Insistence on Being Right
Terry H. Schwadron
What is so disappointing — to be clear, the only thing disappointing — about hearing that a second U.S court of Appeals has found President Trump’s Travel Ban to be illegal is simply that the President insists that despite several judicial rulings, he is right.
Just listen to Mr. Trump. He is right about the ruining environmental regulation, about draining monies from public education, about rounding up immigrants, about ruining health care access as we know it, about stomping out Science and ending support for the arts, despite any verifiable knowledge to the contrary. So, too, he knows more than the courts about the legality of a ban drawn around what looks to be clearly defined religious identification, which would be wrong even if possibly legal.
Only he knows what he said, again, James Comey’s contemporaneous notes notwithstanding. Only he can fix things that have been wrong since people named Obama or Clinton crawled the Earth. The instances go on and on.
Indeed, at this point, it’s not so much that he is consistently on the wrong side of issues that seems to bother me as much as that he is certain — -even when he contradicts himself.
What is easy to remember is that all heads must bow to him — and thus Trump First and America First are the same thing — and that each and every turn must afford Mr. Trump a chance to earn more profit. What struck as a televised cartoon was news film from a Cabinet meeting yesterday in which each secretary, in turn, praised Mr. Trump for the opportunity to serve him; it was a display as absurd as disgusting. And it underscored the idea that no one can bring him information with which he may disagree — or even learn.
Only somewhat facetiously, I believe that there will be a Trump Travel Service in the future to offer Muslims routes to beat his own proposed Travel Bans. After all, only he would know how to travel in legal and actual comfort.
It will be delicious if the Supreme Court takes up the appeals from the two, somewhat different Appeals Court rulings and then votes to uphold them, since there appears to be nothing wrong legally or constitutionally with the earlier decisions. The only way a structure constructionist view of the appeals goes in Mr. Trump’s favor is if the vote is baldly political.
Even better perhaps would be a decision by the court not to hear the cases, allowing the two rulings to stand. I suppose this is where Justice Neil Gorsuch is expected to repay the President for his appointment. If we heard the truth from nominee Gorsuch, he will be all about sticking to the established law.
As The Washington Post noted, unlike the previous Court of Appeals ruling, the unanimous decision by these three Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judges, did not dwell on Trump’s public comments, nor did they declare that the president had run afoul of the Constitution because his intent was to discriminate. Instead, they ruled that Trump’s travel ban lacked a sufficient national security or other justification that would make it legal, and that violated immigration law. They offered no opinion on whether the ban was constitutional, the finding of the previous appeals court decision.
Even better perhaps would be a decision by the court not to hear the cases, allowing the two rulings to stand. I suppose this is where Justice Neil Gorsuch is expected to repay the President for his appointment. If we heard the truth from nominee Gorsuch, he will be all about sticking to the established law.
Meanwhile, the original desire was for a 90-day temporary pause in immigration from seven Muslim-dominant countries to allow for an examination into who actually is coming in. We are past 130 days now. Why is the temporary ban needed? As any number of published reports have shown, the number of terrorist incidents resulting from immigration from those countries to the United States has been zero; The New York Times noted over the weekend that there has been no discernible change in the vetting of visa seekers from those nations. There have been several terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States, all involving native citizens.
The clear implication is that all of this is political theater rather than substantive immigration policy. Surely, Mr. Trump must be able to bring something more than egotistical bombast to the fight against terrorism.
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