Should the President’s Words Matter in Court?
reliance on Donald Trump’s own words as candidate, president-elect and president. The court leaned particularly heavily on his now-famous campaign statement that he was “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
The government’s lawyers argued that those words had no bearing on the order’s lawfulness, but the court disagreed. The president’s words, the court found, led to only one conclusion: The order was driven by “religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination,” not a genuine national-security need
.. But there is an exception to this rule: namely, when presidential speech supplies evidence of intent or purpose of established legal relevance — for example, when assessing a claim of religious discrimination
.. The Supreme Court, for example, acted properly in disregarding President Barack Obama’s statement that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate was “absolutely not a tax increase.”