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Supreme Court and the Trump travel ban case: What's really at stake is our country's future
[FOX] When Alexander Hamilton wrote of the judiciary, in Federalist 78, he called it the "least dangerous branch." It lacks the executive power of the sword and Congress’ power of the purse. It has only the faculty of judgment, and must depend on the executive to enforce its judgments.But what if the judges mistrust the executive, and announce that his orders be ignored? In that case the entire system of separation of powers might be undone, in matters purely political. The judiciary will have usurped the executive power and made little presidents of themselves. A frightening thought, and yet that is where we seem to be headed. The threat began with the practice, begun over a year ago, of federal District Court judges announcing that Trump’s travel bans were unconstitutional. It wasn’t that presidents lack the authority to manage immigration policies. That wasn’t in question. Rather, it was the authority of this president that was impugned. Trump was poison, and his directives were the fruit of a poisoned tree. He had shown himself to be biased against radical Islam, and as a consequence was deprived of any constitutional authority over immigration from Muslim countries. As the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals put it, Trump’s tweets showed that he was "tainted with animus toward Islam." There have been a series of such decisions, from District judges cherry-picked as Trump haters. And they did more than impugn Trump’s authority in their judicial District. They went beyond this to issue a countrywide injunction, a single judge ruling over the United States as a whole. The issue is now before the Supreme Court. After initial judicial rebuffs, Trump is now on the third iteration of his travel ban. The Court will hear an appeal of a District Court decision in Hawaii, affirmed by the Ninth Circuit, that the ban revealed Trump’s hostility to Muslims. "For over a year, the president campaigned on the pledge, never retracted, that he would ban Muslims from entering the United States." Continues Posted by: Besoeker 2018-04-25 |
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