ROGER SIMON: Democrats Are the New Palestinians on Immigration.

Read the whole thing.

HARDBALL: Senator Encourages Democrats to ‘Reveal and Shame’ Trump’s Judicial Nominees. “Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Democrats should ‘reveal and shame’ President Trump’s judicial nominees since they do not have the power to filibuster them.”

Judicial confirmations is one area where the GOP majority has been performing inarguably well, as Blumenthal’s apparent desperation shows.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: From Conspiracy Theories to Conspiracies.

One ingredient for removing a president would entail a nonstop effort by the opposition to use the courts, the legislative branch, the investigatory agencies, and the administrative state to discredit, undermine, and remove an elected government. In modern terms, that might entail opponents suing to challenge the legitimacy of the election, perhaps by charging in court that according to “experts,” voting machines were dysfunctional and thus some state tallies were null and void.

The effort might embrace trying to subvert the Constitution by pressuring state electors not to honor their constitutionally defined responsibilities to vote in accordance with the popular vote in their respective states. It might also include an effort to introduce articles of impeachment in the House.

A resistance might sue under the 25th Amendment to find the president non compos mentis, accompanied by a popular campaign to clinically diagnose the president as mentally unfit or physically decrepit. Or a resistance might use the courts to seek the removal of an elected president on grounds he was a rank profiteer and had violated the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution—or to file suits with cherry-picked liberal judges to delay and stop the president’s executive orders. On the petty side, an organized effort to discredit a president would range from boycotting the Inauguration to deliberately holding up and delaying confirmation of his appointees.

In fact, in just Trump’s first year we have seen all these things and more.

They won’t like it when it’s their turn to live under the new rules they’ve established, as Kurt Schlichter likes to say.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The University of California, Berkeley student who was detained by immigration officials over New Year’s should never have been allowed to enroll in the first place, according to ICE. “In order for a non-citizen to legally attend a U.S. college, that person must have DACA status or posses a student visa. ICE confirmed that Mora does not have DACA status, which his lawyer previously made public. According to ICE, government records also indicate that Mora does not possess a student visa. When Mora overstayed his temporary visa in 2009, breaking federal law, he became ineligible to obtain a student visa.”

QUESTION ASKED: Is US bailing on Syrian Kurds?

Turkey’s local partners in the Afrin campaign include jihadis, Salafists and those looking to settle scores with the YPG. Tastekin explains, “It worries many people that even as Erdogan claims to be ridding Afrin of ‘terrorists,’ that’s how Syria describes some of the groups he wants to move into the area. Many have backgrounds, ideologies and attitudes that are unfavorable to Kurds. Those groups include former al-Qaeda members, Salafi jihadis, a variety of Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood, mercenaries and some volunteers controlled by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT).

“Among the groups besieging Afrin and participating in the operations under [Turkish Armed Forces] and MIT guidance are Faylaq al-Sham, Jaish al-Nasr, Jabhat al-Shamiya, Ahrar al-Sham, Nureddin Zengi Brigades, Suqour al-Jaber, Sultan Murad Brigade, Samarkand Brigade, Muntasir Billah Brigade, Sultan Mourad Division, Fatih Sultan Mehmet Brigade, Hamza Company, Northern Storm, Turkistan Islamic Party and Salahaddin Brigade.”

Metin Gurcan writes, “It appears Turkey had Moscow’s go-ahead for the offensive, given that Russia controls all Syrian airspace west of the Euphrates River. Russia no doubt sees that the operation will drive a deeper wedge between the NATO allies Turkey and the United States in light of the latter’s support for the YPG. Moreover, Russia probably calculates that, faced with the threat of being overrun by Turkey and its Free Syrian Army (FSA) allies, the YPG will now be more open to Moscow’s earlier suggestion of handing Afrin back to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”

Gurcan adds that Turkey “has gone back and forth on the issue of whether Assad should remain in power, [and] has been negotiating with Assad about possibly working together against the YPG and the Kurdish nationalist [PYD]. But the Syrian president knows Erdogan’s preference is an Assad-free Syria, so the Syrian army may end up assisting the Kurdish forces to an extent.

There’s actually little in the article related to the headline, but the story does a solid job of detailing a sticky situation.

XENNIALS: Micro-Generation Born Between 1977-1983 Given New Name. I feel the same way. I’m technically a Boomer, but I was in first grade for the Summer of Love, never had a Davy Crockett hat, never had to worry about the draft, etc. Mostly I followed along after the core Boomers, trying not to trip over the trash they left behind. I think some people call my generation Tweeners, since we came between the real Boomers and Gen X.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Guess what? Trump’s not a feminist. “No, I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist. I mean, I think that would be, maybe, going too far. I’m for women, I’m for men, I’m for everyone.”

