“There’s no question that people are seeing drones,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said yesterday on ABC’s This Week, acknowledging the obvious.
“We know of no foreign involvement with respect to the sightings in the Northeast,” the Secretary assured the public, “and we are vigilant in investigating this matter.”
That means: He doesn’t know or he’s lying. But he pinky swears to apply the same vigilance to the Mystery Drone question that he demonstrated in managing the border these last four years.
Plus, Mayorkas promised, without even cracking a smile, to let us know right away if anything changes and it turns out these things humming over our heads are part of, say, an alien invasion. Or anything. Sorta don’t call us, we’ll call you.
But he reiterated his desire “to assure the American public that we are on it.”
This follows a news briefing last week by “federal agencies leading the response” that, as CNN described, “left reporters and the public with more questions than answers, as they downplayed but simultaneously legitimized concerns about the reported drones.”
“Mystery Drone sightings all over the Country,” President-Elect Donald Trump stated on Truth Social. “Can this really be happening without our government’s knowledge? I don’t think so! Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!”
Meanwhile, on Friday, an international airport in New Windsor, New York, closed its runways for an hour due to a drone spotted in the area; on Saturday night, Boston Police arrested two men for flying a drone “dangerously close to Logan International Airport,” with a third suspect escaping in a boat and still at large; and, earlier in the week, a Chinese national was arrested leaving the country after having flown a drone over Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Is there no one in Washington capable of exerting sane leadership?
Or telling the truth?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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9 replies on “Droning On”
What with nearness to air ports or bases; any chance these drones are designed to negatively effect something- perhaps electronics controls?
“Sane leadership’ in DC is about five weeks away. Let’s hope the country survives long enough to see it.
Or… they know, but if they revealed how bad it really is, there’d be mass panic?
And anger at them over their blatant failure to do their job?
Because that seems so much more believable than the incompetence that they keep claiming.
Shoot them down! Really? What if it is a plane or helicopter? You are out-to-lunch!
If you cannot distinguish Paul Jacob from Donald Trump, then you are in worse cognitive condition than I had imagined. Trump called for shooting-down these whatever-they-are; Paul isn’t inclined to such responses.
More abductions of immigrants than under Donald Trump’s five Secretaries of Homeland Security combined.
More deportations than them, too.
He seems to be doing a fairly good job of the completely unconstitutional job of “managing the border” (the US Constitution clearly and unambiguously forbids the federal government to regulate immigration apart from collecting a small head tax).
Perhaps he can do as well at talking Larry Hogan off the “I think the constellation Orion is an alien attack!” ledge.
The US Constitution is not clear and unambiguous on the subject of immigration. The question turns on whether transportation of persons across the national border involves international commerce.
What is clear is that potential controversy over immigration was not widely anticipated, if at all; otherwise the matter would have been discussed in the Convention and legislatures. I suspect that, if it had been discussed, power would have been put in the hands of the constituent states explicitly; but it wasn’t.
“otherwise the matter would have been discussed in the Convention and legislatures.”
It was discussed. The southern anti-federalists wanted a federal power to regulate immigration to protect “the national character;” Pennsylvania declined to ratify if such a power existed, as it relied on cheap immigrant labor for its growing industry. So there was a compromise — the southerners got their slave importation protected from federal intervention and the rest of the country got freedom of immigration protected from federal intervention.
While the compromise was only set to last for 20 years, there was no federal immigration power — as opposed to commerce power — in the Constitution itself, so (per the Tenth Amendment), a constitutional amendment would have been required to create one after 1808.
Congress recognized its powerlessness to regulate immigration for about a century. Even after an activist SCOTUS miracled up such a power from whole cloth in 1875 (Chy Lung v. Freeman), Congress mistrusted the idea enough that it predicated the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 on treaty provisions rather than on such a constitutional power.
It wasn’t until the 1890s that the feds seized control of immigration at the main US landing point from the Port Authority of New York and opened Ellis Island. And it wasn’t until 1947 that a passport was required to enter the US — even then excluding from Canada and Mexico until after 9/11. Making America East Germany Again in defiance of the Constitution has actually been a relatively slow project.
During the Founding Era, the only sustained analysis of the powers of the Federal government concerning immigration came in the debate over the Alien Friends Act of 1798.* (That debate pitted Federalists wanting more restrictive policies against former anti-Federalists wanting more liberal policies.)
You’re drawing a distinction between immigration and commerce as if the former does not entail the latter. But only in cases in which immigrants do not engage in cross-border trade exactly to immigrate can a case be made that an entailment does not obtain. Even then, bringing unleased labor and human capital across the border could be compared to bringing any other commodity across the border. Perhaps a stronger case could be made for immigrants who have nothing to sell.
The importation of slaves is plainly a form of immigration; and, while the Federal government was explicitly denied the power to act against that immigration for span, if it would otherwise have had no such power then that explicit denial would have been superfluous. If the Tenth Amendment rendered the issue moot, then a Federal ban on the importation of slaves could not have been imposed after that span.
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* Lindsay, Matthew J. “Immigration, Sovereignty, and the Constitution of Foreignness” in Connecticut Law Review v 45 #3.