A recent letter writer (“Emotion doesn’t trump rule of law” from Sept. 13) expressed himself with utter confidence about the unconstitutionality of DACA, a program that has protected now grown children from deportation. The children years ago had crossed the border with their parents. The parents crossed the border illegally, and the kids were brought along. Those kids are the “Dreamers.”

People scarcely know anything, and that certainly includes me. I researched the matter. I did not genuinely know if DACA had been determined to be unconstitutional. The answer: DACA has never been found to be unconstitutional. A deadlocked Supreme Court ruling came close; DACA was one vote away from being ruled unconstitutional and one vote away from being ruled constitutional. So, the utterly confident writer was simply wrong. A Heritage Foundation columnist who appeared in the Gazette on Sept. 11 made the same claim as the letter writer. He also asserted that DACA was unconstitutional, but if eight Supreme Court members (eight at the time, but that’s another letter) could not quite pull the trigger on the constitutionality/unconstitutionality of DACA, could not quite summon up the utter certainty of the Heritage Foundation spokesperson or the aforementioned letter writer, why should we believe partisans? To bolster his argument, the Heritage Foundation fellow brings up the legal opinions of Jeff Sessions. With a little research you will find that Sessions was denied a Federal judgeship by Congress in 1986 because he was just a little too racist. Draw your own conclusions about an editorialist who uses Sessions to bolster an anti-immigration position. Don’t trust me about Sessions, by the way: Look into it yourself, but you probably won’t find the story on Breitbart or The Daily Stormer.

The point: Notice who is writing editorials before you believe them. If an editorial opinion springs from the Heritage Foundation, it’s at least worth noticing and then doing what it takes to learn a little about the Heritage Foundation. The same thinking holds true about editorials that spring from extreme leftist sites. And, avoid being swayed by supremely confidently expressed (but wrong, nonetheless) letters to the editor. Our skepticism needs to run deep because an awful lot of powerful people are counting on our being incapable of sound judgment.

— Dan Morrison

Delaware