Travel Ban

Dr. Fauci: Trump restrictions on travel from China, Europe, UK saved American lives early in pandemic

Dr. Anthony Fauci told House lawmakers Friday that he believed President Trump’s actions during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic saved American lives. During Fauci’s testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., asked Fauci if he was involved in the president’s January order restricting travel from China. “Yes, sir, I was,” Fauci answered. “Do you agree with that decision?” asked Scalise. “I do,” Fauci responded. “Do you think that decision saved lives, Dr. Fauci?” Scalise asked. “Yes, I do,” the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases answered. Fauci went on to say that he was “actively involved” in the administration’s decision to restrict air travel to the U.S. from Europe, and repeated, “Yes, I do” when Scalise asked if he agreed with the move and if he believed it saved American lives. He gave similar responses when Scalise asked about the restriction of travel from the U.K. and the rollout of the administration’s “15 days to slow the spread” and “30 days to slow the spread” guidelines earlier this year. “So, I know we’ve heard a lot about disagreements,” Scalise said, “and clearly there are many decisions made. In fact, there are many, very internationally respected doctors that are involved in each of those decisions … by and large, would you say that you and President Trump have been in agreement on most of those decisions?” Fauci responded: “We were in agreement on virtually all of those.” For months, pundits have speculated about a rift between Trump and Fauci as the latter’s national profile has risen during the pandemic. White House trade advisor Peter Navarro stoked concerns about such a disagreement when he published an op-ed in USA Today earlier this month claiming that Fauci had flip-flopped on the issue of wearing masks. He also expressed caution over taking Fauci’s advice and claimed the adviser fought Trump on his decision to ban travel from China. In response, Fauci told The Atlantic: “When the staff lets out something like that and the entire scientific and press community push back on it, it ultimately hurts the president.”

Agreed.  Yeah, this whole narrative being pushed by the dominantly liberal mainstream media (i.e. CNN, MSNBC, NPR/PBS, the NY Times, etc,) that there is this huge rift between Dr. Fauci and the President is just bs.  And, Dr. Fauci’s testimony under oath here on the last day of July 2020 confirms it.  The liberal media and Democrats are pushing that narrative because it’s an election year, and Dr. Fauci is becoming very popular; an almost pop culture icon of sorts in this new era.  And,  they desperately want to paint President Trump into a corner so hey can blame him, somehow, for the Wuhan virus crisis we’re all dealing with.  Kudos to Congressman  Steve Scalise (R-LA) for asking these very direct, straightforward and relevant questions of Dr. Fauci and getting this on the record.  Excellent!!     🙂

Up to 8,000 Chinese nationals came into US after Trump banned travel due to coronavirus: AP

Thousands of Chinese citizens have reportedly come into the U.S. since President Trump restricted travel on foreign nationals in January, arriving from China after the coronavirus outbreak. According to a recent report by The Associated Press, citing data it obtained regarding travel from the U.S. Commerce Department, as many as 8,000 Chinese nationals and foreign residents of Hong Kong and Macao have entered the U.S. over the last three months. More than 600 flights brought in travelers from these areas after Trump announced his travel ban in late January and it was enacted Feb. 2. Trump’s initial travel ban included any non-U.S. travelers coming from China, and excluded anyone coming from Hong Kong or Macau in late January. Travelers from Hong Kong and Macao also did not face the same scrutiny or screening processes as Americans or any foreign nationals coming into the U.S. after having been in Wuhan — where the coronavirus outbreak started. Flight records from FlightAware provided to The Associated Press showed that 5,600 Chinese and foreign nationals from Hong Kong and Macau arrived in the U.S. in February. More than 2,000 passengers from the same administrative zones arrived in March and an additional 150 in April, according to The AP report. There is no sufficient evidence to show people from these flights transmitted the coronavirus, but the National Security Council, the State Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would not publicly comment on why these territories were exempt from the China travel ban. One administration official told The AP that the travel ban was instated after more than 12,000 people arrived in the U.S. through the two territories in January, according to Commerce records. The Trump administration said it would also require any Americans who have traveled through China and back into the U.S. to undergo a 14-day quarantine period. But according to data collected by The Associated Press, the system that was meant to track and monitor the people undergoing quarantine lost track of at least 1,600 Americans. Trump has touted his border closures, first from China, then European nations and Brazil, as the U.S.’s first line of defense against the coronavirus. In a tweet last week. the president said: “We did a great job on Coronavirus, including the very early ban on China.” “We saved millions of U.S. lives! Yet the Fake News refuses to acknowledge this in a positive way,” he added. Trump’s travel ban on China went into full effect on Feb. 2, at which time 15 people had already been confirmed with coronavirus in Hong Kong and seven people in Macau. The cases from Macau were later linked directly to Wuhan, the origin of the outbreak. The U.S. has reported more than 2.7 million cases of the coronavirus and nearly 130,000 deaths during the pandemic. Hong Kong has since banned all travelers from the U.S.

