The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld President Trump’s controversial travel ban affecting several mostly Muslim countries, offering a limited endorsement of the president’s executive authority on immigration in one of the hardest-fought battles of this term.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the conservative majority opinion, wrote that the order was “squarely within the scope of presidential authority” under federal law.
“The sole prerequisite set forth in [federal law] is that the president find that the entry of the covered aliens would be detrimental to the interests of the United States. The president has undoubtedly fulfilled that requirement here,” he wrote.
Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor was among the court’s four liberals who wrote a dissent.
“This repackaging does little to cleanse [the policy] of the appearance of discrimination that the president’s words have created,” she said. “Based on the evidence in the record, a reasonable observer would conclude that the proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.”
Notice the difference in arguments. Roberts, writing for the majority, stated that President Trump’s travel ban is within Presidential authority as specified by the Constitution.
Sotomayor, writing for the minority, ignored the Constitution. All that matters to her is that the ban is, in her opinion, undesirable and therefore racist.
But the Supreme Court is not supposed to express opinions about policy or law, other than their Constitutional status. The Supreme Court is supposed to uphold the Constitution.
Sotomayor, like former President Obama, lectures Americans on “anti-Muslim animus”. What about the anti-liberty, anti-individual rights, anti-Constitutional church-state separation animus of most Muslims? Muslims are never taken to task for their views, while non-Muslims are expected to bow their heads in shame and sympathy. No wonder Donald Trump is in the White House!
If the President of the United States started putting people in concentration camps or rounding them up to be slaves, then the Supreme Court’s job would be to step in and say, “This law is unconstitutional.” The Constitution decides — not Sonia Sotomayor and her fellow progressives. When it comes to President Trump’s policies, the leftists on the Court do not care about the Constitution. They only care about upholding laws they like and shooting down laws they dislike.
That’s why under a 5-4 majority of leftists rather than conservatives, the First and Second Amendments — which leftists no longer like — would be toast by now.
Thank goodness for the 2016 election. Even today, elections still matter.
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