Lessons From a Travel Ban Clash That Wasnt by Linda Greenhouse
'While the Supreme Court has taken the Trump administration’s travel ban appeal off its calendar, there is something important to remember: Just because a case is moot, as this one appears to be, doesn’t mean that nothing happened.
A great deal has happened in the eight months since the newly inaugurated president unleashed his first Muslim travel ban, fulfilling his campaign pledge to impose “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” It was a bizarre and terrifying weekend — terrifying not only for those whose valid travel documents had without notice become worthless but also for the rest of us, plunged suddenly into the shocking new reality of Donald Trump’s America.
Blocked by the courts, the first travel ban morphed into the second, and now, on the eve of a scheduled Supreme Court argument, we have travel ban 3.0, with a few fig leaves added. (While it’s true that North Korea, a new country added to the previous all-Muslim list, is not a Muslim country, it’s also true that a grand total of 109 visas were issued last year to North Koreans, and subjecting those individuals to exacting scrutiny, as surely happened, is not likely to have overtaxed our national resources.)
Unlike the first ban, issued in the apparent absence of any legal advice, and unlike the second, on which lawyers seemingly functioned while holding their noses and their breath, this one is the product of some smart lawyering. It was clearly designed to address the main statutory flaw that the lower courts found in the earlier versions, which was that under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the president lacks unilateral authority to issue a categorical ban on the entry of entire nationalities without a very precise reason. The official explanation of the new order stresses the multidepartmental consultation and the summerlong study of the world’s nations that went into selecting the eight countries to which the new open-ended ban applies.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/opinion/contributors/travel-ban-lessons-trump.html?
