Travel ban tweets undercut defense
Trump messages may hinder Justice
WASHINGTON — Memo from legal experts to President Donald Trump on resurrecting his stalled travel ban: Put down the Twitter.
Trump’s 140-character musings Monday may have undercut his own efforts to persuade the Supreme Court to reinstate his revised travel ban, which Trump called a “watereddown, politically correct” version of what he’d originally sought. Just as Trump’s Justice Department is arguing the ban doesn’t target Muslims, legal experts said the president seems to be suggesting the opposite.
Those who oppose the travel ban said Trump’s Tweetstorm, ironically, helps their case. Neal Katyal, the former acting solicitor general representing Hawaii in its lawsuit against the ban, said it was as if Trump was his co-counsel.
“We don’t need the help but will take it!” Katyal wrote in his own Twitter post.
The courts in January halted Trump’s initial order, which banned travel from seven majority-Muslim countries and indefinitely halted entry to Syrian refugees. Trump begrudgingly scaled back the order by removing Iraq from the list and making the Syria refugee ban only temporary, but that order was blocked by the courts, too.
At the heart of the legal wrangling is whether Trump’s proposed ban violates the Constitution by discriminating on the basis of religion. As a candidate, Trump called for a “Muslim ban,” comments that came back to haunt him as president when the courts determined that even his scaled-down order was “rooted in religious animus and intended to bar Muslims from this country.”
Not so, the Justice Department has argued, insisting the temporary ban is based on credible national security concerns unrelated to religion, and his campaign statements should be ignored. But Stephen Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor, said Trump was making that argument much less tenable by calling the revised order “politically correct.”
“These tweets are basically winking at his supporters to say, obviously, I’m only doing this so that the courts will uphold it,” Vladeck said. “It makes it harder to argue this is not a Muslim ban, and more importantly, it makes it harder to argue that the president’s statements should be irrelevant.”
In a series of early-morning tweets, Trump bashed the Justice Department for its decision to ask the Supreme Court to review the second version of the ban — which he signed.
“The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.,” Trump said.
He urged the Justice Department, which he oversees, to seek a “much tougher version” of the order.
Hoping to shore up the order’s legal underpinnings, both the White House and Trump’s Homeland Security chief have insisted it’s not actually a “travel ban.” But Trump on Monday was having none of it.
“People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” Trump wrote.
He pounded the point home Monday night, tweeting, “That’s right, we need a TRAVEL BAN for certain DANGEROUS countries, not some politically correct term that won’t help us protect our people!”