The US Congress should start using Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution – to restrict the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, and to reclaim its stolen powers, says Patrick Buchanan after the San Francisco-based appeals court ruled against a travel ban set in place by the Trump administration.
The court’s decision means that President Donald Trump’s executive order banning immigrants from seven terror-prone countries, would no longer be in effect. The ruling increases the likelihood that the administration will ask the Supreme Court to step into a case that’s the biggest test of Trump’s executive power yet.
Following the controversial ruling, Trump tweeted that the judges who voted unanimously were putting the entire nation’s safety at stake.
Trump had less kind words for the politically motivated judges seeking to overturn his 90-day ban on travel on those from the Greater Middle East war zones.
A “so-called judge” blocked the travel ban, said Trump. He desribed their arguments in court as “disgraceful” and added: “A bad student in high school would have understood the arguments better.”
On Wednesday ahead of the court’s decision, Trump noted that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 grants the President express powers to control the entry of non-citizens into the United States on virtually any basis, but the court ignored it.
Trump also quoted from the US Code on “Inadmissible Aliens”: Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President. Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.
He told White House reporters the decision was political.
The State Department meanwhile has more than doubled the rate of refugees from Iraq, Syria, in what analysts said appears to be a push to admit as many people as possible before the program is put back back on ice.
“There’s no doubt in my mind they would be doing whatever they could to get people in before something changes because, from their perspective, their motivation is to resettle these folks. It would not be the first time that State Department officials have prioritized facilitating someone’s entry to the United States over security concerns,” the policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, Jessica Vaughan, told the Washington Times.
The high court is currently shorthanded with eight justices. If there is a split decision, the lower court’s ruling would be upheld.