Supreme Court Sets Stage for Blockbuster Fall Session

The Supreme Court decided Monday to hear President Donald Trump’s appeal of a pair of decisions that struck down his temporary ban on travel to the United States from six terrorism-compromised countries.

The court agreed to hear the case in October, while at the same time lifting most of the injunction issued by two lower courts, allowing the ban to go into effect, except as it pertains to people who have a close relationship with the U.S.

Trump issued the original travel ban in late January, just a few days after he was inaugurated as president. It imposed a 90-day halt on entry of people into the U.S. from seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, based on the government’s assessment of the risk to U.S. citizens that people from these countries could participate in terror attacks on U.S. soil.

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The original ban was blocked by a court in the state of Washington, a decision that was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in California — the nation’s most liberal court, often derided by conservatives as “the Ninth Circus” for having more of its decisions overturned than any other federal appeals court in the country.

The president issued a revised executive order in March, this time naming just six countries, dropping Iraq, where the U.S. military is actively involved in security operations in conjunction with the Iraqi government. The state of Hawaii challenged the revised ban, and U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson of Hawaii issued a temporary restraining order, preventing most of the provisions of the executive order from going into effect.

“I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said on Mark Levin’s radio show following the decision.

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, subsequently upheld the restraining order, and on June 1, the Trump administration filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In addition to a 90-day ban travel to the U.S. by citizens of the six countries listed above, the president’s revised executive order bans all refugees from entering the U.S. who do not have either a visa or valid travel documents and limits the number of refugees admitted into the U.S. in 2017 to 50,000. The federal court decisions had also halted these provisions.

The court is scheduled to hear the case in October. The court’s composition now includes four liberals — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen Breyer — and four conservatives — Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch. The ninth justice, Anthony Kennedy, is considered a swing vote, as he sometimes sides with the liberals, and sometimes with the conservatives.

In its notice that it was staying the lower courts’ injunctions, there was an indication that the majority of the justices believed the lower courts overreached, seeking to apply rights and privileges to non-citizens.

The injunctions, the justices wrote, “bar enforcement” of the ban against “foreign nationals abroad who have no connection to the United States at all.”

“The equities relied on by the lower courts do not balance the same way in that context. Denying entry to such a foreign national does not burden any American party by reason of that party’s relationship with the foreign national.”

The federal government’s interest in enforcing the travel ban and its authority to do so are “undoubtedly at their peak when there is no tie between the foreign national and the United States,” the justices wrote, quoting from the 2010 opinion in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project that the government’s interest in preserving national security is ‘an urgent objective of the highest order.'” (go to page 2 to continue reading)[lz_pagination]