Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 16

Huma Abedin’s Muslim-Brotherhood Ties

Despite mounting evidence of close ties between the Muslim Brotherhood and Huma Abedin, Secretary of State Clinton’s close aide, Republican congressional leaders -- particularly Senator John McCain and House Speaker John Boehner -- continue to target their ire not at the State Department but at Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.

Rep. Bachmann is one of five House conservatives who have raised concerns about Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of our government. Glenn Beck reported Tuesday that GOP leadership is trying to extort an apology out of Bachmann by threatening to boot her from the House Intelligence Committee if she fails to submit.

That got me to wondering: Any chance Speaker Boehner might take just a couple of minutes out of his busy jihad against Bachmann to focus on how the State Department -- during Ms. Abedin’s tenure -- has cozied up to Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief sharia jurist?

#ad#Sheikh Qaradawi is a promoter of jihadist terror. His fatwas endorse terrorist attacks against American personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombing -- by both men and women -- against Israel. He is a leading supporter of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. He also runs an umbrella organization called the Union for Good (sometimes referred to as the “Union of Good”), which is formally designated a terrorist organization under American law. The Union for Good was behind the “Peace Flotilla” that attempted to break our ally Israel’s blockade of the terrorist organization Hamas (the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch) in 2010.

That’s rather interesting -- at least to me, though apparently not to Speaker Boehner -- because Huma Abedin’s mother, Saleha, who is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s female division (the “Muslim Sisterhood”), is a major figure in not one but two Union for Good components. The first is the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief (IICDR). It is banned in Israel for supporting Hamas under the auspices of the Union for Good. Then there’s the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC) -- an organization that Dr. Saleha Abedin has long headed. Dr. Abedin’s IICWC describes itself as part of the IICDR. And wouldn’t you know it, the IICWC charter was written by none other than#...#Sheikh Qaradawi, in conjunction with several self-proclaimed members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

#page#In McCainWorld, these are what are known as “a few unspecified and unsubstantiated associations.” But I digress. Clearly, these significant Muslim Brotherhood connections are of scant interest to Speaker Boehner, who has decided the problem is not the Brotherhood connections but the people who are shedding light on the Brotherhood connections. Nevertheless, since Boehner purports to be all about cracking down on wasteful government spending, at least when he’s not signing off on deals to extend President Obama’s credit card by another trillion or three, I thought I might ask whether the State Department’s Fulbright Scholars Program aroused his curiosity ever so slightly.

Fulbright, by its own account, is “the government’s flagship program in international educational exchange,” promoting “mutual understanding” between the U.S. and other countries. In the 2010–2011 academic year -- the year of the Union for Good’s “Freedom Flotilla,” if you need a time marker -- one Fulbright scholarship was awarded to a lucky chemistry student from Qatar. Her name is Siham al-Qaradawi, and she just happens to be the daughter of Sheikh Qaradawi.

#ad#Now, besides despising America and having lots of global academic connections (at least in countries where he’s not banned), the sheikh happens to be a very wealthy man -- the sharia-advisory business can be very profitable. And while the sheikh’s daughter is said to be an exceptional chemist, the world is full of exceptional chemists. How is it that Qaradawi’s daughter gets the State Department prize? I’m just wondering, and wondering if Speaker Boehner is wondering.

Oh, one last thing. Obviously, Huma Abedin does not make Obama administration or State Department policy. Policy is made by President Obama and Secretary Clinton, and they hardly needed Ms. Abedin in order to have pro-Islamist leanings.

Nevertheless, since Secretary Clinton’s tenure began, with Huma Abedin serving as a top adviser, the United States has aligned itself with the Muslim Brotherhood in myriad ways. To name just a few (the list is by no means exhaustive): Our government reversed the policy against formal contacts with the Brotherhood; funded Hamas; continued funding Egypt even after the Brotherhood won the elections; dropped an investigation of Brotherhood organizations in the U.S. that were previously identified as co-conspirators in the case of the Holy Land Foundation financing Hamas; hosted Brotherhood delegations in the United States; issued a visa to a member of the Islamic Group (a designated terrorist organization) and hosted him in Washington because he is part of the Brotherhood’s parliamentary coalition in Egypt; announced that Israel should go back to its indefensible 1967 borders; excluded Israel, the world’s leading target of terrorism, from a counterterrorism forum in which the State Department sought to “partner” with Islamist governments that do not regard attacks on Israel as terrorism; and pressured Egypt’s pro-American military government to surrender power to the anti-American Muslim Brotherhood parliament and president just elected by Egypt’s predominantly anti-American population.

So I was hoping maybe the speaker could explain to us: Hypothetically, if Huma Abedin did have a bias in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, and if she were actually acting on that bias to try to tilt American policy in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, what exactly would the State Department be doing differently?

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America .

Questions about Huma Abedin

Der Spiegel pointed out the obvious: “A certain role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the transition process [to ‘democracy’] in Egypt seems acceptable to the Obama White House.” It was early February 2011, the moment when the uprising that would oust Hosni Mubarak was bubbling over in Tahrir Square. The prominent German newsmagazine figured, who better to ask about the Muslim Brotherhood than the American political establishment’s resident foreign-policy genius, John McCain?

So, the reporter asked him, does Obama’s tolerance of the Muslim Brotherhood “concern you”?

#ad#Senator Maverick shot back without hesitation: “It concerns me so much that I am unalterably opposed to it. I think it would be a mistake of historic proportions.”

Senator McCain elaborated that he was “deeply, deeply concerned that this whole movement [toward democracy] could be hijacked by radical Islamic extremists.” And what, he was specifically asked, “is your assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood”? McCain pulled no punches:

I think they are a radical group that, first of all, supports sharia law; that in itself is anti-democratic -- at least as far as women are concerned. They have been involved with other terrorist organizations and I believe that they should be specifically excluded from any transition government.

In fact, so apprehensive was he over the Brotherhood and its sharia agenda that McCain was quick to brand Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate, as a Brotherhood tool. Many of us watching developments at the time noted the apparent collusion between ElBaradei and the Brothers. McCain went farther: “Oh yeah, I think it’s very clear that the scenario is very likely he could be their front man.”

Senator Straight Talk reasoned that since ElBaradei appeared to be on the same page as the Brotherhood, and was being hailed as a potential Mubarak successor despite having “no following nor political influence in Egypt,” we should assume that he must be in cahoots with the Brotherhood. It did not matter that ElBaradei was a renowned international figure and an important leftist ally of President Obama’s. So pernicious was the threat posed by the Brotherhood that, in McCain’s considered opinion, you just had to assume the worst.

The Spiegel interview was classic McCain; the senator is never at a loss for bloviation. His professed anxiety, only a year ago, over the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as his blithe willingness to assume that ElBaradei must be an Islamist coconspirator, are worth remembering today. For the sage has suddenly decided that the Brothers -- unapologetic Islamic supremacists who say outright that they are on a “grand jihad” to destroy America and the West -- are a pretty swell lot, after all. Instead, McCain reserves his signature “shoot first, think later” ire for the target he has always preferred: conservatives.

The Arizonan took to the Senate floor this week to lambaste five conservative members of the House who, unlike McCain, are actually serious about addressing threats the Brotherhood poses to American interests. McCain’s bipartisan “Islamic democracy” promoters seem content to keep burning through taxpayer trillions until the Brotherhood is finally running every government in the Middle East. To the contrary, the House conservatives -- Michele Bachmann (Minn.), Louie Gohmert (Texas), Trent Franks (Ariz.), Tom Rooney (Fla.), and Lynn Westmorland (Ga.) -- have concluded that the Brotherhood needs to be regarded as the serious anti-American business that it is.

