Now that Donald Trump has won the presidency, one big question is whether he can deliver on his promises. He made many during his campaign, but let’s focus on three major ones featured in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention: restore law and order; renegotiate trade agreements that he thinks harm the United States; and deport 11 million illegal aliens, while building a wall to keep out the rest. Unless he has a revised version of the Constitution, he cannot do these for a variety of reasons, because of fundamental principles of constitutional law.
Start with law and order, and violent crimes in particular. Those are state law offenses, enforced by local district attorneys, most elected locally, who rely on local police to prevent their occurrence and catch the perpetrators when they happen. Nothing that Donald Trump can do will alter that basic truth. Take the case he cited of the recent college graduate who was murdered in Nebraska, whose alleged killer, an unlawful immigrant, was set free. The law was Nebraska’s, law enforcement personnel were Nebraska’s, the prosecutor was a Nebraska state, not federal, official, and the judge who released the accused was a state judge. What could a different president have done differently? Nothing.
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