Luke Ford

Ilana Mercer tweets: “Donald J. Trump must secure his person over and above his state-bought-and-paid-for security detail. Mr. Trump is unseating Rome-On-The-Potomac.”

Report from World Net Daily:

Donald Trump’s online critics have proposed an alternative to his anti-terrorism policies: Assassinate him instead.

Secret Service agents assigned to protect Trump since Nov. 11 may be working overtime in the wake of his comments on halting Muslim immigration into the U.S. A slew of death threats against the billionaire were tweeted after a campaign stop in South Carolina on Monday.

“Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine,” Trump said in a statement released Tuesday. “Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.”

Trump’s extreme critics saw no irony between his statements on Islamic radicals and their calls for his assassination.

“Can we kill Trump?” asked a woman named Tijani.

“Now he wants to impede Muslims from entering the U.S.? Someone really needs to kill trump ASAP,” wrote a user identified as Aldo.

“ISIS needs to kill Trump,” wrote a woman named Jodie.

An extensive list of the calls to violence were compiled by Infowars on Tuesday.

House Speaker Paul Ryan and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus both distanced the Republican Party from Trump on Tuesday.

“We need to aggressively take on radical Islamic terrorism but not at the expense of our American values,” Priebus told the Washington Examiner.

“This is not conservatism. What was proposed [by Trump] is not what this party stands for. And more importantly, it’s not what this country stands for,” Ryan said during a press conference with House Republicans.

The billionaire defended his position during an appearance on CNN Tuesday morning, telling host Chris Cuomo that a rejection of his plan is tantamount to putting “blinders” on.

Jeb Bush: Let’s Focus On Helping The Christian Syrian Refugees, Rather Than The Muslims
Bush said that the U.S. should use a careful screening process to ensure the refugees it accepts are Christian.

In the wake of the Paris terror attacks, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) said Sunday that American aid toward refugees should be geared toward Christians who are fleeing persecution in Syria, as opposed to those who are Muslim.
“I think we need to do thorough screening and take in a limited number,” Bush said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “There are a lot of Christians in Syria that have no place now. They’ll be either executed or imprisoned, either by Assad or by ISIS. We should focus our efforts as it relates to the refugees for the Christians that are being slaughtered.”
The White House’s plan to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees has come under attack from Republican presidential candidates in the wake of Friday’s terror attack in Paris, which claimed at least 129 lives and wounded at least 350. Officials say one of the attackers held a Syrian passport and appears to have come through Greece among the throngs of refugees, increasing fears that ISIS is using the crisis as a way to infiltrate Europe.
Bush said that the U.S. should use a careful screening process to ensure refugees are in fact Christian, saying “we need to be obviously very, very cautious.”
Bush isn’t the only GOP candidate to say U.S. compassion as it relates to the refugee crisis should focus on Christians. “President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s idea that we should bring tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees to America — it is nothing less than lunacy,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in an interview with Fox News on Saturday.
“Now on the other hand,” Cruz added, “Christians who are being targeted, for genocide, for persecution, Christians who are being beheaded or crucified, we should be providing safe haven to them.”

Eric Posner, Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago Law School, writes:

Probably not. The Supreme Court has held consistently, for more than a century, that constitutional protections that normally benefit Americans and people on American territory do not apply when Congress decides who to admit and who to exclude as immigrants or other entrants. This is called the plenary power doctrine. The Court has repeatedly turned away challenges to immigration statutes and executive actions on grounds that they discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, and political belief, and that they deprive foreign nationals of due process protections. While the Court has not ruled on religious discrimination, it has also never given the slightest indication that religion would be exempt from the general rule.

There is even precedent for Trump’s plan. In 1891, Congress passed a statute that made inadmissable people who practice polygamy (directed, at the time, at Mormons), and in 1907 extended this ban to people who “who admit their belief in the practice of polygamy.” While Congress later repealed the latter provision (the former seems to be still on the books), no court–as far I know–ruled it unconstitutional.

The plenary power doctrine is universally loathed by scholars and some have argued that it is effectively a dead letter. But any honest answer to a journalist’s question about whether Trump’s plan to ban Muslim immigration is unconstitutional should start with the plenary powers doctrine, and observe that it would be an uphill battle to persuade the Supreme Court to abandon a century of precedent. Unfortunately, that is not what scholars–who certainly know better–are telling journalists. They are likely being abetted by journalists and headline writers who don’t like the idea that Trump’s ban would be lawful. Not everything that is stupid or offensive is unconstitutional.

(N.B.: blocking American Muslims overseas from entering the country would certainly be unconstitutional, and blocking immigration by Muslims would raise complicated international-law questions.)