Toward that end, the quintet is justifiably concerned that the Brotherhood’s sharia agenda -- the one to which McCain used to be “unalterably opposed” -- is being abetted not just by some Nobel-toting Egyptian progressive, but by officials in highly sensitive positions inside the United States government.

#page#One official about whom they raise questions is Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ms. Abedin has been an aide since she interned at the White House in 1996 and was assigned to the then–first lady’s staff. The family tie for which she is best known is her husband, Anthony Weiner, the New York Democrat who resigned from Congress in disgrace last year. But it is Ms. Abedin’s parents and brother who have drawn the attention of the five House GOP members. They all have connections to the Muslim Brotherhood -- the organization itself or prominent members thereof.

For pointing this out and merely asking the State Department’s inspector general to look into it and report back to Congress -- which is part of the IG’s duties under the statute that created his position -- McCain & Co. (i.e., his fans in the left-wing media and his admirers in the Republican establishment) are screaming “smear” and “McCarthyism.” McCain’s antipathy toward conservatives (except during election years) is an old story. And it is no secret that he has long been smitten by Mrs. Clinton, whose transnational-progressive leanings mirror his own.

#ad#The Maverick is also a man about town -- towns like Tripoli. Back in 2009, you may recall, he was an honored guest in the compound of Libya’s dictator, Moammar Qaddafi -- celebrating the former master terrorist as an important American ally against jihadist terror, helping to grease the wheels so the Obama administration could increase American aid that would bolster Qaddafi’s military. Yet in the blink of an eye, it seemed, McCain would later be railing that Qaddafi was a died-in-the-wool terrorist monster whose military had to be smashed by the United States -- in an undeclared, unauthorized, unprovoked war, if necessary -- so Libyans could be “free” to elect the Muslim Brotherhood and other assorted Islamic supremacists to their new Parliament.

But the point is that McCain gets around. And when he does, the State Department is often his escort. Between his globetrotting and his case of Hillary hauteur, the senator has gotten friendly over the years with Ms. Abedin, who is said to be smart, able, and quite charming. Ever the Maverick -- chivalrous to a fault#...#at least when the damsel in distress is an exotic, progressive sharia-democracy devotee rather than a conservative national-security worrywart from Minnesota. McCain has leapt to Ms. Abedin’s defense against these vicious House troglodytes.

The senator’s tirade featured his trademark indignation, incoherence, and infatuation with immigrant success stories. (Ms. Abedin was born in Michigan, but no reason to let that get in the way of “what is best about America.”) McCain blasted Representative Bachmann and the others, falsely accusing them of doing to his friend Huma what he had actually done to ElBaradei, namely, implicating her as “part of a nefarious conspiracy.”

To the contrary, the House members have drawn no such conclusions. Instead, they have pointed out the State Department’s dramatic, Brotherhood-friendly policy shifts during Ms. Abedin’s tenure as a top adviser to the State Department’s boss. They have asked -- completely consistent with national-security guidelines, to which I’ll come shortly -- that an investigation into those policy shifts be undertaken.

That investigation would include an inquiry into whether Ms. Abedin’s family ties render her unsuitable for a position that involves access to classified information about the Brotherhood. The shrieks aside, this is not remotely unreasonable, nor is it an inquisition into Ms. Abedin’s decency and rectitude. When I was a prosecutor, the Justice Department would not have let me take a case that involved friends of my family. It’s not that they didn’t trust me; it’s that government is supposed to avoid the appearance of impropriety -- legitimacy hinges on the public’s belief that actions are taken on merit, not burdened by palpable conflicts of interest.

Regarding Ms. Abedin’s family ties, McCain rebukes his House colleagues for alleging “that three members of Huma’s family are ‘connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations.’” “These sinister accusations,” he insisted, “rest solely on a few unspecified and unsubstantiated associations of members of Huma’s family.”

#page#Now, I’m perfectly willing to believe that McCain may not know what the words “unspecified” and “unsubstantiated” mean. That, however, would not excuse his use of them in this context. The ties of Ms. Abedine’s father, mother, and brother to the Muslim Brotherhood are both specific and substantiated.

Ms. Abedin’s father, the late Syed Z. Abedin, was an Indian-born Islamic academic who founded the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs in Saudi Arabia. That institute was backed by the Muslim World League. As the Hudson Institute’s Zeyno Baran relates, the MWL was started by the Saudi government in 1962 “with Brotherhood members in key leadership positions.” It has served as the principal vehicle for the propagation of Islamic supremacism by the Saudis and the Brotherhood. That ideology fuels the “Islamic extremism” that, only a year ago, had McCain so worried that he thought allowing the Brotherhood into the Egyptian-government mix “would be a mistake of historic proportions.”

#ad#McCain’s frivolous retort is that Professor Abedin died 20 years ago. That would be a great point if someone were accusing Ms. Abedin of being in her father’s institute or the MWL. It is irrelevant when the question is whether it is reasonable to infer Islamist sympathies from her parents’ allegiances -- not to make conclusive judgments about her, mind you, but to draw an inference that would merit deeper inquiry. That is standard fare in government background checks. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s emir, has been out of the Brotherhood for more than 30 years. Does that mean the Brotherhood is now irrelevant to his ideological outlook, or to the sympathies of his close associates?

As it happens, the same MWL that supported Abedin père’s institute also helped the Brotherhood establish the Muslim Students Association. The MSA is the foundation of the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure, the gateway through which young Muslims join the Brotherhood after being steeped in the supremacist writings of Brotherhood theorists Hassan al-Banna (who founded the Brotherhood in the 1920s) and Sayyid Qutb (the animating influence of such jihadist eminences as Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden, and the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman).

Speaking of which, it was through the MSA that Egypt’s new president, Mohammed Morsi, joined the Muslim Brotherhood. He was studying engineering in California at the time, the early Eighties. By her own account, Morsi’s wife, Nagla Ali Mahmoud, also joined. She became a leading member of a cognate outfit known as “the Muslim Sisterhood.” And it is here that we get to Huma Abedin’s mother, the Pakistani-born academic Dr. Saleha Abedin.

Dr. Abedin, too, has been a member of the Muslim Sisterhood, “which is essentially nothing more than the female version of the Brotherhood,” according to Walid Shoebat, a former Brotherhood member who has renounced the organization. The Brotherhood is not only the font of Sunni supremacist ideology, it spearheads the international support network for Hamas, the terrorist organization that openly proclaims itself as the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.

According to one report, Dr. Abedin has on occasion represented herself as a delegate of the MWL. Moreover, as William Jacobson documents at Legal Insurrection, Dr. Abedin has led the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC), an Islamist organization that hews to the positions of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s leading sharia jurist. Like Brotherhood entities, the IICWC defends such practices as female genital mutilation and child marriage, which find support in Islamic law and scripture.

Sheikh Qaradawi, of course, is the Brotherhood eminence who promises that Islam “will conquer Europe, we will conquer America.” He is a vigorous supporter of Hamas, and his fatwas lionize suicide terrorism -- including the killing of Americans in Iraq. It is Qaradawi who brings us to Huma Abedin’s brother, Dr. Hassan Abedin. He has been a fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies in Great Britain. Contemporaneously, Sheikh Qaradawi was a member of the Oxford Center’s board of trustees. So was Omar Naseef, onetime secretary-general of the MWL as well as the founder of the Rabita Trust -- an Islamic “charity” notorious for funding jihadists and for having an al-Qaeda founder (Wael Hamza Julaidan) as one of its chief executives.

