TRUMP’S TRAVEL BAN: THE COURT SPLITS THE PRESIDENCY FROM THE PRESIDENT

The U.S. Supreme Court was the calm in the storm of Donald Trump’s presidency Tuesday. In a 5-4 ruling, justices affirmed Trump’s authority to implement reasonable immigration controls while tactfully rejecting his irresponsible calls for a travel ban on Muslims.

The high court said Trump has the power to restrict the entry of foreigners to the United States based on national security concerns, thus upholding last year’s ban on travelers from several predominantly Muslim nations. The key, said the court, is that Trump’s travel policy was based on sound judgment and evidence. The president ordered a Homeland Security review and then focused the travel restrictions on countries, including Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, that pose risks to the United States. The court rejected arguments that Trump’s ban amounted to religious discrimination by noting that the travel policy didn’t mention religion and affected just 8 percent of the world’s Muslims.

To sum up: Trump acted sensibly and followed the law to protect the national interest. Hmm, if only that sober assessment reflected a typical day in the life of this president.

Instead, Trump leads through a combination of gut instinct and emotion, sometimes to his advantage, sometimes to his detriment. He can be nasty, divisive, and he enjoys sowing chaos. Remember that the travel policy approved Tuesday was his third effort. His first travel ban, issued just days into his presidency, was a sloppy mess that created panic at airports and smacked of prejudice. Legal challenges to all three orders were based in part on Trump’s ugly rhetoric, including his reckless vow as a candidate to impose a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

What the Supreme Court wisely said, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority, is that Trump should be held accountable for presidential actions, not for his suspect temperament and sound bites. Presidents have the capacity to lead as figures of moral authority, but they’ve performed that role “unevenly” through history, Roberts noted wryly.

Then he got to the heart of the matter, offering a legal opinion that also can be seen as practical advice for surviving the Trump era with blood pressure intact: Put the focus on the president’s policies over his rantings, because much of what he says is just noise. “Plaintiffs argue that this president’s words strike at fundamental standards of respect and tolerance … ,” Roberts wrote. “But the issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements. It is instead the significance of those statements in reviewing presidential directive, neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core executive responsibility. In doing so, we must consider not only the statements of a particular president, but also the authority of the presidency itself.”

Say it with us, Trump critics: deeds over Twitter feed. Beyond putting Trump’s behavior in proper perspective, the court offered useful guidance for assessing another controversy: the administration’s current immigration enforcement along the Southern border. The circumstances are different — a shutdown of legal travel permission vs. the treatment of people entering the country without permission — but the court made clear presidents have wide latitude to set immigration policy. This cuts to a fundamental responsibility of the office: defense of the nation’s borders. We’d add, however, that Trump has an obligation to balance enforcement with compassion, which is why it was important for him to stop separating children from parents entering the U.S. from Mexico illegally. The administration must reunite those families.

One more vital component of Roberts’ ruling was addressing the historical travesty of forcibly relocating American citizens of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps during World War II. Roberts denounced the court’s opinion in Korematsu v. United States, the 1944 decision that permitted the internment. Roberts called it “objectively unlawful” and “morally repugnant.” Korematsu became relevant because some of Trump’s detractors have wrongly compared the travel ban and the situation on the Southern border — both involving foreign nationals — to the internment of the Japanese-American citizens. Because different rules apply to noncitizens and citizens, Roberts found, those legal comparisons are baseless.

As for the travel ban itself: On Tuesday the court did the country a service by keeping the focus on the presidency, not the president.