BREAKING! Court Decides To Hear Case They've Repeatedly Decided To Hear

Supreme Court grants cert in Travel Ban 3.0 case.

(Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images)

The Supreme Court has granted cert in Trump v. Hawaii, the case over Trump’s third attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to ban Muslims based on their country of origin.

It’s not really surprising that the Supreme Court has granted cert in the case: consider that it already agreed to hear appeals on Travel Ban 1.0 and 2.0, and that Chief Justice John Roberts at least seems very interested in finding some way to authorize the president’s bigotry.

This time, even the Ninth Circuit expected the Supreme Court to take a very hard look at the Travel Ban. As we reported when the Ninth Circuit made its latest ruling, the opinion reads like an argument TO the Supreme Court, laying out a system where judges can squash the travel ban without stepping on the government’s wartime powers.

It’s not really worth it to get into all the tea leaf reading on what the Supreme Court might do, now that they’ve made the obvious decision to hear the case. Yes, the Roberts Court has thus far seemed supportive of the ban, but that’s in the context of the Ninth Circuit issuing temporary injunctions against a temporary ban. Now, we have an indefinite ban, and a lower court ruling saying that it’s beyond the executive’s authority to ban travel based on country of origin, without an act of Congress. We just don’t know how the conservative four on the Supreme Court will balance executive powers here. We don’t have a clue what the still-not-retired Anthony Kennedy will do. We don’t know whether the Court believes us to be at “war” with Muslims. We don’t know if there are enough votes to write the next Korematsu.

What we do know is that this will be a legacy defining decision for whoever writes for the majority. And, if the decision is to allow the Travel Ban, we know that whoever writes the dissent is destined to have those words quoted by future generations fighting their own battles against bigotry. History has already decided that Trump’s travel ban is wrong and racist. Whether there are five justices who see it that way will tell us more about how committed our government is to bigotry, than it will about the constitutionality of that bigotry.

Guess we’ll all be watching.

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Supreme Court to Consider Challenge to Trump’s Latest Travel Ban [New York Times]


Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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