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Two more judges block Trump’s new travel ban — 40 Comments

  1. Yep, didn’t matter how unartfully it was rolled out or any of that this was going to happen no matter what. This needs to be fought til the end less on it’s merits than on the principle. Pretty frightening really.

  2. I’ve read it and it is a disaster on a number of levels. Rank campaign hearsay is not only admissible but dispositive. The plaintiff’s mother-in-law (!) in Syria now has the federal constitutional right to visit the United States.

    But here’s the thing. Now what stops a plaintiff from suing to prevent military efforts against ISIS? We have never declared war and the Authorization for Use of Military Force is very old. What about that Seal raid in Yemen? Muslim citizens were killed without due process. Federal judges better stop Trump!

  3. The really offense thing about this Hawaii case is that a 43 page decision was published within hours of the hearing. The judge had his mind made up even before the case was filed.

  4. Since Bush there has been much handwringing over the expansion of the powers of the executive branch. But, apparently, that was all wrong.

    We learn that in actuality, the office of the president of the United States is merely a vestigial figurehead and has no authority under the law.

    So, are all actions, mistakenly made by all American presidents since 1776, null and void?

  5. Esther:

    No only those made by Republican presidents. All of Obama’s actions are great and should never be changed.

  6. Didn’t a federal judge say that the Obama ban on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico was illegal and the Obama administration just ignored him?

  7. We need to get Gorsuch’s confirmation moved along & him seated on the SCOTUS bench with all due haste. THEN the Trump administration needs to start taking the fight to the judiciary.

    AND President Trump needs to get his next 2 nominations for SCOTUS ready to roll because there’s bound to be a death or a retirement in the offing…actuarially speaking of course.

  8. If you listen to the left explain this latest outrage of a ruling, for instance Rachel Maddow, it boils down to the intent of the Executive Order. No matter what is specifically stated in it, nor how compliant it is with constitutional authority, the fact that Trump spent months campaigning with the promise to ban Muslims indicates to the left an unreasonable bias underlying it.

    I have to laugh at this argument, both for the twisted logic behind it, and for the attempt to impute a prejudicial intent while ignoring the plain meaning rule. Every effort was made to exclude any reference to Muslims in the ban, yet leftist judges will still find an objection based on conjecture. Does it mean what it says, or what some leftist ignoramus wants it to mean?

  9. A further note on this intent vs. plain meaning thing:

    The left is very well aware how such laws, edicts, and regulations work. They used the plain meaning of environmental law to allegedly protect the Spotted Owl, while their intent was clearly to shut down logging, in which endeavor they succeeded. So when it suits their purpose, we must adhere to the plain meaning of the law and ignore any side issues.

  10. Can Trump just ignore this ruling and order the federal agencies to procede? The “coup” argument seems valid to me, although I am no constitutional scholar. It is absurd that any of several thousand appointed judges has the authority to block any executive order. If this precedent is allowed, the executive branch could be completely paralyzed by these judges. Left-leaning ones could block anything they don’t like, and right-leaning ones could block anything the left allows.

  11. Alan F,

    No, it’s a heads we win, tails you lose game they’re playing.

    Any conservative judge’s ruling will be ignored by a democrat administration. Whereas a republican administration, respecting the rule of law cannot ignore an activist judge’s ruling. As, if both sides do it, even if only half the time, there is no rule of law.

  12. I think we have been in a constitutional crisis for a long time–back to Marbury v. Madison. The founders accepted Marshall’s power grab that the Constitution is what the courts say it is and the only way to stop the courts is the practically impossible step of passing an amendment. Actually, the Constitution says nothing about this power of the supreme court but we have gone along with it because the courts have acted more or less responsibly with some notable exceptions. The largest was of course Lincoln ignoring the rulings of the Taney court during the Civil War. FDR’s confrontation with the Supreme Court was only somewhat less blatant.

    We are reaping what we have sowed. We stood meekly and let the Court tell the states that they had to allow abortion and who they allow to marry. And myriad other assaults like requiring the states to educate illegal aliens.

    We are just a few rulings away from all out shooting civil war. If Hillary had won and appointed a Justice to replace Scalia who ruled that the 2nd amendment only applies to the National Guard, the S would have HTF. If Gorsuch turns out to be a Souter then the conflict can happen much sooner.

    In retrospect, the Constitution should have done a lot more to curb judicial power. The Founders were rightly afraid of mob rule but they did not give us any effective way to curb the power of the courts such as an easier way to overrule dictatorial rulings.