#page#These connections are not contrived or weightless -- like when the Left wanted to keep Samuel Alito off the Supreme Court because, 40 years ago, he was a member of “Concerned Alumni of Princeton.” Of course, knowing members of an organization whose goals include conquest of the West and destruction of Israel is not a crime. Nor is it a crime to have close relatives who are either members of, or associated with members of, such an organization. Again, however, no one is accusing Huma Abedin of a crime.

#ad#The five House conservatives, instead, are asking questions that adults responsible for national security should feel obliged to ask: In light of Ms. Abedin’s family history, is she someone who ought to have a security clearance, particularly one that would give her access to top-secret information about the Brotherhood? Is she, furthermore, someone who may be sympathetic to aspects of the Brotherhood’s agenda, such that Americans ought to be concerned that she is helping shape American foreign policy?

Now, Senator McCain is no stranger to smear. No need to confirm that with Mr. ElBaradei; we’ve watched for years as he has slandered, for example, critics of his advocacy for illegal aliens as “nativists” seeking to reprise Jim Crow laws. Nevertheless, since McCain purports to be a tireless guardian of our security, one would think he’d appreciate the distinction between a smear, on the one hand, and a routine application of security-clearance standards, on the other.

The State Department is particularly wary when it comes to the category of “foreign influence” -- yes, it is a significant enough concern to warrant its own extensive category in background investigations. No criminal behavior need be shown to deny a security clearance; access to classified information is not a right, and reasonable fear of “divided loyalties” is more than sufficient for a clearance to be denied.

The guidelines probe ties to foreign countries and organizations because hostile elements could “target United States citizens to obtain protected information” or could be “associated with a risk of terrorism” -- note: The Brotherhood checks both these boxes. Thus, when someone is proposed for a sensitive position, it is necessary to consider “conditions that could raise a security concern and may be disqualifying.” These, the State Department tells us, include “contact with a foreign family member, business or professional associate, friend or other person who is a citizen or resident in a foreign country if that contact creates a heightened risk of foreign exploitation, inducement, pressure, or coercion.”

Furthermore, in light of the Brotherhood’s well-known abhorrence of the United States, it is also pertinent that State’s guidelines raise alarms if a person seeking access to classified information has an “association or sympathy” with people who seek to overthrow our government, or even with people who just seek to prevent Americans from exercising their constitutional rights. The Brotherhood does not just aim to upend our system; it would restrict our rights, such as free expression, to the extent they contradict sharia.

In his diatribe, McCain speciously asserted that the GOP conservatives had failed to cite “an action, a decision, or a public position that Huma has taken while at the State Department” that showed she was either “promoting anti-American activities within our government” or having a “direct impact” on harmful policies. Of course, to assess a person’s fitness for a sensitive position, background investigators are not restricted to asking whether someone has committed some transgression. Their main job is to find out whether there are circumstances and competing allegiances that could tempt someone to take positions or actions that could harm the United States. That is why, for example, we have hearings before we confirm federal judges -- we don’t just hand them a gavel and hope for the best.

In addition, as McCain knows, Ms. Abedin is an adviser, not a policymaker. She gives advice to the secretary of state. Unless you were in the room with the two of them, you’d never be able to demonstrate what “direct impact” the adviser was having. Again, that’s why people are supposed to be vetted before they get these sensitive positions and before they get access to the nation’s secrets.

#page#Since Mrs. Clinton has been secretary of state, with Ms. Abedin as one of her top advisers, the State Department has strongly supported abandoning the federal government’s prior policy against dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood. State, furthermore, has embraced a number of Muslim Brotherhood positions that undermine both American constitutional rights and our alliance with Israel. To name just a few manifestations of this policy sea change:

#*#The State Department has an emissary in Egypt who trains operatives of the Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations in democracy procedures.

#ad##*#The State Department announced that the Obama administration would be “satisfied” with the election of a Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government in Egypt.

#*#Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential early leaders, from entering the United States.

#*#The State Department has collaborated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of governments heavily influenced by the Brotherhood, in seeking to restrict American free-speech rights in deference to sharia proscriptions against negative criticism of Islam.

#*#The State Department has excluded Israel, the world’s leading target of terrorism, from its “Global Counterterrorism Forum,” a group that brings the United States together with several Islamist governments, prominently including its co-chair, Turkey -- which now finances Hamas and avidly supports the flotillas that seek to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas. At the forum’s kickoff, Secretary Clinton decried various terrorist attacks and groups; but she did not mention Hamas or attacks against Israel -- in transparent deference to the Islamist governments, which echo the Brotherhood’s position that Hamas is not a terrorist organization and that attacks against Israel are not terrorism.

#*#The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer $1.5 billion dollars in aid to Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory in the parliamentary elections.

#*#The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian territories notwithstanding that Gaza is ruled by the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.

#*#The State Department and the administration recently hosted a contingent from Egypt’s newly elected parliament that included not only Muslim Brotherhood members but a member of the Islamic Group (Gama’at al Islamia), which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization -- so that providing it with material support is a serious federal crime. The State Department has refused to provide Americans with information about the process by which it issued a visa to a member of a designated terrorist organization, about how the members of the Egyptian delegation were selected, or about what security procedures were followed before the delegation was allowed to enter our country.

#*#On a just-completed trip to Egypt, Secretary Clinton pressured General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the military junta currently governing the country, to surrender power to the newly elected parliament, which is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, who is a top Brotherhood official. She also visited with Morsi; immediately after his victory, Morsi proclaimed that his top priorities included pressuring the United States to release the Blind Sheikh. Quite apart from the Brotherhood’s self-proclaimed “grand jihad” to destroy the United States, which the Justice Department proved in federal court during the 2007–8 Holy Land Foundation prosecution, the Brotherhood’s supreme guide, Mohammed Badie, publicly called for jihad against the United States in an October 2010 speech. After it became clear the Brotherhood would win the parliamentary election, Badie said the victory was a stepping stone to “the establishment of a just Islamic caliphate.”

This is not an exhaustive account of Obama-administration coziness with the Muslim Brotherhood. It is just some of the lowlights.

Senator McCain is an incorrigible vacillator. It is to be expected that he has “evolved” from last year’s claimed opposition to the Brotherhood to a new position, more aligned with that of his friend Secretary Clinton and the Obama administration. Some of us, however, really are “unalterably opposed” to the Muslim Brotherhood. The five House conservatives are asking questions to which the State Department’s own guidelines, to say nothing of common sense, demand answers. Answers not just about Huma Abedin but, far more significantly, about the government’s policy toward virulently anti-American Islamists. Americans deserve nothing less -- even if the usual GOP spaghetti spines would prefer to give them nothing, period.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of  The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America .

Obama Flouts the Rule of Law

Mona Charen had a characteristically great column Tuesday about President Obama’s illegal welfare policy. The president purports to be unbound by federal welfare law, which imposes work requirements on welfare recipients. The Washington Times reports that “such activities as motivational reading, housework, weight loss, and journaling” will now qualify for exemption from work requirements.

There is nothing new about this sort of thing. As Mona points out, “It’s old news that Obama has contempt for the rule of law. He’s declined to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ on many subjects: immigration, the Defense of Marriage Act, labor laws, and environmental rules, among others.”