Pelosi Promoted Chinatown Tourism While Trump Issued China Travel Ban

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) promoted tourism to San Franciso, California’s Chinatown and was moving forward with legislation to prevent presidents from issuing travel bans while President Trump implemented a travel ban from China to stop the spread of the Chinese coronavirus. On Sunday, Pelosi criticized Trump’s travel ban for not being expansive enough in stopping travel from China in the middle of the coronavirus crisis, telling CNN “tens of thousands of people were still allowed in from China. So it wasn’t as it is described as this great moment.” Pelosi argued Trump should have kept American citizens and green card-holders in China rather than allowing them to return to the U.S. As the New York Times noted, nearly 40,000 individuals have returned to the U.S. from China since the implementation of the travel ban on February 2. “There were Americans coming back, green card holders coming back, but there were tens of thousands,” Pelosi continued. “If you’re going to shut the door because of an evaluation of an epidemic, then shut the door.” While Trump implemented the travel ban, however, Pelosi was promoting tourism to San Francisco’s Chinatown and working with House Democrats to try to block Trump’s ability to executively issue travel bans.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) continues to be a nauseating, duplicitous, hypocritical, lying, self-serving tool.  She, along with other Democrats and liberal news media personalities like Joe Biden and Jim Acosta over at CNN, called Trump a “racist” and “xenophobic” for his quick decision to enact a travel ban on China right at the outset of this thing.  And yes, up to 40,000 AMERICAN citizens were allowed back.  Not allowing AMERICAN citizens back in is a WHOLE lot more difficult from a legal perspective.  So, that was definitely a risk that the President and his administration took.  And, Nancy knows all of this.  BUT, for her at the same time to be calling Trump “racist” and “xenophobic” for the otherwise travel ban from China, and then later other parts of Europe is disingenuous and self-serving at best.  She is what is worst with politicians; lying and always looking for that self-serving angle instead being honest and doing what is right.  Trump has since been totally vidicated for that right decision to enact the travel ban, and the doctors and scientists have validated that.  Was the implementation a little rough initially?  Sure.  But, it was the right decision, and Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and Jim Acosta were proven wrong and look like the fools they are.

Dr. Anthony Fauci: CDC’s coronavirus ‘travel advisory’ will ultimately ‘help stop the virus’

Coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Sunday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s travel advisory that was implemented on Saturday “ultimately will help stop” the spread of the novel coronavirus. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, made the comment on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. President Trump on Saturday night said the administration would not be issuing a quarantine on New York, parts of New Jersey and some of Connecticut as part of the efforts to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Trump noted that instead, the CDC issued a Domestic Travel Advisory urging against “non-essential domestic travel” in the tri-state area for 14 days. “Due to extensive community transmission of COVID -19 in the area, CDC urges residents of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to refrain from non-essential domestic travel for 14 days effective immediately,” the CDC said, noting that the advisory doesn’t apply to “employees of critical infrastructure industries, including but not limited to trucking, public health professionals, financial services, and food supply.” Fauci said on Sunday that the task force has had “very intensive discussions” at the White House with the president this weekend. “As you know, the original proposal was to consider seriously an enforceable quarantine,” he said. “After discussions with the president, we made it clear, and he agreed, that it would be better to do what’s called a strong advisory.” Fauci explained the reasoning behind the decision saying, “you don’t want to get to the point that you’re enforcing things that would create a bigger difficulty, morale and otherwise when you could probably accomplish the same goal.” Fauci went on to say that one issue is that “about 56 percent of all of the new infections in the country are coming from” New York City. “So what was trying to be done is to get people, unless there’s necessary travel, so all nonessential travel, to just hold off because what you don’t want is people traveling from that area to other areas of the country and inadvertently and innocently infecting other individuals,” Fauci explained. “We felt the better way to do this would be an advisory as opposed to a very strict quarantine and the president agreed, and that’s why he made that determination last night,” he continued. New York is now the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, with more than 52,000 positive tests for the illness and more than 700 deaths. About 7,300 people were in New York hospitals Saturday, including about 1,800 in intensive care. “So we want to strongly do mitigation in those areas like New York City and the surrounding metropolitan area,” Fauci said on Sunday, adding that at the same time the admiration does not want to “neglect other areas of the country where it looks like there are just relatively few infections.” He explained that “if we do testing, identification, isolation, getting people out of circulation who are infected, and contact tracing, we might be able to prevent those areas from getting to that stage where we would have to do mitigation, which is much more difficult and much more frustrating than trying to contain.” When asked if the guidelines will be lifted early this week when the president’s 15-day plan to beat the virus is expected to reach that time frame Fauci said, “I want to see is a flattening and a turning down of the curve.” He noted that the administration will not be pulling back measures on the hot spots including New York. “When we start to see a daily number of cases instead of increasing and escalating, they start to flatten out, turn the corner and then start coming down, when we see that, then you can start doing the modification of the intensity of your mitigation,” Fauci said. “The virus itself determines that timetable,” he added. Fauci went on to say that at the end of the 15 days members of the Coronavirus Task Force will discuss what to do next. “My own opinion, looking at the way things are, I doubt if that would be the case, but we’re a group, we’re a task force, we’re going to sit down and we’re going to be talking about it,” he said. He added, “Obviously what you see me describe, it’s a little iffy there so we’ll take it as it comes, we’ll look at it and if we need to push the date forward, we will push the date forward.”

Dr. Fauci: Trump’s Travel Ban on Europe Will Reduce U.S. Coronavirus Outbreak

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says President Trump’s travel ban on Europe will efficiently reduce the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. During testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Dr. Fauci said Trump’s travel ban on European nations will stop the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S. “Dr. Fauci, will a travel ban like this have a significant impact on reducing the community spread of the coronavirus, that is cases that are already in the United States?” Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) asked. Dr. Fauci said in response: “Yes … the answer is a firm yes. That was the reason, the rationale, the public health rationale [for] why that recommendation was made because if you look at the numbers, it’s very clear that 70 percent of the new infections in the world are coming from that region, from Europe, exceeding other countries. Of the 35 or more states that have infections, 30 of them now … have gotten them from a travel-related case from that region. So it was pretty compelling that we needed to turn off the source from that region.” Dr. Fauci’s remarks come as House and Senate Democrats seek to stop Trump from effectively implementing travel bans to stop the spread of the coronavirus. 220 House Democrats have signed onto the “No Ban Act” to stop the president from being able to executively issue travel bans. Under the Democrats’ plan, travelers directly from Wuhan, China, and Milan, Italy would be allowed to continue entering the U.S. via flights against the advice of leading medical experts. There have been 1,422 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 38 deaths in the U.S.

So, when you hear these Democrats, including now Joe Biden, fighting President Trump’s travel bans, keep this in mind.  Dr. Fauci has said in no uncertain terms that these travel bans are definitely helping stop the spread of this Wuhan virus here in the United States.  So, don’t listen to crazy Joe or the rest of these idiot Dems who don’t care about your health.  They’re just pandering to certain racial and ethnic demographics and playing politics with our health.  And that’s making all of us sick.

