I should add that 28 USC § 354 does allow the judicial council of a circuit to order that “on a temporary basis for a time certain” no further cases should be assigned to a judge against whom a complaint has been made.
And an appeals court can order that a different judge should hear a case on remand.
I think that’s a fair assessment. But to go further, if my understanding of the order and the courts is correct:
It’s just a temporary injunction
The case will have to be decided, and it could be decided in Trump’s (DoJ’s) favor.
If it isn’t, Trump’s DoJ could probably appeal, where they could win.
Meanwhile, I would imagine the revocation of 100,000 visas might be enough to discourage quite a few of those who have applied for short-term visas.
And with this president and this congress, and given the recent history of republican-led legislatures at the state level, I wouldn’t necessarily discount that possibility. However, considering Kansans have turned on radical conservatives in favor of more moderate ones in recent years, I think it’s a tactic that would ultimately backfire. Still, the fact that it is politically unwise doesn’t preclude the action.
We don’t yet know if the judge in the matter is wrong … rather than being politically motivated, there might be actual issues of Law here … do the immigration laws even allow citizens of specific countries to be banned from visas, or does the law prohibit this banning … Executive orders can never create new law, but must be based on existing law … either the nuts and bolts of enforcement, where the law explicitly says the President can use their own discretion or when an emergency comes up … this judge saw something that doesn’t jive with all this so he issued a TRO until trial …
Not out of the woods yet … if the government makes their case that the EO is a good one … then the TRO is lifted and EO comes into effect …
I just wanted to add that I know nothing about politics and even I knew that judges could block an order from the president.
It’s one of the biggest and most fundamental things they teach you in social studies…that there are three main branches of government set up to provide checks and balances to the other two. They are: Executive branch (President goes here), Legislative branch, and Judicial branch (Federal judges go here).
That system makes sure no one part has too much power and can do things like Trump is trying to do right now. If one of those branches steps up and does something the others don’t agree with, that’s what great about the system…they can put a stop to it, they have the power to do it.
That’s civics, not politics. 
This isn’t quite accurate. I think it would be more to the point to say that the court ruled that the County Clerks did NOT have their claimed power, to conduct their duties according to their personal beliefs/opinions, and to ignore the law of the land.
That is often what is going on when a court declares something unconstitutional, or otherwise blocks it: the court is saying to the people trying to enforce something: “you do not have the authority to order what you have ordered.”
This is why MOST of the people who claim that such judges are “activists” who are CREATING laws, are abject liars, or at least insistently ignorant of the legal process.
I have yet to here how the State of Washington can possibly have standing to challenge alleged harms against non-citizens of Washington.
Among the harms they are asserting is that some of those barred are employees of WA companies.
WA State’s solicitor general made several arguments during the oral argument to support this claim. One of them was that the WA state universities were financially harmed by the EO to the extent it prevented university students and employees from entering the country.
Thanks. I’m guessing here that ‘good behaviour’ does not include blocking the President for political reasons.
Seeing how the Judge’s TRO has not addressed the merits of the underlying complaint, I don’t know how you are able to deduce that it was based on political reasons.
Anyway, the “good behavior” clause generally has been read to mean improper conduct or crimes. Impeachment of a federal judge therefore usually involves things like conviction of a felony or (in one case) having inappropriate business dealings with litigants. As far as I know, no federal judge has been removed (or even impeached) for his judicial rulings – frankly, if that happened, we’re talking about the death of the judiciary as an independent branch of the government.
8 U.S. Code § 1182 - Inadmissible aliens
(f) 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. Whenever the Attorney General finds that a commercial airline has failed to comply with regulations of the Attorney General relating to requirements of airlines for the detection of fraudulent documents used by passengers traveling to the United States (including the training of personnel in such detection), the Attorney General may suspend the entry of some or all aliens transported to the United States by such airline.
(bolding is mine)
Plaintiffs raised constitutional arguments in their case including religious and equal protection arguments. The statute you cited would have no relevance under these arguments, as the Constitution trumps statutes.
I’m still a little confused as to how a judge can simply usurp valid executive authority. The constitution lays out no rights, and there is no precedent, for people who are neither citizens of the United States nor resident in, or within our jurisdiction, to have a “right of travel” to our country. Both Presidents George W. Bush and Obama had suspended travel from specific countries during their presidencies and that was seen as an intrinsically valid option. My understanding is immigration law makes it such that the State Department can revoke a visa at its discretion, so I’m confused as to how the court can justify blocking this. Especially since it looks very likely, due to this being the liberal 9th Circuit, and the Supreme Court being mostly a political body that is split 4-4, this court order is going to stand.
Someone explain to me how we haven’t had a judicial coup d’etat, where the judge has clearly usurped something the constitution allows the congress to regulate (which they have–and they’ve delegated significant discretionary powers on this subject to the executive)?
You’re confused about the state of the law, and also the history of immigration restrictions. You should start by reading the briefs in…really any of the court cases.
Here’s a link to all of them: https://www.clearinghouse.net/results.php?searchSpecialCollection=44
Obama, for example, did not attempt to take away anyone’s validly granted refugee or visa status, unlike Trump. And his delay in processing of applicants was the result of specific facts, not demonstrable anti-Muslim bias.
I’m asking because I don’t have the expertise to read those orders and understand them. My understanding is that after 9/11 Bush banned travel from a set of countries for like 11 months, and Obama did so from Iraq for a brief period. I understand Trump has lost in several courts, but for a week before this I had read nothing but analysis from both liberal and conservative press that while this was a shitty/terrible thing, the law gives the President such broad discretion on this stuff it was unlikely they could do much about it. Now it’s like over night “the President never had the power to do this anyway.” Were people simply ignorant of reality and the President lacks the discretion previously asserted?
It’s also my understanding that the State Department can revoke visas more or less at their discretion as per this law. Is it the case the visas involved here are all “immigrant visas”, and that’s why the action was invalid?
Executive authority (even through generous Congressional delegation) is still subject to the constraints of Constitutional protections. Congress may hypothetically grant the president a blanket authority to ban immigration at his discretion, but any such orders by the president must still be consistent with the Constitution. If the president issues an order that violates a constitutional provision (e.g., banning groups of people based on religious affiliation), a federal court may overturn the order under its judicial review authority.
Obama did not do this. Here’s what he did: PolitiFact | Why comparing Trump's and Obama's immigration restrictions is flawed; Trump's Faulty Refugee Policy Comparison - FactCheck.org
Not sure what you’ve been reading. The ACLU and many others have been saying, correctly, that there are lots of limits on the President’s power to carry out his campaign promises on immigration.
The general principle you’re missing is that these kind of plenary powers are still subject to the rest of the Constitution. There are ongoing legal debates about who has standing and about the application of things like the Establishment Clause in this context. What you describe as being settled law–that the President can do anything he wants to non-citizens outside the country–is not at all settled law.
If you’re not a lawyer, then read the complaints instead of the motions and orders. They are generally written with less technical language.
The difference is that neither Bush nor Obama ran an election platform in which they repeatedly and explicitly promised to ban muslims from entering the country. Their decisions were therefore unlikely to have been based on grounds that are unconstitutional (such as religious establishment), and few (if any) individuals challenged their orders for reasons other than valid and based on national security concerns. Here, Trump expressly stated during his campaign that he would ban immigration by Muslims – whether Plaintiffs now can convince the courts that the order was in fact premised on this promise is a different story, but if they can do so, it would certainly be constitutional grounds to overturn the EO.