Your Travel Ban Isn’t Safe Yet, Mr. Trump

Read carefully, the opinion makes it clear that most of the Supreme Court justices think Mr. Trump’s executive order, which restricts travel from six Muslim-majority countries, is likely to be struck down if the court hears the case in the fall, as scheduled.

.. The court made it clear that the Fourth and Ninth Circuits were correct to suspend the ban for those nationals who have “bona fide” relationships here in the country. That is a long list: families, university students and professors, business owners and partners.

.. Rudy Giuliani told us on national television early in Mr. Trump’s term that the president wanted to enact a Muslim ban and that he had asked him to “make it legal.” While Mr. Trump’s lawyers tried to argue the contrary, Mr. Trump continued to admit in public that he preferred the first “politically incorrect” version of the ban, a reference to limits on Muslim immigration.

.. It’s possible that the court will never make a final ruling on the legality of the travel ban because Mr. Trump might allow the policy to expire. The justices might want to avoid stating the obvious: The president of the United States signed an executive order based on unconscionable prejudice against Muslims. Courts generally like to avoid such direction confrontation between the branches when possible. But for those who look carefully, it is clear that the justices have already rebuked him by keeping the injunction on his ban in place for a significant segment of those who would have been affected by it.

.. Mr. Trump can tweet about his victory all he wants. The truth is that the Supreme Court has kept part of the injunctions against the travel ban in place, suggesting that it was likely that the president of the United States enacted an illegal policy as his signature initiative. We have a Constitution that prohibits policy based on prejudice. And we have a president who, in his indifference to the Constitution and the rights it protects, signed an executive order that violates that basic value.

The Buck Stops Everywhere Else

Trump undermines his own travel ban and Justice Department.

 World leaders who stoop to attack municipal politicians in foreign cities look small, not that we can recall a precedent.
.. In a humiliating coup de grace, the mayor’s office put out a statement saying he “has more important things to do than respond” to Mr. Trump’s social-media insults. The U.S. Commander in Chief also has better uses of his time than making himself look foolish.
.. If Mr. Trump’s action is legal on the merits, he seems to be angry that his lawyers are trying to vindicate the rule of law. Attorney General Jeff Sessions would be justified if he resigned
.. If this pattern continues, Mr. Trump may find himself running an Administration with no one but his family and the Breitbart staff. People of talent and integrity won’t work for a boss who undermines them in public without thinking about the consequences. And whatever happened to the buck stops here?

.. In other words, in 140-character increments, Mr. Trump diminished his own standing by

  • causing a minor international incident,
  • demonstrated that the loyalty he demands of the people who work for him isn’t reciprocal,
  • set back his policy goals and wasted time that he could have devoted to health care, tax reform or “infrastructure week.”
Mark it all down as further evidence that the most effective opponent of the Trump Presidency is Donald J. Trump.

Donald Trump undermines his lawyers’ case for the travel ban

A quartet of intemperate tweets could sink the president’s efforts to ban travel from six Muslim-majority nations

Mr Trump’s advocates—highly skilled, hard-working lawyers at the Department of Justice—have been striving to explain to federal judges across the land why the president’s unprecedented effort to ban travel from six Muslim-majority nations is not the so-called Muslim ban he called for in December 2015, or even a “ban” at all. They’ve resorted to redundancy for emphasis: it’s not just a “pause”, but a “temporary pause” on travel from these countries. And it is rooted not in bias or animosity against Muslims but in the sober calculation of multiple executive agencies that vetting procedures of travellers from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen need to be re-evaluated for the sake of national security.

In the course of a few minutes, the president subverted this case point by point. First, using upper case letters and an exclamation point for emphasis, Mr Trump clarified how the order should be understood: “People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” This suggests Mr Trump would not be satisfied with merely reviewing vetting procedures; he wants to keep people from certain places out of the country, full stop. And by preferring “ban” to “pause”, he is indicating the 90-day prohibition may be a prelude to a more enduring change in policy.

Second, Mr Trump harked back to his original order from January 27th, a haphazardly crafted document that applied to America’s lawful permanent residents and caused chaos at American airports by effectively rescinding visas from incoming travellers at 35,000 feet. “The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban”, Mr Trump tweeted, “not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted” to the Supreme Court.

 This is a truly odd series of sentiments. Lawyers in the Justice Department serve at the president’s pleasure and carry out his policies. If Mr Trump wanted to stick with his first order banning travel, he could have directed the attorney-general to make that happen; his tweet makes it sound as if his own department went rogue.
.. As Corey Brettschneider, a political scientist at Brown University, observes, admitting that the first ban was not politically correct implies that both it and the second order unconstitutionally target Muslims, even if animus in the latter is slightly better cloaked: “No one thinks that targeting countries that posed an actual threat would be politically incorrect”.
.. But there is no sense in which the administration lawyers could seek a “much tougher version” of the travel ban from the Supreme Court; the judiciary does not make policy.
.. “In any event we are EXTREME VETTING people coming into the U.S. in order to help keep our country safe. The courts are slow and political!” But this tweet pulls the rug out from the administration’s stated purpose behind the executive order. Extreme vetting, the president reports, is already happening, without the travel ban in place. If the travel ban—or pause, or “temporary pause”—is only necessary to permit the administration to undertake a review of vetting standards, it suddenly has no justification at all.