Tyler O’Neil is filling in for Liz this morning.

COMPETITIVE VICTIMHOOD: Julie Delpy says it’s easier to be black than to be a woman.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON HOW WE WERE LIED TO BY OUR BETTERS: Fake news: Preventive care will, in the long run, save money. “It is so irritating that this article blames us the believers — ‘Sorry, It’s Too Good to Be True,’ ‘many people believed….’ This is the same newspaper that will turn and blame us for doubting what it tells us, as though we’re a bunch of yokels when we don’t adopt the beliefs it serves up as true.”

LEAN FORWARD: Grammys president: Women need to ‘step up’ after men sweep this year’s awards. Raise your game, ladies!

SO FAR, HE’S DOING PRETTY WELL: Inside the mind of Leonard Leo, Trump’s Supreme Court right-hand man.

He’s been called the “judicial puppet master,” “Trump’s Supreme Court whisperer,” and the “conservative pipeline to the Supreme Court.” He has played roles big and small in the confirmations of four of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices, including the most recent, Justice Neil Gorsuch. . . .

“There are lots of countries around the world that have very long enumerations of rights, social and economic rights, political rights, civil rights. The Soviet Union had a Bill of Rights that was multiples longer than ours. Most of these countries around the world sign on to lots of [United Nations] charters that contain fundamental rights and other freedoms,” Leo said. “But at the end of the day, those are parchment barriers without serious limitations on government powers that can be enforced. And that’s what I came to realize, that the structural Constitution was the genius of the American founding and was ultimately going to protect our freedom and our dignity as people.

“That’s why I wanted to get involved,” he said of his decision to work at the Federalist Society. “I felt that was an important enterprise, and that this was the institution that was really promoting that idea in a way that no other institution had or was going to.”

Leo accepted the job offer 26 years ago, and today, serves as the organization’s executive vice president.

“This is someone who has fallen in love with the Constitution, with the American principles, and has spent his life trying to advance those,” Carrie Severino, chief counsel of the Judicial Crisis Network, told the Washington Examiner. “He had so many opportunities. He could have gone down a route of a high-paying firm. But he was crazy about the Federalist Society, and he ended up trying to follow his heart and his patriotic impulse there, and how amazingly successful that has become.”

I hope he reads this piece.

AXIOS: Trump team considers nationalizing 5G network.

We’ve got our hands on a PowerPoint deck and a memo — both produced by a senior National Security Council official — which were presented recently to senior officials at other agencies in the Trump administration.

The main points: The documents say America needs a centralized nationwide 5G network within three years. There’ll be a fierce debate inside the Trump administration — and an outcry from the industry — over the next 6-8 months over how such a network is built and paid for.

Two options laid out by the documents:

1. The U.S. government pays for and builds the single network — which would be an unprecedented nationalization of a historically private infrastructure.

2. An alternative plan where wireless providers build their own 5G networks that compete with one another — though the document says the downside is it could take longer and cost more. It argues that one of the “pros” of that plan is that it would cause “less commercial disruption” to the wireless industry than the government building a network.

Between the lines: A source familiar with the documents’ drafting says Option 2 is really no option at all: a single centralized network is what’s required to protect America against China and other bad actors.

A single, centralized network also means a single, centralized point of failure.

SECURITY IS HARD: U.S. Soldiers are Accidentally Revealing Sensitive Locations by Mapping Their Exercise Routes.

BYRON YORK: House Intel meets Monday and could vote on memo release — is Jeff Sessions softening his stance?

CHANGE: Wage increases reported by highest number of companies in 18 years, survey finds.

ROLL CALL: State of the Union Will Be Used to Prod on Immigration, Infrastructure.

In his first official State of the Union address, President Donald Trump will tell the country how the “roaring” economy is “lifting up” folks of all backgrounds and ask Congress to pass sweeping immigration and infrastructure legislation, says a senior administration official.

Trump will speak from the well of the House chamber shortly after 9 p.m. on Tuesday evening in an address the senior official described as crafted with a “bipartisan” and “unifying” message. . . .

On specific policies, Trump will try to “get the country excited about the urgency” of the need to devote a large sum of federal monies to rebuilding America’s “depleted” roads, bridges, airports, tunnels, and seaports, the senior official said. In addition to trying to sell the need for a massive infrastructure bill — perhaps as large as $1.7 trillion — he also will talk about “how we’re going to do it right and how we’re going to do it fast,” the official told reporters Friday.

But read the story and see how differently it’s written than an Obama story would have been. Or save yourself the click and don’t bother.

Until recently, both Roll Call and The Hill were noticeably more straightforward in their reporting and less obvious in their partisanship than most media. This seems to have changed in the last few months.

