“A republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin famously warned in describing to a group of curious onlookers what form of government the men of the Constitutional Convention had devised. It is difficult, if not impossible, to ponder the possibility that Franklin could have envisioned such a systemic republic-undermining assault from what Alexander Hamilton famously described in The Federalist No. 78 as “the least dangerous” branch.
As I reported on Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit last week found — for the very first time in the history of the American republic — an affirmative constitutional “right” for prospective asylees denied their initial “credible fear” threshold inquiry by asylum officers to appeal that denial not just to a Department of Justice immigration judge, but to a formal Article III tribunal.
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