuring that illegal aliens are incentivized to come to their states. Then they turn around and demand they be counted. Talk about benefiting from the fruits of the crime!

As I've noted before, even if the dictate of the 14th Amendment to count "whole persons" compelled us to count immigrants, it could not encompass those who entered without consent. Our courts have stated in an interrupted stream of case law that any alien not legally admitted to the country is as if he is literally standing outside our boundary. "The petitioner, although physically within our boundaries, is to be regarded as if he had been stopped at the limit of our jurisdiction, and kept there while his right to enter was under debate," states the Supreme Court in U.S. v. Ju Toy, 1905.

The same way one doesn't need a reinterpretation of the Constitution to recognize that illegal aliens cannot be counted, one doesn't need an update of statute either. As John Noonan, former Ninth Circuit judge, said in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1985, "If there was an invading army on American soil, one does not suppose the Bureau of Census would count the enemy troops."

How sad that a clause of the 14th Amendment designed to ensure that black Americans were not disenfranchised is now being used to disenfranchise all Americans in favor of foreign invaders.

This ruling comes just days after a California judge ruled that the president cannot end the counting of the census itself this month and must continue it into October. Now judges apparently control all executive functions, and there is no pushback from the executive branch or an effort to draw the line on separation of powers.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in Minnesota ruled that a Somali immigrant who had provided aid to al-Shabab must be released early because of the virus. At the same time, a Los Angeles judge ruled that a pastor couldn't hold services indoors, again, because of that same virus.

Oh, and remember how almost no businesses owner won in court the right to keep their businesses from arbitrarily being deemed unessential by government? The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, which was supposedly made more conservative by Trump, ruled against Oklahoma City's anti-panhandling law. Blocking traffic and harassing motorists at highway medians is deemed a First Amendment right and is evidently essential during the virus, but a gym owner who tries to keep his business open is arrested.

See a pattern here of which "rights" are upheld and which ones are repudiated?

One thing is clear: The courts are worse than ever, despite the promise for change. They have failed to protect a single legitimate constitutional right. As such, why should society and other branches of government feel compelled to abide by their concoction of novel "rights" that would have shocked the consciences of our Founders?