EVERYBODY ACT LIKE THEY DIDN’T HEAR A THING: Is China’s nuclear attack submarine too easy to detect? “Military experts say it may not be as quiet as it should be after Japanese navy discovered vessel while submerged near disputed Diaoyu Islands.”

ANDREW SULLIVAN: The Gay Rights Movement Is Undoing Its Best Work.

For a couple of decades, many non-leftists, in the wake of the plague, took more control of the messaging of gay rights. We emphasized those things that united gays and straights, and we celebrated institutions of integration — such as marriage rights and open military service. We portrayed ourselves as average citizens seeking merely the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else — Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. We were largely gender-conforming, which is not in any way better than non-gender-conforming, but this helped get the conversation started and sustained. We adopted a much less leftist stance — and few can really dispute that it was one of the most swiftly successful civil-rights movements in history.

But since Obergefell? As many of us saw our goals largely completed and moved on, the far left filled the void. The movement is now rhetorically as much about race and gender as it is about sexual orientation (“intersectionality”), prefers alternatives to marriage to marriage equality, sees white men as “problematic,” masculinity as toxic, gender as fluid, and race as fundamental. They have no desire to seem “virtually normal”; they are contemptuous of “respectability politics” — which means most politics outside the left. Above all, they have advocated transgenderism, an ideology that goes far beyond recognizing the dignity and humanity and civil equality of trans people into a critique of gender, masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality. “Live and let live” became: “If you don’t believe gender is nonbinary, you’re a bigot.” I would be shocked if this sudden lurch in the message didn’t in some way negatively affect some straight people’s views of gays.

The left’s indifference to religious freedom — see the question of Masterpiece Cakeshop — has also taken a toll.

Yes, when you act like tyrannical jerks, people don’t like you as much. Go figure.

BLUE ON BLUE: A trio of Democratic senators — Booker, Warren, Harris — seem willing to bet that placating the far left on immigration will position them favorably in 2020. But are they sacrificing their party’s fractious unity for their own opportunity?

T.A. Frank for Vanity Fair:

This year, though, we see rather a lot of Democratic senators in red states that didn’t enjoy being forced into brinkmanship over what their opponents could deride as the prioritization of foreign nationals who are in the country illegally. Five sat out the original fight altogether, and 26 more gratefully jumped ship on Monday. Whatever data these senators were viewing, the numbers must have been even more frightening than they’d expected. In politics, a focus on issues can lead people to forget that prioritization is half the battle. It’s one thing to support legalization for DACA recipients; it’s another to say it’s top of the agenda, or the country gets it.

As awkward as the shutdown may have been for Democrats like Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, however, all of the presidency-eyeing stars of the Democratic Party wished, officially at least, to keep it going. While most Democrats voted to end the shutdown, those who didn’t included Booker, Harris, Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand. This, of course, reflects the blueness of their states (Dianne Feinstein also voted against stopping the shutdown), but it also suggests a belief that taking a hard-line stance on immigration, from the left, is the price of a fighting chance in the next presidential primaries. Such thinking might be valid, but things get trickier when it comes to weighing it against the sentiments of the broader public.

Hillary Clinton had a crooked DNC and plenty of superdelegates at her back, to prevent the party’s crazies from nominating Bernie Sanders. But the DNC “reform commission” is looking to limit the superdelegates, and the DNC is is already under the sway of the party’s far-left progressive base.

It’s too soon to make any predictions with confidence, but an early guess is that the Democrats are preparing for another McGovern Moment.

GOOD IDEA. AVOIDS A REPETITION OF THAT EMBARRASSING NODDING-OFF INCIDENT THAT MIGHT LEAD TO CALLS FOR HER TO RETIRE. Ruth Bader Ginsburg Will Not Attend Trump’s First State Of The Union.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Is Venezuela on the Brink of Economic and Social Collapse?

As Venezuela limps into early 2018, it is increasingly isolated from a Latin America that is heading in a more market-friendly direction. That includes former allies, Argentina and Ecuador. Six presidential elections are scheduled for 2018—Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Paraguay—and none of them are likely to bring into office friendly governments willing to shield Maduro’s autocratic regime. The only friends left within the region are Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua, hardly shining examples of democratic governance and they are economically unable to help the regime. As the Venezuelan economy further melts down, more people from that country are going to flee to Colombia, Brazil and the Caribbean.

There have already been reports of boats with Venezuelans sinking and drowning, which gives the image that they could be Latin America’s newest round of “boat people,” fleeing horrible conditions at home.

Bernie Sanders must think it’s weird that the happy citizens of the Bolivarian people’s republic are fleeing for countries which are “heading in a more market-friendly direction.”