February 1, 2017

Occasionally a Democratic representative makes his or her way to the floor and delivers a barn-burner of a speech. This is one of those.

In the span of five minutes, Gutierrez slammed the Muslim ban, Trump's nominees, the bogus "national security" reason for banning Musliims, Steve Bannon, and even Trump's Chinese-made ties.

I'll just leave the transcript right here, but it's worth your five minutes. More fiery Democrats like this, please.

So for the last 2 weeks, we have lurched from one fiasco to another, played out on a national and international stage. There were press briefings and Presidential statements filled with official lies. We have witnessed tragedies, late night firings, policy changes and “clarifications” – also known as back-tracking – and then we come back for another round of fiascos.

We are told we will not have a National Security Council as we always have had– one with the top minds of the Intelligence Community and the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

No, instead, we will have a Nationalist Security Council with Breitbart’s Steve Bannon and his personal experience as a former Navy officer…right there in the situation room.

I’m not feeling safer already.

The President has acted to criminalize immigrants and to make every immigrant an equal priority for deportation.

Trump actually buried a requirement in his executive orders to count – every week – the number of crimes committed by immigrants and to have the government officially tally every single week the number of Mexican rapists, criminals and drug-dealers – the ones Donald Trump has been talking about since he launched his campaign.

By law, the federal government and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cannot conduct research into how many people are killed by guns or how we prevent gun violence. No, the NRA and its wholly owned subsidiary, the Republican Party has outlawed that.

But the new “immigrant rape report” is ripped from the headlines of Breitbart and other right-wing websites, except that now, it is the basis of government policy.

We are really getting a lesson in who is and who is not a criminal in this post “1984” world of “new-speak.”

We all know that there are millions of undocumented immigrants from all over the world, but this Administration keeps whipping out that Mexican thing.

Let’s face it, the people thinking up these policies think all Latinos are Mexicans and all Mexicans are immigrants – so if you are an immigrant from Mexico, except for “a few good ones,” you are a criminal, a rapist or a murderer.

Millions and millions of people the President wants to deport are people with traffic violations. They drove without a license in many cases because the state in which they live and pay taxes does not issue driver’s licenses to them.

They are moms and dads who came back after they were deported because moms and dads tend to want to be with their children and watch them as they grow up.

And Trump’s targets include young people and teenagers who are listed on a quote/unquote “gang registry” because a local cop thought they dressed or acted like they might be in a gang.

But if you hire maids or nannies and do not pay the proper amount of social security and FICA or if they are undocumented immigrants and you don’t pay the taxes, you are not called a criminal. No, you are called a cabinet secretary. In fact, we will put you in charge of the budget, including social security, or you can run the Department of Commerce.

If your business engages in the shady business of foreclosing on grandmas and widows, you get to be Secretary of the Treasury.

If you want to close down the Department of Energy, you get to run it.

If you oppose public schools, you get the Education Department.

And if you have opposed every inch of progress for civil and human rights in this country with every fiber of your being – immigrants’ rights, LGBT rights, basic civil rights for people of color, basic protections to make sure that everyone’s vote counts equally – well in that case you get to oversee the Department of Justice, the agency ultimately charged with making sure everyone gets equal protection under the law.

Up is down and down is up.

And it is only his second week.

I feel our new President has some learning to do and a lot of that learning has to do with the three branches of government, like what the executive branch should do when a federal judge tells them to stop doing something that they shouldn’t be doing.

I think the new President has a lot to learn about the freedom of religion and the separation of church and state and how our refugee policies work.

I think the people of Chicago could teach him a lot about the 4th amendment and its ban on unreasonable search and seizure, and the illegality of holding immigrants in jail without a warrant.

So I am offering to give the President my copy of the Constitution, autographed by Khizr Khan, the father of a U.S. army captain killed in Iraq in 2004, who asked a question I do not think any one of us knows the answer to: has the President even read the Constitution?

I am proud I will be standing with Mr. Khan and other leaders of different faiths later today at a press conference on the actions taken by our new Dear Leader.

We can all see through the Emperor’s new clothes – and his Chinese-made tie – and the view isn’t pretty.

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