  13. Hinderaker and Jacobson are quite right. If the federal judiciary follows precedent, they would agree: SCOTUS explained in 1948 why the courts have no jurisdiction in matters of foreign policy.

    “Such decisions are wholly confided by our Constitution to the political departments of the government, Executive and Legislative. They are delicate, complex, and involve large elements of prophecy. They are and should be undertaken only by those directly responsible to the people whose welfare they advance or imperil. They are decisions of a kind for which the Judiciary has neither aptitude, facilities nor responsibility and have long been held to belong in the domain of political power not subject to judicial intrusion or inquiry.”

    333 U.S. 103 – Chicago Southern Air Lines v. Waterman S.S. Corporation

  14. My best friend is a lawyer and over the years he has been explaining Critical Legal Theory to me. It’s the law bent into a new shape by Marxism and Postmodernism. Here’s a decent capsule summary:

    Proponents of this theory believe that logic and structure attributed to the law grow out of the power relationships of the society. The law exists to support the interests of the party or class that forms it and is merely a collection of beliefs and prejudices that legitimize the injustices of society. The wealthy and the powerful use the law as an instrument for oppression in order to maintain their place in hierarchy.

    The basic idea of [Cirtical Legal Theory] is that the law is politics and it is not neutral or value free. Many in the CLS movement want to overturn the hierarchical structures of domination in the modern society and many of them have focused on the law as a tool in achieving this goal.

    https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/critical_legal_theory

    So if the law is just politics and power relations, it doesn’t matter what the words say. The law is just more oppression. Those who would reform society are free, if not obligated, to use the law against itself.

    Which more and more is what we are seeing.

  15. Time for A Man for All Seasons reminder about arbitrary use of power to cut down the law that ELC references above. The courts have no jurisdiction here. As Yosemitey Sam says with pistols drawn, “Back off!” The judiciary has no pistols, the executive does.

  16. Saw on Tucker Carlson Tonight woman who heads “Nat’l Immigr. Center for Law” (that”s some name for a nonprofit advocacy group, isn’t it?) She was there to gloat over HA & MD judges’ decisions, of course. And to explain that Trump exec. order would violate her client’s (a Muslim legal resident) Constitutional right to bring his Muslim sister here from Syria because our Constitution guarantees that all have the right to pray as they wish to.
    Btw, has everyone noticed that the newest Dem. talking point seems to be to repeat the words “Muslim ban” as often as possible and on every possible media outlet that exists to stamp into American (and World’s) consciousness. I have not heard a single instance where it has been referred to as Pres. Trump’s exec. order intended to protect those in US from Extremist Muslims’ many promises to kill as many Americans as possible here and elsewhere.
    Meanwhile, for these sane liberals, Obama’s unilateral E.O.’sdesigned to end run the Congress he refused to negotiate with, couldn’t come fast enough!

  17. @ Ray, quite a few courts ruled against Obama’s orders. Don’t you remember hearing about it all the time & everywhere in media?!

  18. huxley, That CLT stuff is interesting. It has a circular quality tho’ as the more you consider its assertions, how do the proponents persuade & maintain that their purpose is independent and not a newer hierarchy whose purpose is for the greater good & to undo the existing evil oppressive structure and impose their preferred rules, thus becoming the.dominate society? Which is precisely what it is. Or are they counting on talking circles around those they target hoping to achieve domination before their opponents realize its too late?
    It sounds like a cross between Alice and Wonderland and George Soros! I think what we’ve witnessed since the election, the newest Dem. fighting cry of “Resistance!” & the wholehearted participation of the MSM and a good portion of the Judiciary might indicate that we are already closer to this reality than not.

  19. If Trump ignores federal judges rulings it triggers the constitutional crisis that we are upon the precipice of and will be added to the ledger of “high crimes and misdemeanors” being assembled against him. Once the ledger is judged sufficient, impeachment becomes a possibility.

    Can 20 republican Senators be found to vote to convict? Remember that Senators can vote to convict with no evidence whatsoever of high crimes and misdemeanors. An impeachment trial is basically a calculation of political repercussions, a risk/reward proposition. And the GOP has repeatedly demonstrated its contempt for its conservative faction.

    I’ve little doubt that McCain, Graham, McConnell and other RINOs would be far happier with a Pres. Pence. While a good man, I’ve seen nothing to indicate that he would fight to end illegal immigration or Muslim migration or fight to drain the swamp. Pence is another Bush.

