Pulling out all the stops

The Trump administration is in a hurry to tear down democracy and decency.

You don't need any rights, you're not even human.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Monday the creation of a commission to review the role of human rights in U.S. foreign policy.

  The Hill

Christ, it's practically non-existent as it is.

The Commission on Unalienable Rights is meant to provide advice on human rights based on the nation’s founding principles and the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Pompeo said, arguing that there is confusion over what constitutes a human right.

No, there isn't.

“As human rights claims have proliferated, some claims have come into tension with one another, provoking questions and clashes about which rights are entitled to gain respect,” Pompeo said while delivering remarks to reporters but without taking any questions. “Nation-states and international institutions remain confused about their respective responsibilities concerning human rights.”

No they don't. And what "claims" are in "tension with one another?"

The commission drew swift scrutiny from critics who worry the panel will undermine protections for abortion rights and marginalized groups such as LGBT people.

Mexicans and Muslims, too...

Critics were first concerned in May when a notice for the commission, published in the Federal Register, said the group would provide “fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.”

...and blacks!

The commission will be headed by Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard Law School professor and former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican during the George W. Bush administration.

In brief remarks alongside Pompeo, Glendon said the commission will “do our very best to carry out your marching orders and to do so in a way that will assist you in your difficult task of transmuting principle into policy.”

Wow.

“You’ve asked us to work at the level of principle, not policy, and you’ve asked us to take our bearings from the distinctive rights tradition of the United States of America, a tradition that is grounded in the institutions without which rights would not be possible: constitutional government and the rule of law.”

The rule of law has already covered human rights. No need to go back and redo it.

"Tradition." I think I know what that's code for. Make America Great Again. When blacks, women and dark-skinned foreigners were kept in their place.