Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
President to pursue travel restrictions
Appeals court blocks president’s attempt to reinstate his controversial travel ban
Trump administration vows to continue legal fight after appeals court rejects request to reinstate ban.
WASHINGTON — After a federal appeals court on Sunday rejected President Donald Trump’s emergency bid to reinstate his contentious travel ban, the White House signaled fresh determination to push forward in a legal dispute that is fast becoming a test of executive power.
Meanwhile, visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries targeted by Trump’s temporary ban hurried to board U.S.-bound airplanes to seize what they feared might be a brief opportunity to enter the country.
Trump’s directive — which also temporarily halted the arrival of all refugees coming to the U.S. — sparked worldwide debate over religious discrimination, briefly locked out tens of thousands of valid U.S. visa-holders and rattled some close U.S. allies.
It remains in abeyance after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco early Sunday rejected an emergency request by the Justice Department to stay an order by a Seattle federal judge that had blocked implementation of the ban.
Though it turned down Trump’s request for an immediate reinstatement of the ban, the 9th Circuit will still consider the administration’s appeal and asked for responses and counter-responses from both sides by Monday.
Several courts around the country have questioned whether parts of the ban are discriminatory.
The White House and many Republicans defend it as necessary for national security.
But as a broader constitutional confrontation loomed, the president — as has happened often in his nascent administration — proved a potent source of distraction over the weekend through his comments and tweets.
Some Republicans moved Sunday to distance themselves from two days of repeated attacks by Trump against the Seattle federal judge, James Robart, who had blocked the ban’s implementation on Friday.
“Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!” the president said Sunday on Twitter. A day earlier he referred to the Republican-appointed jurist as a “so-called judge.”
Also grabbing attention was Trump’s inflammatory comparison of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s deadly reprisals against domestic enemies with American acts of violence.
Democrats expressed dismay over Trump’s Twitter attacks, saying they suggested the president did not respect the independence of the judiciary.
Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” said Trump’s ban should have been handled in consultation with Congress. She expected the matter to end up in the Supreme Court — meaning the entire flap could color confirmation hearings for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch.
“The president is not a dictator,” Feinstein said. “The framers of our Constitution wanted a strong Congress for the very reason that most of these kinds of things should be done within the scope of lawmaking.”
Several GOP lawmakers took issue with Trump’s personal attacks on the judge and his comments about Putin, rejecting any moral comparison between the Russian leader and the U.S.
“I don’t understand language like that,” Sen. Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, said on ABC’s “This Week.” “We don’t have socalled judges. We don’t have so-called senators. We don’t have so-called presidents.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” said he wasn’t going to “critique every utterance” of Trump’s, but he didn’t defend him either.
McConnell also raised concerns over restricting travel. “There is a fine line here between proper vetting and interfering with the kind of travel or suggesting some kind of religious test,” he said. “And we need to avoid doing that kind of thing.”
Pence said the White House would abide by the court’s decision, but he expressed unhappiness over what he described as judicial efforts to improperly interfere with the president’s authority.
“It’s just very frustrating to the president, to our whole administration, to millions of Americans who want to see judges that will uphold the law and recognize the authority the president of the United States has under the Constitution to manage who comes into this country,” Pence said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The travel ban affected some 60,000 valid visas. They were first canceled as a result of the president’s Jan. 27 directive and then reinstated following Robart’s order.
Court challenges to the ban are underway in a dozen other venues around the country, but the Seattle ruling was the most sweeping. Groups including the American Civil Liberties Union say they hope to overturn the travel ban on constitutional grounds.
In Florida, where Trump is having a golf getaway, the president told reporters at his Mar-a-Largo resort on Saturday night that he expected his order to ultimately stand.
“We’ll win,” he said. “For the safety of the country, we’ll win.”