Dear Biff:
It has become increasingly clear that you could not pass a high school government class. You have no rudimentary understanding of how the federal government works. For evidence, we need look no further than your most recent tweets regarding the U.S. Justice Department, the Supreme Court, and your executive orders banning travel from certain majority Muslim countries.
The series of tweets to which I refer include the following:
Tweet #1: "People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!"
Tweet #2: "The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C."
Tweet #3: "The Justice Dept. should ask for an expedited hearing of the watered down Travel Ban before the Supreme Court - & seek much tougher version!"
Tweet #4: "In any event we are EXTREME VETTING people coming into the U.S. in order to help keep our country safe. The courts are slow and political!"
Biff, Biff, Biff . . . .
If you wanted the Justice Department to stay with the original Travel Ban, you should not have withdrawn it. The Justice Department is part of the Executive Branch. You are the head of the executive branch. Once you withdrew the original Travel Ban and entered the second Travel Ban, the original Travel Ban had no force whatsoever. And who created that situation? That would be you, Biff.
You refer to the second Travel Ban as “watered down.†Well, you’re the one who watered it.
You say that you want the Justice Department to ask the Supreme Court to enter a “much tougher version†of your “watered down Travel Ban.†Reading this tweet, someone would think you had never heard of the bedrock constitutional doctrines of separation of powers or checks and balances.
The Supreme Court is the JUDICIAL branch of government; it adjudicates. It does not legislate. (That would be Congress). And it most certainly does not draft and sign executive orders. (That would be the President – namely you.)
And let’s not forget that the reason you issued your executive orders was to have time to put “extreme vetting†in place. You said you needed 90 – 120 days to do so. Well, you’ve had more than 120 days and, from your last tweet, it appears you’ve already done that. So the entire rationale for your travel ban is now moot.
Oh, and one more thing . . . . The Department of Justice has tried to make a silk purse out of your sow’s ear by arguing that the second version of the Travel Ban is not, in fact, a Travel Ban. And why is that?
Well, a Travel Ban would pretty clearly run afoul of the U.S. Constitution. You do know that “politically correct,†at least in this instance, might equate with the phrase “more likely to pass constitutional muster.†Or do you?
The Department of Justice has tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade two federal appellate courts that all those racist things you said during the campaign are not relevant to the appeal. “That was candidate Trump, not president Trump,†they claimed.
Now that you, as president, have doubled down on your campaign rhetoric, what is the DOJ to do?
In your rogue tweet storm, you seem to have decided that DOJ lawyers are not up to the task and that you would prefer to appear pro bono. Well, there’s an old adage that comes to mind: “He who represents himself has a fool for a lawyer.â€
Good luck with that, Biff. I’m willing to bet that even Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch might find all of this a little too much to swallow.
But don’t listen to me. Frankie Avalon had some great advice in the musical “Grease!†It came in the song titled “Beauty School Dropout.†Remember? "Go back to high school!"