  20. Huxley, the Cornell article is an excellent summary of what the radical left uses for reference. Without the underpinning of Derrida and Foucault there would be no Critical Legal Theory, Critical Race Theory, and the other deconstruction garbage. The whole Postmodernist movement is a kind of formal encapsulation of the irrational. I consider it evil in the extreme.

  21. The woman on Tucker Carlson’s show was calling the EO a violation of the First Amendment religious freedoms. Which, by the way says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;…..”

    The EO is not a Congressional law and it does not refer to any religion. It refers to immigration of aliens from six countries out of over 52 Muslim majority countries. Hardly a Muslim ban. The President is authorized by the National Immigration Act – specifically section 212(f) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1182(f), – to suspend immigration of aliens that he deems could be detrimental to the interests of the country. The six countries involved do not have functioning governments that allow proper vetting of potential immigrants.

    The charge that the EO is an unconstitutional violation of a person’s (especially a non-citizen’s) religious rights is the typical hyperbole and muddy reasoning of the progs.

  22. huxley, That CLT stuff is interesting. It has a circular quality tho’ as the more you consider its assertions, how do the proponents persuade & maintain that their purpose is independent and not a newer hierarchy whose purpose is for the greater good & to undo the existing evil oppressive structure and impose their preferred rules, thus becoming the.dominate society?

    csimon: Well, yes. The leftie-postmodern types love to deconstruct Western civilization but somehow it doesn’t occur to them to turn those sharp scalpels on themselves. That is an obvious and honest intellectual maneuver, but honesty doesn’t seem to be what they are up to.

    I listened to one of those big multi-CD Great Courses on philosophy with the last lectures on the postmodern era. Only one intellectual, Alvin Gouldner, a sociologist, did so.

    In the trilogy “The Dark Side of the Dialectic,” Gouldner presented a Marxist critique of Marxism itself. He became an “outlaw Marxism.” He uses the dialectic to show the flaws in Marxism, calling himself a “Marxist Socratic.” His analysis of the “new class” of intellectuals and others who earn their living from their education and not their ownership of capital, provides a necessary corrective to the Marxist idea of class struggle and helps explain why so many Marxists and radicals were not proletarians, but intellectuals.

    Bascially the new class intellectuals have created an ideology which gives them power as a new elite to dominate and Gouldner was honest enough to write of it.

  23. Without the underpinning of Derrida and Foucault there would be no Critical Legal Theory, Critical Race Theory, and the other deconstruction garbage.

    The Other Chuck: Derrida and Foucault plus a raft of the usual suspects like the Frankfurt School and Gramsci.

    My lawyer friend tells me this is not a fringe movement — it became mainstream at elite universities in the 80s.

    When my friend was bright young thing just out of law school, he was hired at a Big Law firm in LA. He tells me he happened to be a fly on the wall at a meeting where some of the higher-ups were deciding to hire fewer grads from the Ivy League because instead of learning the law, their heads were full of Critical Legal crap and it would take a year or so to get them up to speed to do real law.

  24. Ray Says:
    March 16th, 2017 at 2:58 pm
    Didn’t a federal judge say that the Obama ban on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico was illegal and the Obama administration just ignored him?
    * * *
    Aptly answered in the rest of the comments, especially
    huxley Says:
    March 16th, 2017 at 9:14 pm
    My best friend is a lawyer and over the years he has been explaining Critical Legal Theory to me. It’s the law bent into a new shape by Marxism and Postmodernism.
    * * *
    Basically, the CLT warriors (can we call them that now) believe there is no law, and being able to implement that belief via the DOJ and the courts will lead to anarchy, because the only thing that makes the Rule of Law work is if all classes, parties, and individuals are treated the same in court.
    Clearly this is not now the case — and although there have always been people “above the law” it is getting epidemic and the rest of us can find out about it.
    * * *
    The Other Chuck Says:
    March 16th, 2017 at 11:13 pm
    Huxley, the Cornell article is an excellent summary of what the radical left uses for reference. Without the underpinning of Derrida and Foucault there would be no Critical Legal Theory, Critical Race Theory, and the other deconstruction garbage. The whole Postmodernist movement is a kind of formal encapsulation of the irrational. I consider it evil in the extreme.

  25. Not on Trump, but on lawyers, because it started a chain of thought.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/rise-of-the-robolawyers/517794/

    “There is a possible downside to lowering barriers to legal services, however: a future in which litigious types can dash off a few lawsuits while standing in line for a latte. Paul Ford, a programmer and writer, explores this idea of “nanolaw” in a short science-fiction story published on his website–lawsuits become a daily annoyance, popping up on your phone to be litigated with a few swipes of the finger.”

