Robert Barnes reports for WashPost:
The Supreme Court’s final oral argument of the term will be one of its most important and potentially far-reaching, an examination of the president’s authority to protect the country by banning some foreigners who seek entry.
But, similar to a debate that has consumed Washington for the past 15 months, a major issue for the court is separating “the president” from “this president.”
The justices on Wednesday will consider President Trump’s third iteration of a travel ban that bars most nationals from a small group of mostly Muslim nations. It is the first time the court has considered the merits of a policy that has consumed the administration since its start, and raises deep questions about the judiciary’s role in national security issues usually left to the political branches.
The first version of the ban was issued just a week after Trump took office, and lower courts have found that it and each reformulated version since exceeded the authority granted by Congress and was motivated by Trump’s prejudice — animus, as courts like to say — toward Muslims.
The state of Hawaii, which is leading the challenge of the ban, told the Supreme Court:
“For over a year, the president campaigned on the pledge, never retracted, that he would ban Muslims from entering the United States.
“And upon taking office, the president issued and reissued, and reissued again, a sweeping and unilateral order that purports to bar over 150 million aliens — the vast majority of them Muslim — from entering the United States.”
Hawaii’s brief, by Washington lawyer Neal K. Katyal, cites not only Trump’s campaign comments, but also his actions as president, including the time he retweeted “three anti-Muslim propaganda videos” from a widely condemned far-right British organization.
This led to a response by the solicitor general of the United States to the justices of the Supreme Court that could have been written only in this era, about this chief executive:
“The president’s retweets do not address the meaning of the proclamation at all.”
Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco urged the court not to get distracted by the president’s bluster — he has said nice things about Muslims, too, the brief states — and to keep its examination on the law.
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Read Barnes’s full article at the link.
Trump has never shown any actual justification for the “bogus ban.” But, the standard of “facially bona fide and legitimate” is very permissive. As usual, from a legal standpoint, Trump would have done better to have kept his big mouth shut!
PWS
04-24-18