Courtesy of Pam Martens.
At 3:08 p.m. Pacific time, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 29-page decision on President Donald Trump’s Executive Order regarding banning immigration to the United States for 120 days and banning people from seven majority Muslim countries from entering the United States for 90 days.
The Court found that the States of Washington and Minnesota, which had taken their case to a lower Federal District Court and won a Temporary Restraining Order, did indeed suffer harms from the Executive Order. The Court wrote:
“We therefore conclude that the States have alleged harms to their proprietary interests traceable to the Executive Order. The necessary connection can be drawn in at most two logical steps: (1) the Executive Order prevents nationals of seven countries from entering Washington and Minnesota; (2) as a result, some of these people will not enter state universities, some will not join those universities as faculty, some will be prevented from performing research, and some will not be permitted to return if they leave. And we have no difficulty concluding that the States’ injuries would be redressed if they could obtain the relief they ask for: a declaration that the Executive Order violates the Constitution and an injunction barring its enforcement. The Government does not argue otherwise.”
On the government’s assertion that Trump’s Executive Order was non-reviewable by a Court, the Ninth Circuit stridently voiced the opposite opinion, writing:
“There is no precedent to support this claimed unreviewability, which runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy. See Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723, 765 (2008) (rejecting the idea that, even by congressional statute, Congress and the Executive could eliminate federal court habeas jurisdiction over enemy combatants, because the ‘political branches’ lack ‘the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will’). Within our system, it is the role of the judiciary to interpret the law, a duty that will sometimes require the ‘[r]esolution of litigation challenging the constitutional authority of one of the three branches.’ Zivotofsky ex rel. Zivotofsky v. Clinton, 566 U.S. 189, 196 (2012) (quoting INS v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919, 943 (1983)). We are called upon to perform that duty in this case.”
The Ninth Circuit also agreed with the States that the government had produced no evidence that an irreparable harm was imminent, writing:
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