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Wednesday, May 10, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
O
P
I
N I
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Jonah
Goldberg
Letters to the Editor…
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To the Editor:
I couldn’t let Craig Rullman’s April 26 col-
umn “Red-Teaming the climate question” go
unchallenged.
He would like you to believe that climate
change is far from “settled science” and needs
to be further debated.
Peter Frumhof, director of science and
policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists,
says the scientific community, in its vari-
ous forms and in professional journals, has
a very well-established, time-tested and by-
and-large quite effective process for evaluat-
ing alternative hypotheses about any body of
science — and that’s called independent peer
review.
“The notion that we would need to create
an entirely different new approach, in par-
ticular for the specific question around global
warming is unfounded and ridiculous and sim-
ply intended to promote the notion of a lack
of consensus about the core findings, which in
fact is a false notion.”
Mr. Rullman, I suggest you take your own
advice and depend “on the integrity of sci-
entists and their research to help me form an
intelligent opinion.”
Terry Weygandt
Sisters Weather Forecast
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A great deal has been said
about Donald Trump’s viola-
tions of “democratic norms.”
I agree with much of it.
But the big problem with
violating democratic norms
— the unwritten customs and
practices even political oppo-
nents traditionally abide by
— is that once you’ve done
it, everybody else wants to
do it, too. This makes every-
thing worse, because when
the people most offended by
Trump’s violations respond
in kind, they not only con-
tribute to the problem, they
create incentives for Trump
and his biggest supporters to
keep doing it.
For example, the outgo-
ing Obama administration
was horrified by the pros-
pect of being replaced by the
Trump administration. The
exact details have yet to be
revealed, but it seems that
some in the old guard may
have violated norms about
“unmasking” the identities of
certain individuals, and they
certainly violated norms by
leaking various highly clas-
sified details to the press. In
response, Trump claimed
vindication in his claims that
he was wiretapped.
A better example might be
Stephen Colbert, host of “The
Late Show” on CBS. He has
found a sweet spot in the rat-
ings as a leading voice of
the anti-Trump “resistance.”
That’s fine. TV is a niche
business these days, even at
the broadcast networks. But
last week, Colbert’s animus
toward Trump’s crudeness
got the better of him. Suffice
it to say that if you want to
condemn a president for
his incivility, you squander
some credibility when you
describe the president of the
United States in a lewd act
with a foreign dictator.
The most acute example
of the problem, however,
is working its way through
the courts. During the cam-
paign, Trump outrageously
and ridiculously called for
a “total and complete shut-
down” of Muslims entering
the United States. He justi-
fied the ban on the campaign
trail with lots of incendiary
statements.
One of his first acts as
president was to sign an
executive order suspending
entry into the U.S. by resi-
dents of seven countries for
90 days. It empowered gov-
ernment agencies to allow for
exceptions on a case-by-case
basis.
The order, which was
immediately blocked by fed-
eral courts and ultimately
rescinded, was a sloppy
piece of work. But it wasn’t a
Muslim ban. The vast major-
ity of Muslims live outside
of those seven countries and
were unaffected by it.
In March, Trump issued
a second “travel ban” execu-
tive order to take into account
some of the legal and politi-
cal objections to the first.
Iraq was dropped from the
list, for example.
That order, too, was
blocked by judges. The 4th
Circuit in Virginia heard
arguments in the case
Monday.
Reasonable people can
disagree with the policy
merits of the ban, legally,
morally, politically and stra-
tegically. But what I find
troubling is the way various
judges have taken to acting
like pundits weighing in on
Trump’s campaign rhetoric.
For instance, Hawaii Judge
Derrick Watson of the 9th
Circuit responded to the idea
that Trump’s past utterances
are irrelevant with this preen-
ing statement: “The court
will not crawl into a corner,
pull the shutters closed, and
pretend it has not seen what
it has.”
Historically, paying such
deference to political rhetoric
is highly irregular.
In Monday’s hearing, a
lawyer for the ACLU con-
ceded that if a hypothetical
president — Hillary Clinton
or someone else — had
issued the same executive
order, it could be constitu-
tional. But Trump makes it
unconstitutional. That’s nuts.
I don’t blame judges or
anyone else for being dis-
gusted with Trump’s rhetoric.
But judges aren’t comedians
or pundits. Their job is to fol-
low the law.
Trump doesn’t help by
referring to his executive
orders as a “ban” (so as to
pretend he’s fulfilled a prom-
ise he could never keep). But
the reality is that he aban-
doned the ban from the get-
go. When judges pretend oth-
erwise to prove their “woke-
ness” they undermine demo-
cratic norms even further.
And they give Trump and his
boosters one more reason to
screech that the courts are
biased against him.
© 2017 Tribune Content
Agency, LLC
Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and
are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.