A challenge to President Trump's executive order to bar citizens of certain Muslim-dominant nations from visiting the United States came before the Fourth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals, which issued its opinion today blocking the president's travel ban. The opinion goes on at some length, but all that a constitutionalist need pay attention to is the opening, written by Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory:
The question for this Court, distilled to its essential form, is whether the Constitution, as the Supreme Court declared in Ex Parte Milligan (1866), remains "a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace." And if so, whether it protects Plaintiffs' right to challenge an Executive Order that in text speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination. Surely the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment yet stands as an untiring sentinel for the protection of one of our most cherished founding principles - that government shall not establish any religious orthodoxy, or favor or disfavor one religion over another. Congress granted the President broad power to deny entry to aliens, but that power is not absolute. It cannot go unchecked when, as here, the President wields it through an executive edict that stands to cause irreparable harm to individuals across this nation.
What did the court rely on for its 10-3 decision? Largely, and ironically, the campaign speeches of Mr. Trump himself.
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