    Back when I had time to read, I was very impressed with this book: Gladiator-at-law by Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth; First published in 1955. Lawsuits in this very-pre-internet opus were settled by having plaintiff and defense “computers” introduce competing citations which could wipe each other out; you won if your case had more surviving statutes or judgments than your opponent.
    There was also a lot of social satire and dystopic commentary in the vein of “if this goes on” which has so far panned out with just about everything but the citizen-gladiator combats.

  26. The Black Robed Lefties want to tear the whole thing down, don’t they?

    Do they have any idea what comes after?

  27. I’m mystified by the fact that SOME Supreme Court decisions are sacrosanct while others are tosseed it because they were “bad decisions.” Marbury vs. Madison is carved in stone. Dred Scott, gone. (Rightfully so.)

    Some of the Supreme Court decisions during the FDR years were made while FDR was basically threatening the court. Those stand as sacrosanct, although without FDR holding a metaphorical gun to their collective heads, they probably would have ruled a different way.

  28. Geoffrey Britain:

    You write “Pence is another Bush.”

    Now, I happen to agree with you that Pence isn’t a fighter. But he is far FAR more conservative than either Bush I or Bush II ever were.

    Do you know much about Pence, prior to his being picked by Trump as Veep? Take a look.

    I fail to see a resemblance to the Bushes.

  29. President orders the Air Force to begin bombing Syria, but a judge on the Left Coast, now drunk with his unconstitutional powers, enjoins the bombing to stop because it may injure some Muslim relatives of a citizen of ours.
    That’s the slope these idiot judges have put us on.

  30. AesopFan: “The Dosadi Experiment” is actually my favorite Frank Herbert book instead of “Dune.”

    It involves a frog-like alien race whose legal system includes the possibility of lawyers having to fight to the death in the CourtArena.

    When I’m in a bad mood that sounds like a good idea.

  31. A FOUR STEP HEALTHCARE SOLUTION

    08/14/2009Hans-Hermann Hoppe
    It’s true that the US health-care system is a mess, but this demonstrates not market but government failure. To cure the problem requires not different or more government regulations and bureaucracies, as self-serving politicians want us to believe, but the elimination of all existing government controls.

    It’s time to get serious about health-care reform. Tax credits, vouchers, and privatization will go a long way toward decentralizing the system and removing unnecessary burdens from business. But four additional steps must also be taken:

    Only these four steps, although drastic, will restore a fully free market in medical provision. Until they are adopted, the industry will have serious problems, and so will we, its consumers.

    Eliminate all licensing requirements for medical schools, hospitals, pharmacies, and medical doctors and other health-care personnel. Their supply would almost instantly increase, prices would fall, and a greater variety of health-care services would appear on the market.
    Competing voluntary accreditation agencies would take the place of compulsory government licensing – if health-care providers believe that such accreditation would enhance their own reputation, and that their consumers care about reputation, and are willing to pay for it.

    Because consumers would no longer be duped into believing that there is such a thing as a “national standard” of health care, they would increase their search costs and make more discriminating health-care choices.

    Eliminate all government restrictions on the production and sale of pharmaceutical products and medical devices. This means no more Food and Drug Administration, which presently hinders innovation and increases costs.

    Costs and prices would fall, and a wider variety of better products would reach the market sooner. The market would force consumers to act in accordance with their own – rather than the government’s – risk assessment. And competing drug and device manufacturers and sellers, to safeguard against product liability suits as much as to attract customers, would provide increasingly better product descriptions and guarantees.

    Deregulate the health-insurance industry. Private enterprise can offer insurance against events over whose outcome the insured possesses no control. One cannot insure oneself against suicide or bankruptcy, for example, because it is in one’s own hands to bring these events about.

    Because a person’s health, or lack of it, lies increasingly within his own control, many, if not most health risks, are actually uninsurable. “Insurance” against risks whose likelihood an individual can systematically influence falls within that person’s own responsibility.

    All insurance, moreover, involves the pooling of individual risks. It implies that insurers pay more to some and less to others. But no one knows in advance, and with certainty, who the “winners” and “losers” will be. “Winners” and “losers” are distributed randomly, and the resulting income redistribution is unsystematic. If “winners” or “losers” could be systematically predicted, “losers” would not want to pool their risk with “winners,” but with other “losers,” because this would lower their insurance costs. I would not want to pool my personal accident risks with those of professional football players, for instance, but exclusively with those of people in circumstances similar to my own, at lower costs.

