Blog: Trump could just ignore court’s order halting travel ban
Trump could just ignore court’s order halting travel ban
Does our current status quo make our Constitution a suicide pact? Thomas Jefferson certainly thought it could be, warning that accepting judicial supremacy would make our founding document just that, a
felo de se, as he
put it in Latin.
Acceptance of judicial supremacy, by the way, is precisely why President Trump's temporary ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations is on hold. Imagine that.
Alexander Hamilton
wrote in
The Federalist, No. 78 that the judiciary is the "least dangerous" branch of government because it "has no influence over either the sword or the purse." Yet it's trumping the man with the sword: the president. Does it have to be this way?
No, Trump could simply ignore the court ruling suspending his ban.
Outrageous?! Unconstitutional?! Actually, it's wholly constitutional.
In his dissent from the 2015
Obergefell v. Hodges marriage ruling, the late Justice Antonin Scalia warned that with "each decision ... unabashedly based not on law," the Court moves "one step closer to being reminded of [its] impotence."
There's more than one way to do this. Another little known fact is that Article III of the Constitution grants Congress the power to limit the jurisdiction of federal courts below the Supreme Court and the appellate jurisdiction of the latter. In other words, Congress could simply have prevented federal courts below the SCOTUS from ruling on immigration (and other issues) to begin with and the SCOTUS from reviewing lower-court decisions on those issues.
Congress also has the power under Article III to eliminate any and every federal court, except for the SCOTUS. So it could have made the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit – a bench of fools now reviewing Trump's immigration ban – disappear long ago.