Opinion/Analysis: Trump’s coronavirus travel ban makes sense — here’s why

Predictably, the immediate reaction to last night’s presidential speech on the battle against COVID-19 — both pro and con — appeared to be driven largely by partisan sentiments. Much attention was lavished on things like the president’s delivery. Few attempted to objectively assess the efficacy of the measures already taken by the administration, much less the new measures announced last night. The big story, of course, was the 30-day ban on travel from most of Europe. Let’s put the politics aside and see why the White House went there. In dealing with pandemics, top priorities have to be limiting the spread of the disease and protecting our most vulnerable populations. Social distancing — that is, limiting the contact between people who are shedding the virus and others — is critical to achieving both goals. And that’s where travel bans have a role to play. Simply put, it is hard to empty the bathtub while the water’s running. American businesses, organizations and governments are taking unprecedented steps to drain the tub — from shutting down classrooms to barring fans from sporting events to raining on St. Patrick’s Day parades. At a time when we’re voluntarily disrupting our day-to-day lives to contain the disease, it makes no sense to risk importing more contagion from abroad. Why Europe? First, let’s be clear about what “Europe” means in this instance. The president’s ban is for the “Schengen Zone” — not “Europe,” not the “European Union.” The Schengen Zone is a grouping of European countries that don’t require passports or border controls to move from one to another. Ireland, for example, is in the European Union but not part of the Schengen Zone, so the ban does not apply to the Irish. The United Kingdom is in neither the European Union nor the Schengen Zone, so it, too, does not fall under the ban. Meanwhile, Iceland, though not part of the European Union, is part of Schengen, so it is covered by the ban. We know that travel bans can effectively retard the advance of pandemics. Early on, the U.S. wisely restricted travel from China and other countries experiencing large outbreaks of COVD-19. That significantly delayed the arrival of the disease here, allowing the U.S. to get through the bulk of the flu season without a serious outbreak. European nations, on the other hand, imposed no travel bans. They wound up importing a lot of sick people. Italy, with its significant migrant Chinese population, has been hit particularly hard. No doubt some who went home to celebrate the Chinese New Year, returned with the disease. Italy and other Schengen Zone nations now have travel restrictions in place, but COVID-19 is no longer just “a Chinese disease.” It’s now on a European tour. The head of the German government estimates that 70 percent of the country will be infected. Limiting the European transmission here has to be a priority, and a travel ban is the best way to do that. Focusing on the next 30 days makes perfect sense. It will get us through the bulk of the flu season, at which point the U.S. government can take stock and reevaluate. The ban does not include goods, just people. That makes sense. People, not cargo, are the high-risk carriers. The ban alone, while prudent, will not be enough to stop the spread of COVID-19. Throughout that 30-day period, we’ll need to keep draining the tub. That means continued, responsible social distancing. Governments, businesses, communities and organizations can certainly make responsible decisions. Many already have. Quick and reasoned responses will make a big difference. We also need to be prepared to deal with the economic consequences of this public health problem. America has a strong economy. If COVID-19 subsides with the flu season, this outbreak will be little more than a speed bump to the economy. But we need measures to ensure the economy can pick up where it left off and help folks through troubled times.

Thanks to James Jay Carafano for that clear-headed analysis.  James is vice president of foreign and defense policy studies  The Heritage Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @JJCarafano.  Click on the text above to read the rest of James’ article.

Hundreds of Chinese migrants detained at US border amid coronavirus-tied travel ban

Since officials first reported the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan in late December and the United States imposed a travel ban for those entering from China, Border Patrol agents have detained 333 Chinese nationals attempting to enter the United States illegally, according to Department of Homeland Security data. While none have tested positive for the virus, the southern border remains a primary focus of the Trump administration, which sees the area as high risk and a gateway for COVID-19 to spread in the U.S. “We have a unique public health threat posed by individuals arriving unlawfully at the border, where migrants, law enforcement officials, frontline personnel, and the American public are put at risk,” said a DHS official who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak publicly by the agency. Under MPP, which stands for the Migrant Protection Protocol, the U.S. has deported some 60,000 migrants to Mexico to await their deportation hearings. Unless the Supreme Court acts, the policy will be ruled illegal in California and Arizona and those individuals and other migrants claiming asylum will be allowed to remain in the U.S. indefinitely. “All it would take is a single infected individual to impact the detained migrant community within DHS facilities without proper precautions, which can only happen through orderly, lawful migration, the virus threatens to spread rapidly,” the official said. “Any halting of MPP would exacerbate this threat.” The U.S. southern border is a microcosm of the world, with foreign nationals from 122 separate countries apprehended or denied entry already this fiscal year — from October through the end of February. Seventy of those countries currently report confirmed COVID-19 cases, led by China but followed by Italy, Iran, India, Romania, Vietnam and Brazil. The virus started popping up on health officials’ radar screens in late December in China and has since spread around the world. Some of the countries on the list have had very low rates of the virus, including Mexico. Meanwhile, the number of cases in the U.S. has risen dramatically in recent days, topping 1,000. China has nearly 81,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus, Italy has more than 10,000 and Iran has about 8,000. Last week the Border Patrol asked the CDC to take over testing of those migrants who show symptoms consistent with COVID-19. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement also runs 16 detention facilities with airborne infection isolation rooms. So far, it tested 4 migrants, all coming back negative. “It’s absolutely a risk that we’re monitoring and we’re evaluating,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan said..

