The 9th Circuit is handling the Trump administration’s appeal of a District Court stay on their fascist Muslim ban. They received the argument today:
Lawyers for the Justice Department told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that the states of Washington and Minnesota should not have been allowed to challenge the ban and that a judge was wrong to stop Trump’s executive order, issued just more than a week ago.
“Judicial second-guessing of the President’s determination that a temporary suspension of entry of certain classes of aliens was necessary at this time to protect national security would constitute an impermissible intrusion on the political branches’ plenary constitutional authority over foreign affairs, national security, and immigration,” Acting Solicitor General Noel Francisco said in a brief.
They refused to grant an immediate stay of the stay and set an aggressive briefing schedule for tomorrow. The immediate problem is simple. No one sentient and mentally competent actually believes that the president issued his Muslim ban to apply to these particular countries at this particular time in order to protect national security.
And, it’s really a low bar here. Normally, if the president says we have a national security threat, no judge is going to argue that the president is wrong and that no threat exists. But that’s exactly what judge after judge (excepting one in Boston) has concluded. And the reason for this is simple. The Trump administration has been quite transparent that the motivation is based on nonspecific opposition to letting Muslims come into this country. The countries weren’t picked based on any threat assessment from the intelligence community. Refugees were cut off without any fine-grained threat assessment.
The administration believes that there is a vague threat that grows incrementally larger every time a new Muslim sets foot on our soil, and they believe there is a long term threat that we could wind up with large disaffected Muslim communities like Europe has created for themselves. It’s really the latter threat that is motivating them, but their solution isn’t fitted to the problem, which remains theoretical in any case.
Their objection is much more cultural than about national security, and this is obvious enough that they aren’t getting the normal deference a president would receive.
Imagine if President Obama had emerged from a meeting with the National Security Council and announced that they had intelligence about plans to infiltrate terror cells from Yemen into the country and therefore called for an immediate and temporary ban of all travelers from Yemen. He would have been believed. His order would have won the day in court.
It’s only because Trump’s order isn’t fitted to any credible and specific threat and that his ulterior motives are plain for all to see that he isn’t convincing these judges.