To take yet another example, Congressman Steve King of Iowa observes that Obama has serially flouted the federal law that requires the president to submit a plan to address Medicare’s fiscal health if, as long ago happened, the program’s trustee issues an insolvency warning. The president does not even deem himself obliged to follow the health-care law he famously championed, imperiously issuing numerous “waivers” to excuse non-compliance. He asserts executive privilege frivolously to stonewall Congress’s investigation of his Justice Department’s Fast and Furious program. In addition, he flouts the Constitution’s requirement that Congress actually be in recess before a president can make recess appointments.

#ad#I could go on, but you get the point. Now, the Constitution provides Congress with powers to rein in a lawless president. Congress can cut off funding to the executive branch. It can impeach if the lawlessness is serious enough.

The current Congress, however, has partisan Democrats running the Senate. They just encourage Obama’s skirting of the law because they agree with his policies. The House, on the other hand, is run by Republicans, but they are afraid to use their “power of the purse” to pressure the White House into lawful behavior. The Constitution requires all revenue bills to originate in the House, a requirement the House has traditionally construed to extend to all spending bills. Republican leadership would have you believe that out-of-control government spending is on autopilot. GOP leaders want you to think that, when an executive agency like the Justice Department goes rogue, they are simply powerless to start slashing its budget. But the spending and the taxes necessary to support executive malfeasance can happen only with the House’s complicity. Lawmakers have the power to stop this stuff, they just lack the will.

In short, President Obama has sized up Capitol Hill and knows full well that he is not going to be reined in. The welfare-law “waivers” are only the latest result. Unless you are dealing with a person who feels a moral obligation to conduct himself lawfully, the rule of law obtains only when it is demonstrated that lawlessness will not be tolerated. That is not the case here.

This is worth considering for a wide variety of reasons. The one I want to focus on at the moment is the jail in Thomson, Ill.

You may recall Thomson as a white-elephant state prison outside Chicago. Democrats in Obama’s home state spent a king’s ransom on it even though it was patently not needed. It is thus a virtually empty “state of the art” prison. That should surprise no one, since influential Illinois voices -- such as community-organizer-turned-politician Barack Obama and terrorist-turned-academic Bill Ayers -- have spent much of their time arguing that felons should not be sent to prison, anyway.

#page#President Obama had a scheme. He wanted to fulfill his commitment to close the jihadist violent-extremist detention facility at Gitmo and ship stateside the remaining detainees -- of whom there are now about 168. Thomson would let him kill two birds with one stone: First, he could bail out his fellow Illinois Democrats, whose governance has driven the state into insolvency, by having debt-ridden Uncle Sam fork up over $160 million to take the prison equivalent of a bridge to nowhere off their hands. Next, he could close Gitmo by transferring the remaining detainees there -- which would entail spending even more millions to convert Thomson into a high-security facility fit to hold trained terrorists. And all this, notwithstanding that we have already spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to make Gitmo a perfect fit for our needs.

The president’s scheme did not work -- at least, it has not worked yet. There was intense congressional opposition to closing Gitmo and moving the terrorists inside our country. And for once, Congress went beyond toothless bloviating: It backed its opposition up with legislation that bars the executive branch from using congressionally appropriated funds to transfer the detainees into the U.S.

#ad#Yet once again, the administration and congressional Democrats, particularly Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, are stepping up pressure to have the federal government buy Thomson. They claim that this is no longer about moving the terrorists -- no one, they assure us, is trying to do that anymore. Now, we’re to believe this is just another Keynesian stimulus -- as if, after hundreds of billions of failed stimulus, that somehow makes it all okay. Thomson is being hyped as a way to “create jobs” in Illinois. Proponents also contend that a federal purchase will address what is suddenly framed as a “crisis” in federal-prison overcrowding. Funny -- the reason Thomson was built in the first place is that these same Illinois pols claimed there was a crisis in state-prison overcrowding. Yet, Thomson lies empty.

Durbin and other Democrats are squeezing Frank Wolf of Virginia, the Republican who chairs the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Representative Wolf has also always been strong when it comes to American security against the terrorist threat. He is blocking the federal purchase of Thomson. It makes no economic sense for Illinois’s fiscal recklessness to be socialized onto the rest of the country, particularly when we’ve already paid for Gitmo and when Leviathan is even more of a fiscal basketcase than the Land of Lincoln. Moreover, it makes no national-security sense to give Obama a golden invitation to close Gitmo and transfer terrorists into the country once the election is over.

On that latter point, it is contended that the administration understands that Congress opposes the transfer of trained-terrorist enemy combatants into the country, and that the Justice Department has thus abandoned this plan. Don’t believe it.

The Obama administration is not pushing this hugely unpopular initiative now -- for the same reason that it arranged for many of its other agenda items, including the phase-in of Obamacare and the phase-out of the Bush tax cuts, to be postponed until after the election. If Obama had to run on the things he wants to do, he could not win. Shrewdly, he has tried to take them off the table, figuring that Republicans are too inept and timid to make them into campaign issues.

But remember this: When Obama signed the legislation banning him from transferring the detainees into the country, he did so under protest. As a senator and as a presidential candidate, he objected strenuously to President Bush’s use of “signing statements.” These were proclamations, made when Bush signed laws, that certain aspects of the legislation were deemed by the executive branch to be unconstitutional and unenforceable. As president, Obama has not only muted his criticism of signing statements, he has resorted to them. In that vein, he and his Justice Department have argued that congressional attempts to prohibit him from transferring alien enemy combatants into our country are invalid.

#page#Yes, Obama is claiming, in order to kill Gitmo as a campaign issue, that he has no present intention of transferring the prisoners into the United States. But make no mistake that his formal position is that he has the power to do it and that he thinks it should be done.

Congressional Republicans ought to be rallying around Wolf. And the Romney campaign should not be letting Obama lie low in the tall grass on this one. The public strongly supports keeping Gitmo open and keeping terrorists out of the country. The issue presents Romney with an opportunity both to show how extreme Obama is and to remind Americans of all the time bombs that could go off after November 6, once Obama no longer has to worry about being punished at the ballot box for acting on his worst instincts.

#ad#Which gets us back to lawlessness. Even if Obama does not have the lawful authority to transfer the prisoners into our country, he certainly has the sheer power to do it -- just as he had the sheer power to initiate a war in Libya without congressional authorization, the sheer power to announce recess appointments even though there was no recess, the sheer power not to enforce the immigration laws, and the sheer power to make up his own welfare standards regardless of what congressional statutes say.

This is a renegade presidency. If Obama decides that he is going to put these terrorists on a plane and fly them into the United States, what is going to stop him? A law? Are you kidding? There is only one thing that might stop him: Congress’s refusal to purchase Thomson or some similar space that would give him a place to stash them.

To be blunt, I am not sure that will stop him, either. There are only 168 prisoners left. He has cleared about 60 of them for release now -- meaning he just has to find countries willing to take them. And with the “Arab Spring” in bloom, there may soon be a number of countries that would happily accept the terrorists as heroes. Indeed, Egypt’s new, American-endorsed Islamist president is already agitating for the Blind Sheikh to be released and repatriated.

There is every chance that, if Republicans do not accede to Democratic demands that Thomson be bought from Illinois, Obama will attempt to close Gitmo anyway, by releasing the detainees to willing Islamic countries. That could happen regardless of who wins the election. Even if he loses, Obama will have ten weeks as president to make a great deal of mischief. Congress has virtually no ability to stop him from releasing enemy combatants to foreign countries.

