This is written by a “Never Trumper” who has not let up on his criticism, so this column is very important….rsk
A strange madness is gripping the federal judiciary. It is in the process of crafting a new standard of judicial review, one that does violence to existing precedent, good sense, and even national security for the sake of defeating Donald Trump. We’ll call this new jurisprudence “Trumplaw,” and its latest victim is once again the so-called Trump travel ban. The perpetrator is the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
This afternoon, the Fourth Circuit upheld a nationwide injunction on Trump’s temporary halt on immigration from six majority-Muslim countries — each of which is either a state sponsor of terrorism (Sudan and Iran) or overrun with terrorist violence, with entire regions under jihadist control (Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Somalia). Indeed, some of these countries no longer have a recognizably functional government.
Here is the essence of the court’s ruling: Trump’s campaign statements were so grotesque that they not only (1) hurt the feelings of a Muslim resident so much that he was granted standing to challenge an executive order that did not apply to him, but also (2) rendered an otherwise lawful executive order so damaging that the harm to the plaintiff’s feelings (and his wife’s possibly delayed entry into the United States) outweigh the government’s asserted national-security interest in pausing to reexamine foreign entry from hostile and war-torn countries.
Since Trumplaw is such a novel form of jurisprudence, it’s exceedingly hard to square with existing precedent. So, when existing precedent either doesn’t apply or cuts against the overriding demand to stop Trump, then it’s up to the court to yank that law out of context, misinterpret it, and then functionally rewrite it to reach the “right” result.
Take, for example, the Fourth Circuit’s reading of a Supreme Court case called Kleindienst v. Mandel. In Mandel, a collection of scholars demanded that the U.S. grant a non-immigrant visa to Belgian Marxist journalist. The government had denied him entry under provisions of American law excluding those who advocated or published “the economic, international, and governmental doctrines of world communism.” Make no mistake, the First Amendment protects the right to advocate or publish Marxist doctrines every bit as much as it protects the free exercise of the Islamic faith. Yet the Supreme Court still ruled against the Belgian journalist:
We hold that, when the Executive exercises [its] power negatively on the basis of a facially legitimate and bona fide reason, the courts will neither look behind the exercise of that discretion, nor test it by balancing its justification against the First Amendment interests of those who seek personal communication with the applicant.
The meaning is clear. If the order is supported by legitimate and bona fide reasons on its face, you simply don’t go beyond the document. By that standard, the executive order is easily and clearly lawful. On its face, the order asserts a legitimate and bona fide national-security justification. On its face, the order isn’t remotely a Muslim ban. On its face it doesn’t target the Muslim faith in any way, shape, or form. On its face it describes exactly why each nation is included. The Fourth Circuit, however, interpreted Mandel to argue that the Court looked only at the face of the document to determine whether its supporting reasons were legitimate, not whether they were “bona fide.” It could go “behind” the document to determine “good faith.”