So there I was, working hard on citizen-only voting measures in state after state, and also within Congress to create a new constitutional amendment, when a bigger non-citizen voting issue exploded.
And it has nothing to do with me!
It’s all about “Ilhan Omar.”
I give her those scare quotes around her name because, the Department of Justice alleges, that name wasn’t the one she used to get into Britain. It’s just the one she used to get into America. Her father had served in the Somalian military and was persona non grata in these United States.
She and her father lied to get in. Allegedly. She also lied about her age on her forms, though this may be the weakest charge — she probably didn’t know her date of birth.
Richer yet, she “married” (or pretended to marry) her brother in 2009, to finagle a visa for him.
Then, when MS Now’s Chris Hayes asked her, point blank, if she had actually married her brother, she responded with “Not to my knowledge.”
Skepticism about one’s own marriages shouldn’t take that form.
And it is marriages plural. In 2011, she separated from her brother-husband in a “faith-based” manner, then married and divorced another, and is now married to political consultant and ersatz vintner Tim Mynett — about whom scandals have swirled.
The latest wrinkle to the story is from the New York Times. Contrary to Democratic accusations that the very idea that she married her brother was just so much partisan lawfare, The Times reports that, during the Obama Administration, the DOJ did indeed have evidence of her visa frauds but shelved the issue.
Why? Statute of limitations.
Besides, she was in Congress!
Ilhan Omar is one of those politicians who sends chills down my spine. Criticism and reform are helpful, but she strikes me as dangerously anti-American.
Still, innocent until proven guilty. Follow the law. This applies to Ms. Omar as well as her prosecutors.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
One reply on “Alien in Congress?”
When Ilhan Omar (née Elmi) learned that her DNA and that of her brother would reveal that they were siblings, and that the DNA of each of them had likely already been collected and compared, she grasped for an alternative to a denial that would be refuted. Instead of denying that she had married her brother, she thought to deny that she had knowingly married her brother.
Indeed, siblings separated shortly after birth have sometimes unknowingly met, fallen in love, and married. And, if she could maintain a half-plausible pretense of ignorance, then the mainstream of the media would surely circle their wagons around her and insist that she were a victim first of bad luck and then of a heartless right-wing.
But she moved too quickly to denying that, if she had married her brother, then she’d done so knowingly; and, more importantly, the Department of Justice began signalling that they’d assembled enough documentation to show, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she’d known her kinship to the man whom she married.
So her handlers began insisting that her “Not to my knowledge!” was mere sarcasm. And, in utter, pathetic desperation, Democrats have been advancing a bizarre theory that, regardless of evidence, candidates for election or for reëlection should enjoy a legal immunity de facto.
But not all Democrats have joined in advancing this theory, because they understand that the Trump Administration is not spooked in the fashion traditional to Republicans; and these abstaining Democrats know that Elmi’s defenders are going to take greater political damage when the full case is presented to a court and hence to the public.
And the New York Times understands that Elmi/Omar is doomed, just as they understand that Peltola’s gambit has backfired. So, instead of futilely joining the circling wagons, the Times is going to try to recapture some of its ruined reputation for credibility, by being truthful about Elmi and about Peltola.
I expect that, ultimately, Ilhan Whatshername, seeing deportation as inevitable, will declare that she is “going into exile” and will “claim immunity” in some other nation. But probably not in Somalia; she will want the perks of living in a more economically advanced nation, though she will probably still have to settle for one in decline.