But that hardly means Congress should make it easy on Obama and the Left. Republicans should stand up and say “No way” to Thomson. And Governor Romney must smoke Obama out now on his post–November 6 intentions. Of course, no commitment Obama makes now in order to get himself elected will be enforceable once the election is over. Forcing the president to discuss these time bombs and make commitments, however, would hammer home to voters just how much is at stake on Election Day. It would also make it more difficult politically for Obama to act on his worst instincts in the ten weeks between Election Day and January 20, 2013. 

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Sovereignty, Preempted

Justice Antonin Scalia, in a characteristically electrifying dissent, seized on the cataclysm at the heart of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Arizona immigration case. It came in the form of a question: “Would the States conceivably have entered the Union if the Constitution itself contained the Court’s holding?”

Fittingly, Scalia summarized this holding, in Monday’s Arizona v. United States case, as a hypothetical provision proposed by the Framers when adoption of the Constitution was being debated: Imagine if Article I had granted Congress the power “to establish Limitations upon Immigration that will be exclusive and that will be enforced only to the extent the President deems appropriate.” In short, the Court ruled that the states can be precluded from their natural right of self-defense against alien outlaws if Congress, in its discretion, decides to enact national immigration standards -- even if the president refuses to enforce what Congress has prescribed. Hence, at the whim of Leviathan’s central planners and passively aggressive (non-)police, the states are defenseless.

Being defenseless in this context is not merely a practical problem -- namely, the problem that states and their citizens are certain to suffer physical and financial harm. Being defenseless raises, in addition, two other considerations of epic importance.

#ad#First, the right of self-defense is a vital, ineliminable aspect of sovereignty. If it is eliminated, a state is no longer a sovereign; it becomes a subject, at the mercy of its federal master’s fancy. Second, the guarantee that states are sovereign, and would remain so, is a vital, ineliminable aspect of the states’ agreement to adopt the Constitution and create the Union. If it is eliminated, the solemn compact has been broken. Why should a state remain in a union whose government will neither protect it nor tolerate its fundamental right to protect itself?

As my friend Heather Mac Donald observes, Justice Scalia’s dissent is a “must read.” Heather also contends that Scalia’s explicit assertion of “a historic and inherent state authority to police state borders, regardless of what the feds do or do not do” has, up until now, “only been implicit” in the arguments made by supporters of the Arizona law (S.B. 1070). That is certainly true of the litigants’ arguments and the reasoning offered in judicial opinions.

It is a different story, however, in the commentariat. In fact, I emphatically posed just such an argument in an NRO column last year, when the high court decided Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting, a related Arizona immigration case (upholding the power of states to revoke the business licenses of employers who hire illegal aliens). Further, I offered the same federalism theory when Heather and I discussed preemption on the Corner in 2010, after the first lower-court ruling on S.B. 1070.

Alas, his riveting dissent notwithstanding, Justice Scalia is as much a part of the problem as of the solution on illegal immigration. So are his three fellow conservative justices, and so is most of the modern conservative movement. That’s the reluctant conclusion I came to after the Whiting decision, and Monday’s ruling only confirms it.

The problem is an iteration of what ails conservatism across the board. We sing our paeans to federalism and limited government. But when it gets down to brass tacks, we reliably opt for big, centralized government, whether the issue is illegal immigration, unsustainable welfare-state programs, education, energy, or most of the remaining “internal objects,” as Madison put it -- the matters that “concern the lives, liberties, and property of the people,” including the “internal order of the state,” that proponents assured skeptics the Constitution would retain in state control. We just think we can do big “compassionate” government smarter and less intrusively than the Left -- or, at least, that’s what we tell ourselves.

#page#Conservatives by and large agree that immigration enforcement is principally a federal responsibility, and hence that Washington has the power to preempt the states from exercising their sovereign police powers. So the problem, my conservative friends, is not Obama. We are the problem. Once that “federal responsibility” premise has been accepted, the ballgame is over.

That the Court’s conservative justices are aboard this runaway train was elucidated by last year’s Whiting opinion. All four of them joined in Chief Justice John Roberts’s bold declaration that the “power to regulate immigration is unquestionably a federal power.”

In Monday’s dissent, though he makes a case for states’ rights, Justice Scalia proceeds from this same foundational assumption. Scalia is a writer of singular forcefulness. The reader is gripped by his passion for state sovereignty as essential to the nation’s founding, and for the states’ deeply rooted power to police their territories. The justice convincingly illustrates that, in the early Republic, the dubious thing was suggestion of a federal role in immigration enforcement; the state’s power was undeniable. Still, even as the words crackle off the page, the careful reader notes that Scalia has already undermined their persuasive force with a fleeting yet shattering concession made earlier (page 8) in the dissent. Immediately after first underscoring that “the power to exclude” trespassers on its territory goes to “the core of state sovereignty” (emphasis in original), Scalia writes:

Like elimination of the States’ other inherent sovereign power, immunity from suit, elimination of the States’ sovereign power to exclude requires that “Congress#...#unequivocally express its intent to abrogate.” [My italics.]

#ad#For all the rhetorical fireworks, this is Justice Scalia’s ultimate position on state sovereignty: not that it is inviolable, just that if Washington wants to strip it away, Congress needs to be clear in doing so.

That is not sovereignty. Indeed, to borrow Justice Scalia’s own method of testing a proposition, would the states have agreed to enter the Union if the Constitution had stipulated that their sovereign powers were subject to total abrogation by Congress, as long as federal legislators were plain-spoken about it? Not a chance: As Scalia puts it, “The delegates to the Grand Convention would have rushed to the exits.”

Justice Clarence Thomas is also ostensibly strong on states’ rights. At bottom, though, as his short dissent from Monday’s decision demonstrates, he’s in the same place as Justice Scalia. Thomas’s main objection to the Court’s ruling, like Scalia’s, is that nothing in the federal immigration laws passed by Congress has preempted the states. He does not appear to doubt, however, that Congress could preempt the states -- again, it would just have to be done clearly and unequivocally. Justice Thomas’s objection to the majority ruling that voided three of the four contested provisions of Arizona’s immigration law is that the majority improperly substituted its own meanderings about what Congress must have been trying to accomplish for the modest words that Congress actually used. He is correct about that, but so what?

The bipartisan ruling class that runs Washington is increasingly arrogant about stuffing its free-borders pieties down the throats of the states and their beleaguered citizens. Look how quickly President Obama thumbed his nose at the Court’s upholding, at least temporarily, of the Arizona law’s Section 2 -- the most controversial provision, allowing state police to inquire about a properly detained suspect’s immigration status. Before the ink on the ruling was dry, the administration defiantly announced that it was suspending immigration cooperation with Arizona -- telling the state to “drop dead,” as Governor Jan Brewer aptly summarized. If the feds are going to act that provocatively, with influential conservative organs like the Wall Street Journal cheering them on, do you really think they’ll hesitate to be more definitive in their usurpations if the Supremes are telling them that is all they really need to do?

#page#It is not just conservatives on the Court who have adopted this inflated understanding of federal power. A year ago, Texas Republican congressman Lamar Smith proposed a national requirement that all employers use the E-Verify system to check the immigration status of new hires -- with the caveat that states would be barred from taking punitive actions against businesses that hire illegal aliens. Among the bill’s most significant proponents was my friend Mark Krikorian, whose invaluable Center for Immigration Studies works tirelessly to combat illegal immigration.

