Supreme Court Appears To Be On Same Page As Donald Trump

The Trump administration is set to win an important Supreme Court case. If it works out, the travel ban will be legally protected. The Supreme Court justices indicated that they support the authority of the much-maligned executive order.

The State Department has the right to determine its own immigration protocols. Democrats are angry that several Muslim-majority countries made Trump’s travel ban, but their ire doesn’t mean that the administration did anything wrong.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy hinted that they believed Trump had the right to determine his own national security policy.

Critics have spent the past year arguing that the ban is somehow racist. A few Muslim countries made the list but many more did not. Justice Samuel Alito admitted that the policy “does not look at all like a Muslim ban.”

We’re now on version three of the travel ban. The first one was hastily implemented and quickly shut down by the court. Version two fixed the mistakes that were apparent in the first order. It expired last fall. The current version includes the addition of two non Muslim-majority countries.

“It’s about whether our federal courts have a meaningful role to play in enforcing the limits of those authorities, or whether — as the government argues here — the courts simply shouldn’t be looking at this at all,” Joshua A. Geltzer of Georgetown Law complained.

Josh Blackman, a law professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston, however, said:

“If the court upholds the travel ban on statutory grounds, it will signal that Congress has for decades vested the president with the flexibility to respond to an unforeseeable national security dynamic… If the Supreme Court rules that the President’s actions can be halted based on his campaign statements, courts will be drawn into the unenviable position of serving as fact-checkers for the executive branch.”

(Source: CNN)