Travel-ban fight at court to test presidential power

Bloomberg

Fifteen months after Donald Trump’s first travel ban set the in-your-face tone for his presidency, the controversy finally comes before the Supreme Court in a showdown over the limits of the president’s power to control who enters the country.
In arguments on Wednesday, the justices for the first time will directly confront the policy, which in its latest version restricts entry by people from seven countries, five of them predominantly Muslim.
The court will consider whether the travel ban’s roots lie in anti-Muslim comments Trump made during his campaign, whether he overstepped his authority under immigration laws and whether judges can second-guess the president’s national-security assessments.
The case will mark the biggest test yet of Trump’s relationship with the court, which so far has treaded lightly around his unconventional presidency. The argument will be the last of the court’s nine-month term.
The justices hinted they will uphold the travel ban when they issued an order in December letting it take full effect during the legal fight.
The move, over the dissents of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, superseded an order that let an earlier version of the ban take only partial effect.
Still, neither action addressed the merits of the legal controversy, a subject covered by dozens of briefs filed in the case by interested outsiders.
The justices will examine a ruling against Trump by a federal appeals court in San Francisco that said he exceeded his powers with a sweeping prohibition from entry to the US that would cover more than 150 million people. Although federal immigration law says the president can block a “class of aliens”, the appeals court said he still must show they would be a danger to the country.
Trump’s top Supreme Court lawyer, Solicitor General Noel Francisco, said the appeals court ruling “would severely constrain the ability of this and future presidents to discharge their duties.”
Francisco said in a court brief that Trump’s order laid out the reasons for his policy, even though the law “does not require the president to articulate detailed findings before he may suspend or restrict entry of aliens abroad.” That’s a stance that opponents of the travel ban say would give the president far more power over the nation’s borders than either Congress or the constitution’s framers intended.
“It is stunning what the Department of Justice is saying in terms of how much power they are asking the courts to give to the president,” said Hawaii Lieutenant Governor Doug Chin, who led the case against the ban when he served as his state’s attorney general.