cedarbridge wrote:Whoisthere wrote:Why did Trump ban dem muslims? Is it just a populist move or what? It seems pretty retarded to me, but I want to like Trump I guess but also can't be assed to do my own research on murican politics since I'm a euro.
He issued an order blocking ingress from a list of countries produced by the previous administration (Obama.) The stated reason was to give administrative agencies time to review the policies in place for vetting the ingress of persons from those countries as areas of interest related to terrorism. The order doesn't mention muslims or islam. This shouldn't be a major story since every president entering office has issued a similar ban on one or more countries immediately or soon after taking office.
The 9th circuit's ruling actually covers all this in detail. But several caveats before we continue:
They weren't making a ruling on the merits of the case simply because they don't have time to do so. Instead they just laid out what should happen in the meantime while some other court makes that ruling.
They specifically said they haven't reviewed all the evidence because the case is "urgent" and they needed to reach a ruling quickly.
The way the appeal was set up was adversarial to the government. Since the injunction was already in place, it was up to them to prove the injunction should be lifted, not on Washington to prove it should be kept.
They do say that there are competing interests at stake that support the government's desire for the EO, but they kind of gloss over the point under the premise that a later court can make a decision on the matter.
The government has decided not to pursue the case any further. They're going to craft a different EO instead of appealing to the Supreme Court or waiting for a case on the merits. You can draw conclusions from that all you want, but it's a good piece of information to know.
They laid out the reasons why the injunction was filed. Washington state and its citizens would have harm caused by the EO, that harm would go away if it was blocked, there was a potential legality issue with the EO, and the government failed to cite a rational basis reasoning for the EO. The first two are non-controversial opinions that I think everybody can agree with. The third I'll get into in a moment, because I want to draw special attention to that fourth issue. The 9th circuit asked the government to cite a recent terror attack that would have been prevented from this EO. They could not. They asked if there was a known or suspected terror plot that would be prevented or hampered by the EO. They refused to cite one. Instead they claimed that the president has unlimited authority on the matter, a notion the 9th called ridiculous. I want to stress that it's not that the government couldn't defend the EO or failed to, they simply didn't even try. It's hard to win win win when you concede.
But let's take a step back and talk about those potential constitutional legality issues since that's the really controversial part. They primarily focused on the 5th amendment, specifically the "No person shall be deprived of life or limb without due process" clause. As covered above the 9th had already determined the EO was arbitrary and unnecessary, and due process by definition is rational and restrained, you can imagine they found that aliens were being deprived of proper due process. They took another step and also pointed out that citizens and lawful residents were also being deprived of due process since not only would some of them be disbarred from leaving and returning, they also couldn't invite their family members if they were from the 7 barred countries. Interestingly they also cited a possible 1st amendment problem "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" because Trump had called this a Muslim ban while campaigning. I'm not drawing a conclusion, that's literally their argument. However they didn't go into detail on this because the due process problems were enough to come to the conclusion they came to.
But don't take my word for it,
read it yourself.