Overruled again

Arigorous decision by a George W. Bush-appointed federal district judge serves as a powerful rebuke to President Trump’s recission last year of protections for undocumented young people brought to the U.S. as children.

Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Tuesday forced those protections to stay in place and required the government to resume accepting new applications — albeit after a 90-day pause. That period, wrote Bates, will “afford DHS” — the Department of Homeland Security — “an opportunity to better explain its view that DACA is unlawful.” As is, the administration’s “legal judgment was virtually unexplained.”

Given the sweeping power of the presidency on national security, Trump is likely on firmer legal footing in his seven-country travel ban, the case tested in Supreme Court oral argument Wednesday.

But even there, the policy is senseless and cruel, and unmoored from logic. It was all about a President’s whim. That’s life in Trump’s America.