‘Utter Nonsense’: Fox’s Andy McCarthy Nukes Marco Rubio Over ‘Ridiculous’ Argument in Defense of Wrongful Deportation
(Pool via AP)
Fox News’ Andy McCarthy nuked Secretary of State Marco Rubio from orbit in a National Review column taking him to task for spouting “utter nonsense” during an Oval Office debate about the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man currently being held in a Salvadoran prison because of an “administrative error” on the part of the Trump administration.
On Monday, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked President Donald Trump and his Salvadoran counterpart, Nayib Bukele, about Abrego Garcia, whose return to the United States the Supreme Court has ordered Trump to “facilitate.”
In turn, Trump, his lieutenants, and Bukele took turns mocking Collins and producing arguments for why Abrego Garcia should not be brought back into the country.
“I can tell you this, Mr. President, the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the president of the United States, not by a court. And no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States. It’s that simple, end of story,” submitted Rubio during his turn at bat.
McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and longtime conservative legal commentator, was unimpressed.
“As absurd as was Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s commentary about the Abrego Garcia case in the Oval Office on Monday, he was matched whopper-for-whopper by Trump administration officials. Consider the secretary of state,” began McCarthy under the headline “Marco Rubio’s Disingenuous Explanation of the Abrego Garcia Case.”
“Marco Rubio is too smart not to know that what he was saying was utter nonsense. The secretary haughtily pronounced that he didn’t see what all the fuss was because Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran national who was illegally in the United States, and who was simply deported to his own country, which is what’s supposed to happen,” he continued before diving deeper into the weeds:
After airbrushing the inconvenient withholding of removal order out of the picture, Rubio went on a ridiculous rant about how the foreign policy of the United States is run by the president, not by a judge. As the former senator is surely aware, the withholding of removal remedy was enacted by Congress. (See Title 8, U.S. Code, §1231(b)(3), “Restriction on removal to a country where alien’s life or freedom would be threatened.”) In this instance, withholding of removal was ordered by an immigration judge, not by Judge Xinis, the Supreme Court, or some other Article III tribunal. That is, it was ordered by an executive branch officer in the first Trump administration. What is stymying the president here is statutory law and the actions and inactions of his own administrations, not a federal judge.
Nor is this anything close to a judicial usurpation of the president’s power to conduct U.S. foreign policy. To repeat (see here and here), the courts have not interfered at all with the power of the president to make a bilateral agreement with a foreign head of state in which the foreign country agreed to cooperate with the federal government regarding the custody of prisoners. Whether to make or not make such an agreement is entirely up to the president. On the other hand, if a litigant in the United States has a legitimate claim that is cognizable in federal court, the executive branch may not obstruct the litigant. Pursuant to his oath of office, the president must conduct foreign policy, just as he must carry out all executive duties, consistent with the laws of the United States.
“A federal court’s vindication of a person’s legal rights is not a matter of the judge trying to wrest control of foreign policy. It’s the law,” concluded McCarthy. “I’m pretty sure Marco Rubio knows that.”
