CNN’s Striking Ignorance of the Federal Judiciary

I was reading an article about Immigration and family separation on CNN’s website the other day. It was yet another tug-at-the-heartstrings piece, sympathetic to illegals while demonizing border security and I.C.E. You know – a kill two birds with one stone type of thing.

The article began by stating: “Six months after US officials separated them at the border, ICE put a 4-year-old girl on a plane to Guatemala this week so she could be reunited with her father.”

According to CNN, the father, who was deported back to Guatemala six months ago, lived 8 hours from the airport, but only learned of his daughter’s arrival 30 minutes prior to her touching down. There was no mention of a mother.

The girl would then have to spend another night in a shelter awaiting her father’s arrival. Again, not a single mention of a mother.

This, CNN says, is a travesty. Yes, it’s a travesty that a little girl must spend a few extra hours in a shelter after not seeing her dad for six months. The incongruity of this is evidently lost on the geniuses at CNN.

Is it just me who thinks that, in the grand scheme of things, this is not a big deal and that it is no one’s fault but the father’s? Whereabouts of the mother still not mentioned.

Yet, despite the stupidity of this scenario and the fact that CNN is telling it, so I’m almost certain we’re not getting the whole story, this is not what I found striking.

“It's an example, they said, of a reunification effort that remains needlessly chaotic at times, even months after a federal judge ordered the US government to reunite the immigrant families it separated,” CNN wrote. The “they” are the myriad of illegal alien advocate groups.

What I find offensive about this article is that a federal judge can order the government to do anything. And more offensive is that the government, the press and we, just accept his “order.”

A federal judge has no authority to do any such thing.

Have we completely lost sight of the job or function of the federal judiciary? In short – yes.

Per Articles I (the legislative branch) and II (the executive branch) of the U.S. Constitution, the judiciary has no authority to make the law, nor enforce the law. They are limited only to the interpretation and application of the law, per Article III (the judicial branch).

“At no point may judges set policy or substitute their political [or personal] views for those of the elected representatives or of the people themselves.”

But don’t take my word for it. James Madison, author of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist 47, and citing the Massachusetts Constitution: “The judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.”

Alexander Hamilton, the new darling of the left, adds in Federalist 78 that, “There is no liberty if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.”

Yet to CNN and other left-wing advocates posing as news outlets, this is perfectly acceptable. That is until a federal judge orders the government to do something they don’t like. Then it will become a Constitutional crisis.