The first full week of President Trump’s term has seen Hosea’s “They who have sown the wind, shall reap the whirlwind” made manifest to his political opponents, the federal bureaucracy and the terrorist sponsors of the Middle East.

A. The Congress and Bureaucracy

The Democrats rammed through ObamaCare. To cite Judge Napolitano, Trump has begun dismantling it by an executive order that

regulations already in place be enforced with a softer, more beneficent tone, and he ordered that no penalty, fine, setoff or tax be imposed by the IRS on any person or entity who is not complying with the individual mandate, because by the time taxes are due on April 15, the IRS will be without authority to impose or collect the non-tax tax, as the individual mandate will no longer exist. Why take money from people that will soon be returned?

Then he ordered a truly revolutionary act, the likes of which I have never seen in the 45 years I have studied and monitored the government’s laws and its administration of them. He ordered that when bureaucrats who are administering and enforcing the law have discretion with respect to the time, place, manner and severity of its enforcement, they should exercise that discretion in favor of individuals and against the government.

EPA overreached its mission and authority and Trump has reined it in and promises drastically to cut its staffing and budget.

The prior administration, working with radical environmental groups, halted construction of the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access Pipelines. Trump greenlighted them. Crude oil will flow from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries and from North Dakota to Illinois. He ordered that steel and other materials used in the pipelines be fabricated here. No wonder construction unions are pleased. We should be, too -- it will make us more energy independent and stands to reduce OPEC and Russian energy profits by increasing world supply.

The Second Circuit’s opinion that the dreadful Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the creature of Elizabeth Warren, formerly the Harvard Law School’s token “Indian” professor) is unconstitutional because it does not provide for Congressional oversight means it is likely CFRB will be overhauled or scrapped.

Dodd-Frank is likely to be restructured and the Department of Labor rules under it respecting fiduciaries and ERISA plans probably will be significantly changed.

Republicans in Congress are considering a resolution to wipe out Obama’s coal-mine killing regulations and overly restrictive rules on methane emissions. 

Scores more federal regulations likely will be wiped out by the Congressional Review Act of 1996.  

B. Voter Eligibility

Trump has suggested that millions of illegal votes were counted. The media has almost uniformly denied this, but there is ample evidence -- anecdotal and otherwise -- establishing that there is substantial vote fraud. What states do with respect to local elections is their own business under the federal system, but respecting federal elections, it’s long past time to have the Department of Justice and FBI review the record and prosecute those who engage in it.

Slightly over two years ago the Washington Post conceded millions of votes have been cast in prior elections by illegal aliens, though it later tried to walk back the cat.

Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether they actually voted.

How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.

Estimated Voter Turnout by Non-Citizens
	2008	2010
Self reported and/or verified	38 (11.3%)	13 (3.5%)
Self reported and verified	5 (1.5%)	N.A.
Adjusted estimate	21 (6.4%)	8 (2.2%)

Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.

Professor Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University extrapolated from a 2014 study on voting in the 2008 and 2010 elections that 800,000 noncitizens voted in the last presidential election. 

The Pew Foundation study went further. Examining duplicate registrations in more than one state and dead voters still on registration lists, Pew concluded that the possibility of fraud was enormous.

• Approximately 24 million -- one of every eight -- voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate.
• More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters.
• Approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.

One citizen tried to spearhead an examination into voting integrity -- Catherine Engelbrecht -- and in response, a “weaponized IRS”, OSHA, BATF working with Congressman Elijah Cummings singled her out for onerous audits of herself, her family, her business and nonprofit organization.

Clearly, the left was worried about an examination of voter fraud and any attempt to end it. 

In fact, Obama himself appears to have encouraged non-citizens to vote this November with a convoluted answer to a question about non-citizen voting. Project Veritas videotaped admissions by Democrat operative Robert Creamer and his sidekick Scott Foval in which the later discussed moving illegals around through the Midwest to vote illegally, bragging that they’d fixed elections there for decades. Creamer visited the White House 32 times in the runup to the election, something the White House declined to explain:

Many Democratic leaders, in fact, have made no secret of their efforts to allow non-citizens to vote.

