Hammer Defends Texas' Border Enforcement
Analyzing the article
Our Analysis: 1 Fallacy
The adjective 1 "Orwellian" can be overused in our political discourse. But how else to describe a situation in which the federal government abdicates its responsibility to secure the nation's wide-open border and then, when a state steps up to help stanch the 1 bleeding, is told by that same federal government to stop--and, for good measure, that its efforts to help secure the border via a new razor wire barrier will be undone?
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On Monday, the Supreme Court voted 5-4... in favor of the Biden administration, which had requested that the court permit its Border Patrol agents to cut or remove protective razor wire fencing installed by Texas officials along the besieged Rio Grande... The court's ruling is simply 1 astonishing.
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The federal government... is in no position whatsoever to demand that states deliberately undermine their own sovereignty. That is especially true when the federal government itself obstinately refuses to secure the nation's territorial integrity, as has been the case throughout Joe Biden's 1 disastrous presidency.
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As the late 2 Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the 2012 Supreme Court case Arizona v. United States, "As a sovereign, Arizona has the inherent power to exclude persons from its territory..."
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Are the sovereign states 1 at the mercy of the federal executive's refusal to enforce the nation's immigration laws? It seems, 1 sadly, that the answer is "yes." Substitute "Arizona" for "Texas," and nothing else has changed today.
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The 1 mass invasion now transpiring at the U.S. southern border is 1 illegal, immoral, and unsustainable. Its scope is truly unprecedented in our history, posing a 1 mortal threat to the nation. God bless Greg Abbott and the great state of Texas, who rightfully cherish their sovereignty and righteously refuse to bend the knee to the 3 most lawless presidential administration in American history.
- Appeal to emotion • The text makes strong emotional appeals, using terms like "Orwellian," "disastrous presidency," "immoral, and unsustainable," "lawless presidential administration," "bleeding," "astonishing," and "mortal threat" to evoke strong emotions in readers and potentially cloud their judgment. While the mere occurrence of emotional language is not necessarily a logical fallacy, it becomes fallacious when employed persuasively, as it is here, to manipulate the reader's perspective.
- Cherry-picking • The failure to mention that Scalia's comments were from a dissenting opinion, and not part of the Supreme Court's majority decision, is highly misleading. Since Scalia's dissent clearly backs the author's position supporting state immigration actions even over federal opposition, obscuring the dissenting context allows citing Scalia's eminent legal voice for support, while ignoring that his view did not prevail legally. This can also be considered quote-mining or quotation out of context.
- +Ad hominem The text refers to the Biden administration as the "most lawless presidential administration in American history." This is an ad hominem attack, criticizing the administration's character generally rather than addressing the specific policies or actions of that administration in respect to immigration.
References
- Josh Hammer (2024, Jan 26). Texas Is Correct To Defend Its Sovereignty From the Border Invasion.
https://www.newsweek.com/texas-correct-defend-its-sovereignty-border-invasion-opinion-1864151
Disclaimer
Note that there being one or more apparent fallacies in the arguments presented in this article does not mean that every argument the arguer made was fallacious, nor does it mean there are not other arguments in existence for the same or similar position that are logically valid. Also note that checking for fallacies is not the same as verification of the premises the arguer starts from, such as facts that the arguer asserts or principles that the arguer assumes as the foundation for constructing arguments. For more about this, see our 'What is Fallacy Checking?'
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