President’s Powers Tested before Supreme Court — US Travel Ban

The Supreme Court held its long-awaited arguments over President Donald Trump’s third attempt at a travel ban on Wednesday – signaling the hard issues that the justices believe they are being asked to consider but not how they are likely to rule.

The president’s executive order faced a losing streak in multiple lower courts since he issued it a week after taking office, forcing the White House to change the order’s wording two times.

Until Wednesday, the court had never heard arguments on the legal merits of the travel ban or any other major Trump immigration policy, including his move to rescind protections for young immigrants sometimes called Dreamers brought into the United States illegally as children. And it marks the first time the court will give a full hearing to one of the president’s initiatives. That’s at the heart of the case, experts say.

“There’s a long line of cases of the Dred Scott iteration where the court has turned the other way in the face of a system of entrenched discrimination”, said Smith. The issue is whether Trump’s executive order has effectively laid out the threat.

The justices might not have the appetite to interfere with the authority of the executive branch, Alden said.

Nationally: President Donald Trump suggested that his pick to head the Department of Veterans Affairs may withdraw because of the “abuse” he is facing during the confirmation process. It’s not clear, says Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute. “That was the running theme”.

“It is an order that is based on a multiagency, worldwide review that applied neutral criteria all across the world and concluded, under those neutral criteria, most of the world was fine, but a small part of it failed to provide us with that minimum baseline of information, the minimum, not the ideal, the bare minimum – terrorism history, criminal history – that we need to protect the country”, Francisco said. Would such a president, she asked, still have the broad power to issue a proclamation banning people from Israel, or could a court intervene?

Hans von Spakovsky, a Trump ally and former member of the president’s now-defunct election fraud commission, was also in the courtroom. The oath of office offers a “fundamental transformation” of a private citizen into the president, he argued.

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Seema Sked, 39, of Richmond, Va, demonstrates outside the Supreme Court ahead of arguments over President Donald Trump’s travel ban on April 25, 2018.

“The solicitor general stated that some 431 people had received a waiver”.

“We understand what it would be like to ban a whole group of people on the basis of their nationality or religion”, Hirono said.

“It’s not surprising”, he said. “The thing the public has to realize is that things are not better than they were then”.

The Supreme Court is saving one of its biggest cases for last.

The Trump administration’s top attorney made a glaring slipup while arguing before the Supreme Court Wednesday, saying the President considers Islam “one of the great countries of the world”. Its replacement was allowed to take partial effect, but expired in September. Still, it’ll likely be a close decision, Coyle said.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, often the swing justice on contentious cases, chimed in with another hypothetical.

But some of the more liberal justices questioned the administration’s arguments that the ban was purely about national security. “That indicates there’ll be a reassessment and the president has continuing discretion”, Kennedy said.

Gorsuch, meanwhile, is not an automatic vote for the administration, Pierce added. He conceded that if Cabinet officials knew the president was ordering a ban based on religious animus, because he told them as much, they would be “duty bound” to resign or refuse to comply with his order to come up with a justification.

While he said the justices all seemed to ask tough questions, he didn’t get the sense that they tipped their hands enough to indicate which side will prevail in the end.