Whether Trump is right that the margin of Clinton’s popular vote was as a result of illegal voting remains to be seen, but that there is such voting and it is not insubstantial seems likely and deserves examination. 

[A]s [John] Fund and [Hans] von Spakovsky point out, "we don't know how big of a problem voter fraud really is because no systematic effort has ever been made to investigate it."

That's a knowledge gap that needs to be filled in, and Democrats should eagerly embrace such an effort.

After all, they are the ones who keep insisting that we have to "count every vote" and "every vote counts." Well, every single vote cast by an ineligible voter cancels out one legitimate ballot, which means that any level of fraud should be intolerable.

Plus, if Trump is wrong about the scale of voter fraud, a thorough investigation is the only way to prove it.

Somehow, we doubt Democrats will see it this way. 

My online friend Henry notes that such fraud is usually accompanied by an impossible-to-follow audit trail and suggests the same rules that apply to businesses be applied to vote counters:

It is not clear to me that an investigation will yield a number of illegal votes. Just around here, the police audited Milwaukee's 2004 vote and found many registrations were multiple voters at vacant lots. Something in the neighborhood of Kerry's 2004 victory margin of undeliverable voter confirmation cards were found. No way to tie that to who voted though. Same thing in the recall in Racine at the Cesar Chavez Center polling location. Total pandemonium, no way to tell what happened as audit trails were broken. Then Detroit in Stein's Michigan recount, complete chaos on many polling places where ballots did not match up to vote totals.

In all three cases, not so much as a slapped wrist for the government types whose job was to fairly manage the election. In the private sector, your numbers don't add up and the audit trail is broken? Go to jail (SARBOX). Need that for elections.

C. The March of the Loony Pussies

Thousands of women, many dressed as vulvas and carrying vulgar signs, who purported to have been offended by some bawdy Trump locker room talk years ago marched on Washington. Leading organizers and speakers of the march included Angela Davis, a Communist closely connected with the Black Panther party, Donna Hylton, who served 27 years in jail for the 15- to 20- day kidnapping, starving, torture and murder of a man, and Linda Sarsour, an advocate of Sharia Law.

So these delicate souls are okay with Stalinist repression, Islamic denigration of their rights and psychopathy. Got it. I especially loved shots of these largely upper-class urban white women willingly draping themselves in American flag hijabs. I score this another self-inflicted Democrat wounding.

D. Immigration

In his 1995 State of the Union address, then-President Clinton spoke about securing our borders and restricting immigration to a standing ovation. A 2006 law signed by G.W. Bush authorized the construction of a wall on the Mexican border but the Democratic Congress prevented it in its spending bill. The law, however, was never repealed, so Trump and the new Congress can get to work on it without requiring the passage of a new law and he has several means at his disposal to get Mexico to pay for it.

In addition to effective Southern border security, this week Trump issued an executive order providing a ninety-day suspension of all visas from Iran, the Sudan, and Syria, state sponsors of terrorism, and Libya, Somalia, and Yemen “countries of concern."

It begins by noting that “State Department policy prevented consular officers from properly scrutinizing the visa applications of several of the 19 foreign nationals” who carried out the 9/11 attacks, and that after-enacted measures did little to stop attacks on American soil by foreign nationals. It places the onus on the countries involved to provide us with information we need to determine that visa applicants from those countries are not a “security or public-safety threat”. Its key provisions include the following:

Nationals of countries, which upon notification of information we need, do not cooperate within 60 days will, with few diplomatic exceptions be, barred entry. Uniform screening standards for all immigration programs will be put in force. The totally corrupted Refugee Resettlement Program in which religiously denominated NGOs (the shells of their original organizations which received funds to flak for more open borders) will be suspended for 120 days. When the suspension period is over, refugee claims will be re-prioritized to give preference to “Individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality”. States and localities “will be granted a role in the process of determining the placement or re settlement in their jurisdiction “ of alien refugees, The ”completion and implementation of a biometric entry-exit tracking systems for all travelers to the US” will (at long last) be expedited. The Visa Interview Waiver program is suspended. All applicants not covered by specific statutory exceptions, must undergo an in-person interview. We will collect and report the number of foreign nationals charged with, convicted of, or removed because of terrorism-related offenses here.