Major kudos to our Border Patrol for all their hard work.  They get beat up daily by the dominantly liberal mainstream media and Democrat politicians who  attack these agents for doing the jobs they were hired to do; protect us.  And with this latest challenge, they’re doing phenomenal work given their limited resources.

Trump expands travel ban to six new countries

President Trump signed an order Friday expanding his travel ban to six new countries, targeting nations the government says pose a threat because they don’t issue electronic passports or don’t do enough to share information with American authorities to vet their citizens looking to travel. The six countries are Burma, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania. They join seven countries who are still part of the president’s previous travel ban: Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. “It is fundamental to national security, and the height of common sense, that if a foreign nation wishes to receive the benefits of immigration and travel to the United States, it must satisfy basic security conditions outlined by America’s law-enforcement and intelligence professionals,” said White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham. The new countries aren’t subject to a total ban. Only immigrant applications from Burma, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan and Nigeria will be blocked, while other travelers are not affected. For Sudan and Tanzania, only applicants under the diversity visa program will be blocked, a Homeland Security official said. That means businesses can still bring in temporary workers and family members can still visit relatives here. The official said the lower level of ban reflects the countries’ conditions. “These six countries have a greater prospect of making improvements,” the official said. The additional ban will take effect Feb. 22, so nobody traveling now will be affected, nor will those who already have visas. Anyone already in the U.S. is unaffected, too. Based on past trends, Homeland Security said perhaps 12,000 people would be affected by the expanded ban.

Sounds like a very smart precaution…

Supreme Court allows full enforcement of Trump travel ban

The Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to fully enforce a ban on travel to the United States by residents of six mostly Muslim countries. The justices, with two dissenting votes, said Monday that the policy can take full effect even as legal challenges against it make their way through the courts. The action suggests the high court could uphold the latest version of the ban that Trump announced in September. The ban applies to travelers from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. Lower courts had said people from those nations with a claim of a “bona fide” relationship with someone in the United States could not be kept out of the country. Grandparents, cousins and other relatives were among those courts said could not be excluded. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor would have left the lower court orders in place. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, will be holding arguments on the legality of the ban this week. Both courts are dealing with the issue on an accelerated basis, and the Supreme Court noted it expects those courts to reach decisions “with appropriate dispatch.” Quick resolution by appellate courts would allow the Supreme Court to hear and decide the issue this term, by the end of June.

