Travel ban tweets show disdain for law
By Amy Davidson
June 5, 2017
... The question is whether the current order, which would temporarily keep people from six predominantly Muslim countries and all refugees out of the country, is a realization of the unconstitutional “Muslim ban” that Trump called for during the campaign, or whether it is something entirely independent: a prudent, religiously neutral immigration measure taken in response to national-security concerns. After the weekend’s terrorist attacks on London Bridge, Trump provided some ugly answers to that question in a series of tweets.
It started on Saturday night, just after 7 p.m. “We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!” By “our rights,” Trump apparently meant the right that he presumed to have, as President, not to listen to the courts. He added, on Sunday night, “We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people. If we don’t get smart it will only get worse.” But it was in four Monday-morning tweets, the first issued at 6:25 a.m., that Trump jammed himself directly into the legal arguments surrounding the ban. He wrote, “People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!”
Sean Spicer, Trump’s spokesman, has criticized reporters for calling the executive order a travel ban. More importantly, though, the Administration’s lawyers have made the opposite argument regarding which language matters. They have argued, before appeals panels in both the Fourth and Ninth Circuits, that Trump can say whatever he wants when campaigning or in talk that is not “official,” but that what the ban actually is consists of nothing more that the legalisms (and euphemisms) that his lawyers come up with in drafting it. The judges, the lawyers said, should pay no attention to moments when Trump said that we as a nation had a “problem” with Islam, or that “Islam hates us” and that only people who “love” us should come into the country, or to what such comments might say about how the order would be implemented. Trump, by saying the reverse of what his legal team argues, is mocking his lawyers, believers in the language of the law, and pretty much everyone else involved. (In another, roughly simultaneous series of tweets, which my colleague John Cassidy explored, Trump conveyed his disdain for the mayor of London.)
And then, a few minutes after that first Monday tweet, Trump added another lashing of the same kind of contempt: “The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.” This raises, again, the question of what “the original Travel Ban” is in Trump’s mind. Is it the January 27th order, which was so obviously legally flawed—it failed, for example, to even consider the due-process rights of long-term permanent residents—that, after a few scathing legal losses, Administration lawyers withdrew and redrafted it? (It’s worth noting that Trump’s Monday-morning tweet, by bemoaning the loss of the first order, was complaining about the lost chance to discriminate against those green-card holders.) Or is it his call, in December of 2015, for a “complete and total shutdown” of the entry of any Muslims into the United States? That ban, Trump said at the time, should remain in place “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” With Trump as our representative, that figuring-out could take an awfully long time ...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/trumps-travel-ban-tweets-show-his-disdain-for-the-law