I took issue with Mark on the matter, in the context of an exchange about objections to Smith’s bill lodged by the Kansas secretary of state, Kris Kobach, another stalwart against immigration lawlessness (and one who, not coincidentally, helped write the Arizona law). In our debate, Mark insisted that “state laws on immigration#...#are a means to an end -- better federal law enforcement everywhere.” My reply was the same as it would be today: “I could not disagree more. The purpose of state laws is to protect the people of the state — that is the end to which they are the means. A state does not legislate in order to achieve better federal enforcement. In a properly functioning federal system, where the federal government would be limited to the few things we need it to do, the states would be doing most law enforcement, tailored to their priorities, not to the policies of whatever administration happened to be in power in Washington.”

#ad#Mark’s position, however, follows seamlessly from the conventional wisdom: Immigration enforcement is, essentially, a federal responsibility. State power is limited to what Washington deigns to permit, and the exercise of that pittance must always be guided by national concerns, not the state’s security.

The states, this wisdom instructs, must never be at cross purposes with federal objectives. Until recently, you could at least say that those objectives were knowable -- a state just needed to read congressional statutes, the legitimate expression of federal law. Now, however, “federal objectives” carnivorously include both administration policy and judicial speculation about what Congress must have been trying to achieve -- neither of which, apparently, need be consistent with what Congress has actually said. In any event, it is quite remarkable that, in the fourth year of Obama, many on the right still cannot imagine what there should be no need to imagine because it is all too real: a federal government that not only has no interest in stopping illegal immigration but is run by politicians who affirmatively encourage illegal immigration.

If you are going to cede exclusive control of enforcement to a single authority in Washington, without any guarantee that this single authority will always be committed to the enforcement mission, you are inviting catastrophe. And now the invitation has been accepted. Quite foreseeably so: If allowed to do so, Arizona’s elected representatives, who must answer to Arizona’s citizens, would do security; but Leviathan’s elected representatives, who want to be reelected to Leviathan, and who answer as much to open-borders activists as to besieged Arizonans, will do politics.

As I’ve contended before, nowhere in the Constitution was the national government vested with an enumerated power over immigration enforcement. Congress was empowered only to set the terms for naturalization -- to determine who qualifies for American citizenship. The police power, the power to enforce laws within their respective territories, was left to the states -- left to the representative governments closest to the people whose lives, liberties, and property were most affected by the manner of enforcement.

Nevertheless, conservative champions of limited government, on the Supreme Court and elsewhere, have concurred in the theory that, because control of the borders and security against intruders are basic ingredients of sovereignty, a federal immigration-enforcement authority must be inferred.

#page#Fair enough. But there are all kinds of powers that are shared in a system of dual sovereignty. When they conflict, it is not a given that federal power must prevail. Contrary to what appears to be a bipartisan consensus, the Supremacy Clause does not mean federal power always wins; it means the Constitution always wins. The Constitution does not subordinate the states and the people to the federal government; to the contrary, its main objective is to suppress the federal government, to cabin its powers to a few, limited areas of national concern. Progressives are trying to save the world, but the Framers were more concerned about saving the states.

Because of the federal government’s metastatic growth, conflicts between the dual sovereigns often involve areas not explicitly assigned to the national government by the Constitution, areas that were understood at the time of the Constitution’s adoption to be within the states’ domain. When that is the case, whatever federal power it may be legitimate to infer must be subservient to the power the states undoubtedly have, not the other way around.

Arizona’s sovereign duty is to protect its citizens from the scourge of illegal immigration. Washington’s sovereign duty is to assist Arizona in that endeavor or, at a minimum, refrain from impeding the state’s defense measures. If the federal government, on a mere inferential theory crafted by federal judges, can usurp the power that Arizona must have, then we no longer have dual sovereignty. That is, we no longer have the core guarantee that induced the states to join the Union. It is cold comfort that conservatives are fine with this arrangement as long as Leviathan proclaims its usurpations with sufficient clarity.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Final Jeopardy - Category is OBAMA: The answer is: Fundraising in Paris

How will Obama be spending American Independence Day this week?

On Egyptian President-Elect's Vow to Work for Blind Sheikh's Release

The New York Times has a report this morning about the pledge by Egypt's newly elected president, Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, to work for the release from U.S. prison and repatriation to Egypt of Omar Abdel Rahman, better known to Americans as "the Blind Sheikh." The report can be read here. 

Because I was the lead prosecutor at the Blind Sheikh's 1995 terrorism trial, the Times asked me for information about the case and to make a statement about Mr. Morsi's vow to seek Abdel Rahman's release. Here is some background information -- much of which I provided to the Times yesterday, have provided to the Times in various interviews over the years, and have written about extensively, particularly at National Review and in my book about the case, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad.

Abdel Rahman is serving a life sentence for terrorism convictions arising out of his formation of a terrorist cell that operated in the New York metropolitan area from the late Eighties through spring 1993. That cell bombed the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993. It was, in addition, responsible for the murder of JDL-founder Meir Kahane in 1990, plots to kill then--Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and a plot to conduct simultaneous bombings of New York City landmarks -- primarily, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and the United Nations complex, with additional targets, such as the FBI's lower Manhattan headquarters, the George Washington Bridge, and U.S. armories, also contemplated. Abdel Rahman, moreover, urged his followers to bomb American military installations, citing as the example most worth emulating: Hezbollah's 1983 bombing of the U.S. barracks in Lebanon, in which 241members of our armed forces were killed, 220 Marines, 18 Navy, and 3 Army.

#more#Abdel Rahman rooted his terrorist commands in Islamic scripture and jurisprudence, subjects on which he is an internationally renowned authority. That, indeed, is the sole source of his influence -- which is profound -- over the global jihadist movement; his blindness and various other ailments render him unable to perform physical acts that would be of any use to a terrorist organization. Blind since childhood, Abdel Rahman is a prodigy who memorized the Koran in his early youth. He eventually graduated from from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning, with a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence. 

Following the trial at which he and several of his fellow jihadists were convicted, Abdel Rahman issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Americans, civilian and military, wherever they could be found, and to conduct terrorist attacks against our military assets, embassies, and civilian infrastructure. Following the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden publicly credited this fatwa as the sharia justification required under jihadist protocols to carry out the operation.

The Blind Sheikh has, for decades, been the emir, or leader, of Gama'at al-Islamia, the Islamic Group, the Egyptian terrorist organization that carried out the 1981 murder of President Anwar Sadat after Sadat made peace with Israel. Abdel Rahman brags about having issued the fatwa for that murder, although he was acquitted at his trial. (Abdel Rahman used a nullification defense, arguing that because Sadat failed to rule by sharia, devout Muslims had a duty to remove him.)

In 1997, following the Blind Sheikh's U.S. terrorism convictions, the Islamic Group carried out a brutal massacre in Luxor, Egypt, in which 62 tourists and police were killed. The jihadists left behind leaflets promising there would be more such attacks if the Blind Sheikh were not released -- and there have, indeed, been several others, though none as atrocious. In 1998, the Islamic Group signed on to the declaration of war against the United States issued by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. The Islamic Group is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization under federal law, meaning it is a felony to provide it with material support. In 2005, the Justice Department convicted the Blind Sheikh's attorney, Lynne Stewart, of material support for passing instructions from her client to the Islamic Group.

Nevertheless, as detailed here a few days back, the Obama administration issued a visa to Hani Nour Eldin, a member of the Islamic Group, and then hosted him for talks in Washington. Eldin accompanied a contingent of other members of Egypt's new Islamist government -- which is led by the Muslim Brotherhood and in which the Islamic Group is a coalition partner. Topping Eldin's agenda, reportedly, was to petition the administration to release the Blind Sheikh. The Obama administration has since stonewalled when pressed by members of Congress and the media to explain why and how it came to issue a visa and play host to a member of a designated terrorist organization given that providing assistance to such organizations is a serious federal crime.

