Trump travel ban makes no sense, and neither does Supreme Court ruling

President Trump’s travel ban never made sense, and Monday’s narrow ruling on it by the Supreme Court makes even less.

The court should have given the entire travel ban the heave ho. Instead, the justices said it was OK to ban citizens from six countries the White House deems dangerous — if they “lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”

Say what?

Lawyers are scrambling to determine exactly what the court means by a bona fide relationship or, for that matter, an “entity”. The only certainty the ruling brings is another round of lawsuits for the courts to struggle with.

The original legal argument for the ban was that it was temporary in order to implement better vetting procedures. But Trump now has said it’s a ban, period, and there are already extreme vetting procedures in place.

Republican leaders seem to have no problem with this, so there will be no legislative solution in this Congress. The court has to sort it out. Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito wrote in a dissenting opinion that the travel ban should have been allowed to take effect in full, but the others clearly have reservations or they wouldn’t have added the weird exceptions. There is room for argument in October.

The ban targets countries that in theory are sending us people who are “prone” to terror. But no Americans have died from a terrorist attack in the United States carried out by a person from one of the six Muslim-majority countries covered by the ban: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Thousands died in the 9/11 attacks by terrorists from Saudi Arabia. But Trump does business in Saudi Arabia, not in the six banned countries. He also has dealings with Egypt, Indonesia and Turkey, all of which have militant elements. Could that be why they’re not included in the travel ban?

Since the U.S. began its system of vetting refugees in 1980, not a single person accepted as a refugee has been involved in a successful deadly attack on the United States.

Trump’s ban was a blatant attempt to fulfill a campaign promise to ban Muslims, buying into the misbegotten idea, shared by his political base, that America is at war with Islam. Since the Republican party has lined up behind him, the courts are the only recourse.

The Supreme Court can continue to torture the details of the ban into something a majority feels is constitutional. But for clarity, it should declare the executive order unconstitutional for its lack of basis in fact, if not for its obvious intent to discriminate against Muslim refugees from wars in which we are combatants.