The hearing today could decide the fate of the president’s so-called “Muslim ban’
President Donald Trump appears likely to win his travel ban case at the Supreme Court.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy both signaled support for the travel policy in arguments Wednesday at the high court. The ban's challengers almost certainly need one of those two justices if the court is to strike down the ban on travelers from several mostly Muslim countries.
The travel ban case is the court's first comprehensive look at a Trump policy - one of considerable importance to the president and highly controversial since it was first rolled out a week after Trump took office.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the most aggressive questioner of Solicitor General Noel Francisco in his defense of the Trump policy, and the three other liberal justices also raised questions about it.
The Supreme Court is considering whether the president can indefinitely keep people out of the country based on nationality. It is also looking at whether the policy is aimed at excluding Muslims from the United States. A decision is expected by late June.
With Katyal at the lectern, Justice Samuel Alito said it seemed wrong to call the travel policy a Muslim ban when it applies to just five of 50 mostly Muslim countries, 8 percent of the world's Muslim population and just one country - Iran - among the 10 largest with Muslim majorities. 'Would a reasonable observer think this is a Muslim ban?' Alito asked.
Hearing the last arguments of its nine-month term Wednesday, the court took its first direct look at a policy that indefinitely bars more than 150 million people from entering the country. Opponents, led at the high court by Hawaii, say Trump overstepped his authority and was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.
Chief Justice John Roberts suggested he doubted that the policy was unconstitutionally tainted by Trump’s campaign call for a Muslim ban at the border. Roberts asked whether those arguments would prevent a president from taking the advice of his military staff to launch an air strike against Syria.
“Does that mean he can’t because you would regard that as discrimination against a majority-Muslim country?” Roberts asked Hawaii’s lawyer, Neal Katyal.
Another pivotal justice, Anthony Kennedy, suggested the travel ban was more flexible than opponents contended, pointing to a provision in the most recent version that he said requires officials to revisit it every 180 days. “That indicates there’ll be a reassessment and the president has continuing discretion,” Kennedy said.
Trump v. Hawaii: the Supreme Court’s travel ban oral arguments look better for Trump
The federal government’s argument, as presented by Francisco, was a new variation on a theme the Trump administration has pushed for the entire 15-month court battle over the travel ban: that this is a matter of national security, and on national security, the executive branch has a lot of power over both Congress and the courts.
The government argues the ban is covered by a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the president to suspend entry of “any aliens, or any class of aliens,” if he finds they could be a threat to the US.
Francisco argued that the government was only targeting countries that didn’t give the United States enough information for US officials to judge whether someone ought to be admitted to the country under existing law — so the ban was needed to enforce the rest of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
More importantly, he argued, the point of the ban was to exert “diplomatic pressure” on targeted countries, to force their governments to start providing that information.