    Because of legal restrictions on the health insurers’ right of refusal – to exclude any individual risk as uninsurable – the present health-insurance system is only partly concerned with insurance. The industry cannot discriminate freely among different groups’ risks.

    As a result, health insurers cover a multitude of uninsurable risks, alongside, and pooled with, genuine insurance risks. They do not discriminate among various groups of people which pose significantly different insurance risks. The industry thus runs a system of income redistribution – benefiting irresponsible actors and high-risk groups at the expense of responsible individuals and low-risk groups. Accordingly, the industry’s prices are high and ballooning.

    To deregulate the industry means to restore it to unrestricted freedom of contract: to allow a health insurer to offer any contract whatsoever, to include or exclude any risk, and to discriminate among any groups of individuals. Uninsurable risks would lose coverage, the variety of insurance policies for the remaining coverage would increase, and price differentials would reflect genuine insurance risks. On average, prices would drastically fall. And the reform would restore individual responsibility in health care.

    Eliminate all subsidies to the sick or unhealthy. Subsidies create more of whatever is being subsidized. Subsidies for the ill and diseased promote carelessness, indigence, and dependency. If we eliminate such subsidies, we would strengthen the will to live healthy lives and to work for a living. In the first instance, that means abolishing Medicare and Medicaid.

    https://mises.org/library/four-step-healthcare-solution

    So according to libertarian theory this is a solution to apply free markets to health care. Anyone think this is a good idea?

    The alternative is to debate how much regulation is enough and what is necessary to regulate.

    And when the market is priced above peoples ability to pay, what to subsidize and how much.

  32. There are four unfilled seats on the 9th Circuit. Pick the top four on the list and confirm them forthwith! And where is Goresuch’s nomination? Should be a top priority.

  33. I went to an Insty link and found this about the recent decisions opposing Trump’s EO:

    Perhaps everything Blackman and Margulies and Bybee are saying is right as a matter of law in the regular order, but there’s an unexpressed legal principle functionally at work here: That President Trump is a crazy person whose oath of office large numbers of judges simply don’t trust and to whom, therefore, a whole lot of normal rules of judicial conduct do not apply.

    In this scenario, the underlying law is not actually moving much, or moving or at all, but the normal rules of deference and presumption of regularity in presidential conduct … simply don’t apply to Trump. As we’ve argued, these norms are a function of the president’s oath of office and the working assumption that the President is bound by the Take Care Clause. If the judiciary doesn’t trust the sincerity of the president’s oath and doesn’t have any presumption that the president will take care that the laws are faithfully executed, why on earth would it assume that a facially valid purpose of the executive is its actual purpose?

    In this scenario, there are really two presidencies for purposes of judicial review: One is the presidency when judges believe the president’s oath–that is, a presidency in which all sorts of norms of deference apply–and the other is a presidency in which judges don’t believe the oath. What we may be watching here is the development of a new body of law for this second type of presidency.

    https://lawfareblog.com/revolt-judges-what-happens-when-judiciary-doesnt-trust-presidents-oath

    If these judges really are mindreading Trump, finding him insincere and basing their decisions upon that, something is very wrong and quite dangerous.

  34. “The Black Robed Lefties want to tear the whole thing down, don’t they? … Do they have any idea what comes after?”

    Nope, Mouse. Lefties are not only completely incapable of anticipating the most obvious consequence of an ill-considered policy or action, they are equally incapable of accepting that consequence as the outcome of the bad policy or action when it actually occurs. These utter morons go around pushing glasses off of tables and in between stomping and screaming and gnashing teeth and blaming others for all the glass on the floor, can go an entire lifetime and never figure out that pushing glasses off of tables inevitably results in broken glasses on the floor. They have become that bad, and are getting more insane by exponentially increasing levels.

    There is nothing that will be at more of a disadvantage than a typical urban lefty by the reality that ensues should they achieve their endgame of dissolving Western civilization into a violent, lawless, broken, tribal dystopia in which one of the most dangerous contingents are members of a seventh century religion of murder and conquest. Not only do they not have any skills that involve building, growing, making, fixing or self-defense, no one they know does. Urban lefties don’t know anything about stuff like that. Yet, they throw screaming tantrums for every minute of delay in getting there.

  35. I am not a lawyer and all that but it sure seems to me law at the national level is often a not-so-pleasant chat with Humpty-Dumpty from Through the Looking-Glass:

    “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

    “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

    “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master– that’s all.”

    God bless Lewis Carroll.

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