Truth vs. The Refugee Ban.
Consider this train of logic.
“The idea is preposterous. It wouldn’t have stopped a single one of the bloodthirsty acts that have occurred to date. It only deprives honest, law-abiding people of due process. It’s too broad. And besides, it violates the Constitution. People cannot be denied their rights simply because they don’t look or behave like the rest of us.”
It’s the basic argument the NRA wing of the Republican Party makes every time there’s yet another mass shooting in a schoolyard or nightclub and people start talking about ways to decrease the level of firepower we make so easily available to lunatics and terrorists.
It’s also the argument these same politicians are getting smacked with as they try to defend their ban on travelers from a group of Muslim countries. Irony can be a glorious thing. The bull elephants trumpet their outrage at the words come back to haunt them. But you have to wonder if the intellectual dishonesty makes them squirm at least a little.
The truth is catching up with them. That may be the best news of all to come out of a week of headlines about the president’s immigration policy hitting the wall of our judicial system. We’ve been told we abide in some sort of dystopian post-truth era. Now we’re seeing what happens when truth gets its day in court.
A president who campaigned promising a complete ban on Muslims entering the country finds those words difficult to escape when he tries to argue in court that his executive order doesn’t target religion.
A president who rants about a “so called judge” finds himself standing on quicksand when his administration needs to make a legal argument about the separation of powers in a constitutional democracy.
A president who routinely fills his Twitter account with fictions about hoards of terrorists pouring over our border now finds no sane person will believe him when he says we urgently need a shutdown of travel to keep the country safe.
I think the politicians sense they’ve dug themselves into deeper hole than they intended. Like any big modern organization their first instinct is to dig ever more furiously. The government is publicly shamed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit by its inability to offer any evidence that supports a ban on travel from nations that have done us no harm. So we’re treated to breathtaking new fictions. The Bowling Green Massacre, penned by presidential spin mistress Kellyanne Conway. The Atlanta Massacre, from the podium of White House press secretary Sean Spicer.
Even here we learn that the truth still has some fight left in it. Instead of spreading these fake news stories like they did during the election, the good denizens of the Internet had a hoot mocking them. The ridicule of Ms. Conway and Mr. Spicer spread like a prairie fire.
But let’s not allow these small victories for truth make us overconfident. A new weekend arrives. A new troupe of presidential aides takes to the airwaves to spin the next round of falsehoods. No one knows where this will ultimately end up. There is a real fear that the United States government is lurching toward authoritarianism, and the central battle will be fought around truth. As the poet said, we have miles to go before we sleep.
We can only hope for the best for the good people who managed to reunite with their families and their universities and their jobs during the reprieve from the president’s travel ban. And, we can look forward to more days in court. A lot of them. In another bit of irony, the Republicans made sure of that when they perfected suing the Federal Government as a strategy for the party out of power.
The method of the courts is careful pursuit of truth. A party that throws its lot in with the alt-truth crowd might find the road ahead isn’t the cakewalk they anticipated.
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