None are so blind as those who refuse to see. That well-worn adage applies perfectly to the Supreme Court's willfully blind decision to uphold President Trump's travel ban despite its evident anti-Muslim animus and its transparently pretextual national security rationale.
To be clear, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. recited much of the evidence of Trump's anti-Muslim prejudice before getting his four Republican-appointed conservatives to go along with upholding Trump's Proclamation 9645, his third iteration of travel restrictions aimed mostly at Muslim-majority countries. Trump issued that proclamation in September 2017 after federal appeals courts had struck down his first two executive orders — so-called EO1 and EO2 — as unconstitutional or illegal or both.
Trump claimed complete vindication within minutes after Roberts announced the Court's decision in Trump v. Hawaii at the end of Tuesday's court session [June 26]. But his ears should have been burning. Roberts disclaimed any role for the Court to "denounce" Trump's statements, but he recited what any reasonable observer would have regarded as a damning summary.
Speaking for two of the four Democratic-appointed dissenters, Justice Sonia Sotomayor showed no such reticence in detailing Trump's "deeply offensive" comments dating from his September 2016 campaign promise of a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States . . . ." From the bench, Sotomayor continued with details that spanned six pages in her written opinion. She ended with Trump's retweet in November 2017 of virulently anti-Muslim videos posted by a British political party with an explicitly Islamophobic platform.
Sotomayor, joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg but not the other two liberal justices, acknowledged Roberts' point that the issue for the Court was not whether to denounce those statements. The "dispositive" issue, she explained, was whether a reasonable observer would conclude from all this information that the proclamation's "primary purpose" was "to disfavor Islam and its adherents by excluding them from the country."
Surely, Sotomayor concluded in a tongue-lashing like none other ever delivered from the Supreme Court, the answer to that legal question was yes. Trump, she noted "has never disavowed any of his prior statements about Islam," despite "several opportunities to do so." And so, she went on, the proclamation cannot be upheld against the charge of Constitution-violative religious animus by the putative national security concerns. The "unassailable fact," she explained, is that the proclamation "is contaminated by impermissible discriminatory animus against Islam and its followers."
For Roberts and the other Trump-excusing justices, the issue was not the First Amendment's protection of religious freedom but Article II's grant of executive power. Other presidents had imposed country-specific travel bans, Roberts noted: Reaagan on Cuba, Carter on Iran. The Court's decision, he noted, must avoid shackling some future president from acting on a real national security concern. But for Sotomayor that was the point: a future president must be prevented from acting on unconstitutional animus, just as the Court in Korematsu should have prevented FDR from interning Japanese citizens on trumped-up fears of national security.
A note about the religious liberty at stake: not the religious freedom of the beyond-our-borders traveler or asylum applicant, but the religious freedom of U.S. residents and citizens to interact with friends, relatives, colleagues, and others without governmental discrimination. Lost in the Court's decision was the University of Hawaii's ability to meet with scholars from the affected countries, a U.S. citizen's ability to welcome his mother-in-law from another of the affected countries, and — in the other case, from the Fourth Circuit — the International Refugee Assistance Project's ability to aid asylum applicants from the affected countries.
Sotomayor rightly dismissed the administration's attempts to find legal justification for what originated as and continued as an anti-Muslim travel ban. The conservative majority swallowed the administration's line that a worldwide interagency review of travel security in other countries justified the inclusion of the countries that remained from EO1 and those added since. As Sotomayor noted, this review was a scant seventeen pages in length.
In a separate opinion, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, joined by his pragmatic liberal colleague Elena Kagan, voiced disbelief about another of the administration's claims in defending the travel ban. At oral argument, Solicitor General Noel Francisco emphasized that the proclamation included waiver provisions that he assured the Court would be applied in generous good faith.
Wrong, Breyer noted, in his opinion issued two months later. The number of waiver applicants approved so far is a minuscule percentage of the total: 430 out of more than 6,500. In addition, he noted, the administration has yet to issue formal guidance for consular officers to follow in exercising their supposed discretion to grant waivers.
Breyer suggested a remand rather than a ruling so that lower federal courts could examine the actual implementation of the proclamation. The conservatives had no interest, but the opportunity may yet arise: a Muslim advocacy group filed a federal court lawsuit on Friday [June 29] challenging the proclamation on a facts-on-the-ground basis.
Still, Sotomayor was surely right with her final words. "Our Constitution demands, and the country deserves, a Judiciary willing to hold the coordinate branches to account when they defy our most sacred legal commitments," she wrote. "[T]he Court's decision today has failed in that respect. . . "
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