In the interview yesterday, I provided the Times with a number of these details. I was also asked to give a statement, though I was not promised that my statement would appear in the paper's report. It did not appear in the report, but here is what I told the reporter:

The Obama administration recently issued a visa to, and hosted in Washington, a member of the Blind Sheikh's Islamic Group. This was done despite the IG's formal designation as a foreign terrorist organization to which it is a federal crime to provide material support, and despite the fact that the IG signed al-Qaeda's 1998 declaration of war against the United States. With President Obama sending these signals, it is no surprise that Egypt's new Islamist president-elect would seek to capitalize on them.

On Egyptian President-elect's Vow to Work for Blind Sheikh's Release

The New York Times has a report this morning about the pledge by Egypt's newly elected president, Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, to work for the release from U.S. prison and repatriation to Egypt of Omar Abdel Rahman, better known to Americans as "the Blind Sheikh." The report can be read here. 

Because I was the lead prosecutor at the Blind Sheikh's 1995 terrorism trial, the Times asked me for information about the case and to make a statement about Mr. Morsi's vow to seek Abdel Rahman's release. Here is some background information -- much of which I provided to the Times yesterday, have provided to the Times in various interviews over the years, and have written about extensively, particularly at National Review and in my book about the case, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad.

Abdel Rahman is serving a life sentence for terrorism convictions arising out of his formation of a terrorist cell that operated in the New York metropolitan area from the late Eighties through spring 1993. That cell bombed the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993. It was, in addition, responsible for the murder of JDL-founder Meir Kahane in 1990, plots to kill then--Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and a plot to conduct simultaneous bombings of New York City landmarks -- primarily, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and the United Nations complex, with additional targets, such as the FBI's lower Manhattan headquarters, the George Washington Bridge, and U.S. armories, also contemplated. Abdel Rahman, moreover, urged his followers to bomb American military installations, citing as the example most worth emulating: Hezbollah's 1983 bombing of the U.S. barracks in Lebanon, in which 241members of our armed forces were killed, 220 Marines, 18 Navy, and 3 Army.

#more#Abdel Rahman rooted his terrorist commands in Islamic scripture and jurisprudence, subjects on which he is an internationally renowned authority. That, indeed, is the sole source of his influence -- which is profound -- over the global jihadist movement; his blindness and various other ailments render him unable to perform physical acts that would be of any use to a terrorist organization. Blind since childhood, Abdel Rahman is a prodigy who memorized the Koran in his early youth. He eventually graduated from from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning, with a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence. 

Following the trial at which he and several of his fellow jihadists were convicted, Abdel Rahman issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Americans, civilian and military, wherever they could be found, and to conduct terrorist attacks against our military assets, embassies, and civilian infrastructure. Following the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden publicly credited this fatwa as the sharia justification required under jihadist protocols to carry out the operation.

The Blind Sheikh has, for decades, been the emir, or leader, of Gama'at al-Islamia, the Islamic Group, the Egyptian terrorist organization that carried out the 1981 murder of President Anwar Sadat after Sadat made peace with Israel. Abdel Rahman brags about having issued the fatwa for that murder, although he was acquitted at his trial. (Abdel Rahman used a nullification defense, arguing that because Sadat failed to rule by sharia, devout Muslims had a duty to remove him.)

In 1997, following the Blind Sheikh's U.S. terrorism convictions, the Islamic Group carried out a brutal massacre in Luxor, Egypt, in which 62 tourists and police were killed. The jihadists left behind leaflets promising there would be more such attacks if the Blind Sheikh were not released -- and there have, indeed, been several others, though none as atrocious. In 1998, the Islamic Group signed on to the declaration of war against the United States issued by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. The Islamic Group is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization under federal law, meaning it is a felony to provide it with material support. In 2005, the Justice Department convicted the Blind Sheikh's attorney, Lynne Stewart, of material support for passing instructions from her client to the Islamic Group.

Nevertheless, as detailed here a few days back, the Obama administration issued a visa to Hani Nour Eldin, a member of the Islamic Group, and then hosted him for talks in Washington. Eldin accompanied a contingent of other members of Egypt's new Islamist government -- which is led by the Muslim Brotherhood and in which the Islamic Group is a coalition partner. Topping Eldin's agenda, reportedly, was to petition the administration to release the Blind Sheikh. The Obama administration has since stonewalled when pressed by members of Congress and the media to explain why and how it came to issue a visa and play host to a member of a designated terrorist organization given that providing assistance to such organizations is a serious federal crime.

In the interview yesterday, I provided the Times with a number of these details. I was also asked to give a statement, though I was not promised that my statement would appear in the paper's report. It did not appear in the report, but here is what I told the reporter:

The Obama administration recently issued a visa to, and hosted in Washington, a member of the Blind Sheikh's Islamic Group. This was done despite the IG's formal designation as a foreign terrorist organization to which it is a federal crime to provide material support, and despite the fact that the IG signed al-Qaeda's 1998 declaration of war against the United States. With President Obama sending these signals, it is no surprise that Egypt's new Islamist president-elect would seek to capitalize on them.

Limiting the General Welfare Clause

Three months ago -- while anticipating that there would be five judges on the Supreme Court who would figure out a way to uphold Obamacare despite the weakness of the Commerce Clause argument for the “individual mandate” -- I argued on the Corner that the root of our problem is the General Welfare Clause in the preamble of the Constitution’s Article I, Section 8. That is, since the poorly reasoned decision of the New Deal–era Supreme Court in United States v. Butler (with the justices laboring under FDR’s court-packing threat), the Supreme Court has ceased to recognize any limits to Congress’s power to tax and spend on what it unilaterally decides is in the public interest.

It does not have to be this way. Indeed, it was not this way for the first century-plus of the nation’s existence.

As my friend John Eastman of Chapman Law School outlined in a brilliant essay for the Heritage Foundation, there are three visions of what “general welfare” means in the Constitution. First is the Hamiltonian view, with which we are now saddled.

Alexander Hamilton contended that Congress’s taxing authority is “plenary, and indefinite,” and that “the objects to which it may be appropriated [i.e., the general welfare] are no less comprehensive.” He successfully persuaded George Washington to adopt this construction during the first presidential administration. Yet it was widely rejected. In fact, the Framers of the Constitution denied a Hamiltonian proposal to include a provision authorizing the federal government to spend public funds on internal improvements. Most presidential administrations, moreover, recognized that Hamilton’s construction of the general welfare could, as James K. Polk’s crystal ball warned, “absorb the revenues of the country, and plunge the government into a hopeless indebtedness.”

Second is the position that is generally credited to James Madison but was shared by Thomas Jefferson -- the one I believe is correct. It holds that the preamble’s General Welfare Clause, right before the Constitution’s exacting enumeration of Congress’s powers, merely makes clear that Congress has the authority to raise revenue and spend in furtherance of those specified powers. Those powers include many things: declaring war, raising armed forces, regulating interstate and international commerce, establishing post offices and the lower federal courts, etc. But they do not include welfare-state programs.

#ad#Don’t be cowed by shrieking from the Left. The Constitution, of course, does not say we cannot have Social Security, health care, education, and other such programs that Congress is given no power to create. It creates a federalist system of dual sovereignty. Welfare programs can legitimately be created only by state and local governments. It is at that level that the people most intimately familiar with the local culture and conditions can best determine what they desire and what they are willing to pay in order to have it -- without those desires and costs’ being imposed on other states that have different notions of what government may demand of the citizen.