Great news!!!  🙂

French: Once Again, Judges Defy the Law to Defy Trump

In the last week, two federal district-court judges in two different federal circuits have issued new injunctions against the Trump administration’s latest “travel ban.” Both injunctions are wrong, but one is dangerously wrong, representing not just an extraordinary act of judicial supremacy but also a cavalier disregard for the Supreme Court of the United States. Before I go any farther, let me add this caveat. One of the judges (Theodore Chuang, from Maryland) is a close friend of mine. I’ve known him since my earliest days of law school, and he’s a man of keen intellect and high integrity. He’s one of Barack Obama’s best appointments to the federal bench. Even the smart and wise can be wrong, however, and he’s wrong in this case. But first, some background. We are now on our third travel-ban executive order. The Trump administration withdrew the first one (we’ll call it EO-1) after poor drafting and incompetent and possibly even malicious implementation created chaos in airports nationwide and contributed to a wave of court injunctions blocking its enforcement. While court cases were still pending against EO-1, the Trump administration went back to the drawing board and crafted a second executive order, EO-2. Both EO-1 and EO-2 temporarily blocked immigration from multiple jihadist or jihadist-dominated nations, and both orders required the Department of Homeland Security to conduct a review to determine whether the United States needed additional information from any given country to determine whether a potential immigrant or visitor represented a security threat to the United States. Plaintiffs of course challenged EO-2, and it was also enjoined — first in district courts and then in federal courts of appeal. These decisions were extraordinary on a number of fronts — so unusual that they constituted a unique kind of jurisprudence. I called it “Trumplaw.” In essence, judges were abandoning common standing rules, rereading binding precedent, and sometimes even ignoring controlling authority to rule against Donald Trump. They were acting less as judges and more as particularly potent members of the #Resistance. On June 26, 2017, the Supreme Court restored a degree of judicial order. It didn’t rule on the merits of the case, but its per curiam (unanimous) decision was instructive nonetheless. First, it lifted the injunction on the vast bulk of the travel ban, keeping in place protections only for those immigrants or visitors with “bona fide relationships with a person or entity in the United States.” Second, it rejected judicial claims that individuals or entities in the United States could somehow represent the interests of the tens of millions of potential immigrants who don’t have any current tie to the United States. Here’s the Supreme Court: “The interest in preserving national security is “an urgent objective of the highest order.” Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, 561 U. S. 1, 28 (2010). To prevent the Government from pursuing that objective by enforcing [the travel ban] against foreign nationals unconnected to the United States would appreciably injure its interests, without alleviating obvious hardship to anyone else.” The justices thus freed the Trump administration to impose the lion’s share of its temporary travel ban while the administration conducted its review of foreign information-sharing capabilities and processes, and on September 24 it issued a new order (EO-3) responding to the results of that review. According to the order, the secretary of homeland security had identified seven countries that were “inadequate” not just in providing information but also in other security provisions. The secretary recommended immigration restrictions that “would help address the threats that the countries’ identity-management protocols, information-sharing inadequacies, and other risk factors pose to the security and welfare of the United States.” While the recommended restrictions were indefinite, they were not necessarily supposed to be permanent. As the order notes, the restrictions “also encourage the countries to work with the United States to address those inadequacies and risks so that the restrictions and limitations imposed by this proclamation may be relaxed or removed as soon as possible.” The order placed significant restrictions immigration and entry from Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and Somalia. Critically, only the North Korean and Syrian restriction constituted a total ban on entry (and even the total ban could be waived on a case-by-case basis). The rest of the nations faced varying degrees of restrictions but no total ban. For each nation, the order outlined the deficiencies that increase the threat to the United States. For example, regarding Iran, the order notes that it “regularly fails to cooperate with the United States Government in identifying security risks, fails to satisfy at least one key risk criterion, is the source of significant terrorist threats, and fails to receive its nationals subject to final orders of removal from the United States.” Even so, the order permits entry under valid student visas (with enhanced screening). Plaintiffs promptly challenged EO-3, and the two rulings partially blocking its enforcement — one from Hawaii, and one from Maryland — are wrong in distinct ways. Let’s deal with the worst first: Judge Derrick Watson’s ruling in Honolulu. Simply put, it’s 40 pages of judicial defiance. To understand the extent of Judge Watson’s malfeasance, one has to linger over the actual words of the governing statute: “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.” How does one get from there — a statute empowering the president to “suspend the entry” of “any class of aliens” when he (not the court) finds their entry would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States” — to a ruling stopping him from exercising exactly that power? When the judge decides it’s entirely up to him to evaluate the president’s reasoning according to the judge’s perception of American interests. Time and again throughout the opinion, the judge suggests alternative policies, wonders at the exclusion or inclusion of different countries, and acts far more like a Homeland Security bureaucrat debating the wisdom of various policy proposals than a judge determining whether the plain language of a very simple statute applies. Yes, the president made findings. They’re on the face of the document. Moreover, those findings happen to be true. Iran is the “source of significant terrorist threats.” Yemen does have “significant identity-management challenges.” They are “amplified by the notable terrorist presence within its territory.” The fact that the judge would prefer a different kind of response does not negate the president’s clear statutory authority.

Precisely!!  And that, really, is the bottom line here.  The President has not only the statutory authority, but the constitutional authority as well!  It’s not even remotely moot. And, they have brazenly defied the Supreme Court.  This spot-on, legal analysis was written by attorney, and Army Reserve officer (Major), David French.  David was awarded the Bronze Star for his service in Iraq.  To read the rest of this excellent piece, click on the text above.