If anything should be patent by now, as we rapidly sink trillions deeper into debt’s death spiral, it is this: If Congress’s tax-and-spend authority is not restricted to the specific grants of power enumerated in Article 1, Section 8 -- a restriction confirmed by the Tenth Amendment’s guarantee that powers not granted by the Constitution to the national government are retained by the states and the people -- the Hamiltonian gloss on general welfare both bankrupts the country and destroys state sovereignty.

As is seemingly always the case, there is also a “third way” -- a “moderate” compromise between the Hamiltonian and Madisonian “extremes.” This is the Monroe position. President James Monroe understood the existential danger of Hamilton’s no-limits approach. Still, as John Eastman explains, he was unwilling to adopt Madison’s strict limitations. His middle position was that the concept of “general welfare” did not restrict Congress to section 8’s enumerated powers, but it did contain its own restriction -- the word general.

Spending, he inferred, had to be for the general welfare: It could not be a redistribution of wealth strictly for the benefit of local or regional interests; it had to accomplish some legitimate national interest. To be more concrete, Eastman recounts that one early Congress declined to fund the dredging of the Savannah River but approved an appropriation for a lighthouse at the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay: The latter was valid because it benefited coastal trade for the nation, the former invalid because it would solely benefit Georgia and South Carolina.

#page#The problem with the Monroe approach is easy to spot and has, alas, been confirmed by history: “General welfare” is a hopelessly amorphous, subjective term. It inexorably devolves into federal gluttony if not guided by explicit limitations, which is to say, if the political branches are left to their own devices and allowed to contort the idea of general welfare based on the exigencies of the times -- a “crisis” being a terrible thing for big-government enthusiasts to waste. This, no doubt, is why the resourceful Hamilton himself eventually embraced the Monroe approach, just as today’s progressive Democrats shrewdly make common cause with moderate Republicans to expand unsustainable government programs and explode government debt.

In the 1936 Butler case, the Supreme Court purported to adopt the Monroe middle way, although it relied on Hamilton as its principal guide. That was prescient, because what we’ve ended up with really is Hamilton’s boundless behemoth. The Court has left it to Congress itself to decide the parameters and needs of the “general welfare.” This is odd. The justices have not hesitated to prescribe objective metrics for assessing the legitimacy of such congressional exercises as the imposition of conditions on states receiving federal funds, and even -- as we saw in the Obamacare ruling -- the regulation of interstate commerce. Yet, when it comes to the general welfare, on deciding what is a proper federal expenditure, Congress has been left on its own. Today’s profligate spending and cavernous debt, to be followed in short order by tomorrow’s Taxmageddon, is the resulting nightmare come true.

As Professor Eastman notes, even Justice Sandra Day O’Connor -- not exactly a limited-government scold -- recognized that “if the spending power is to be limited only by Congress’ notion of the general welfare, the reality#...#is that the Spending Clause gives ‘power to the Congress#...#to become a parliament of the whole people, subject to no restrictions save such as are self-imposed.’ This#...#was not the Framers’ plan and it is not the meaning of the Spending Clause.” Ironically, she was contending (in her South Dakota v. Dole dissent) that this was not what the Butler Court intended. It is, alas, what the Butler Court wrought.

The decision to uphold Obamacare was a shameful subordination of good constitutional law to Chief Justice John Roberts’s worries about the vulnerabilities of the Court and his legacy to the Left’s otherwise certain tirade. Nevertheless, the Court can hardly be blamed for omitting serious consideration of potential limits on Congress’s spending power. Put aside that Obamacare was legislated as an exercise of Commerce Clause power and substantially litigated as a Commerce Clause case -- before 10:15 Thursday morning, outside a stray left-leaning commentator or two who wanted the law upheld regardless of how it had been presented to the public, no one but Roberts seems to have seen it as a tax case. The point is that, for three-quarters of a century, no limits on “general welfare” have been recognized, so no weighty arguments for narrowing Congress’s tax-and-spend authority have been offered.

#ad#Thursday was not the end of the Obamacare challenges. In his sleight-of-hand opinion, Roberts was against the tax before he was for it: Prior to implausibly upholding the “individual mandate” as a tax for constitutional purposes (so he could sustain the law), he held that it was not a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act. Under that act, taxpayers who claim to be unconstitutionally harmed by Congress’s tax-and-spend forays must wait until the taxes are collected before suing. In Obamacare, that starts to happen in 2014 (i.e., after the 2012 elections). This will provoke a raft of new challenges and, perhaps, an opportunity to revisit the Court’s General Welfare Clause jurisprudence and its reluctance to second-guess the bipartisan ruling-class consensus that nothing is outside Leviathan’s domain.

But why wait for litigation? The biggest mistake Republicans made with the deeply unpopular Obamacare law -- besides funding it even as they were promising to repeal it -- was to delegate the heavy lifting of undoing it to the states and their lawyers. Obamacare has always needed a political rejection, not a legal one. So does the whole Obama agenda, which suffers no impediments to federal intrusions.

This is the agenda that gave birth to the Tea Party and dramatically shifted the House to Republican control in 2010. That shift has been a profound disappointment: Republican leadership is hospitable to expansive federal power propped up by deficit spending (see, e.g., the debt-ridden transportation bill to which the GOP agreed while every American eye was watching the Supreme Court). But the feckless leadership is not the future; the Tea Party and limited government are. They have to be, for we are fast running out of other people’s money -- of other generations’ money.

The Tea Party and the conservative grassroots have not fallen in love with Mitt Romney. They suspect, based on his record, that he looks favorably on government-controlled health care and is cut from the same cloth as GOP leadership. Romney, however, has the advantage of having lived his political life outside Washington. He is not tainted by the Beltway establishment legacy -- not yet, anyway.

In the wake of the Obamacare ruling, the 2012 election is now teed up as a make-or-break decision over an economy teetering on terminal paralysis, incalculable debt, ruinous unemployment, and government-rationed health care. The general-welfare issue gives Romney a golden opportunity to separate himself and galvanize the core of the country that dreads a second Obama term and has had it with Washington.

Don’t wait for the courts, Mitt. Propose a plan that defines the general welfare with clear, objective limits on Congress’s spending power. Make it a plan that restores the states as supreme when it comes to the health and welfare of their citizens. Make it a plan that places the Obamacare monstrosity beyond federal authority, a plan that reasonably, but definitively, winds down and ends federal entitlement programs that are going broke anyway. Let the states craft their own safety nets. As a certain former Bay State governor observed during the GOP debates, if that means Massachusetts and Texas have different ideas about the welfare state, so be it. As long as Big Government states are willing to finance their own extravagance, without passing the costs along to states whose citizens put their faith in self-reliance, that is what federalism is all about.

Now that would be a campaign that promoted the general welfare. And it would win.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America .

Egypt's New President from 'Largely Secular' Muslim Brotherhood Vows to Free the Blind Sheikh

I know, you're shocked. Happy Spring. CBS has details, here.

Demwalking on Gunwalking

Democrats who walked out on Holder contempt hearing were apparently followed for a time by the ATF, but agents were told by their supervisors to let the subjects go. Last seen heading toward border. Conspiracy theory abounds that American politicians directly cause Mexican bloviating -- theory holds that by intentionally letting the Dems walk, DOJ could be laying groundwork for a political argument to restrict constitutional speech and debate rights. But we'll never know until we finally get some transparency ...