I had written before that it was a mistake to withdraw and take another shot at the travel measure. Any version of this measure, no matter how watered down, will be blocked by a Federal judge on very dubious grounds. That, very predictably, happened again with an Obama appointee in Hawaii.
The Robart ban was legal garbage. The Derrick Watson ban is legal garbage squared. Watson cited President Trump's campaign as evidence that the measure was a Muslim ban.
Now the six countries are undeniably terror states. Their selection was a result of a listing in the Obama era. But that doesn't matter. The facts and the law have nothing to do with the matter. This is judicial lawfare of the kind we saw during the gay marriage wars when judges had decided that they were going to block measures, regardless of their legality, because they personally opposed them.
This amounts to a power struggle. And if the Supreme Court can't resolve it, then it can only be resolved by the White House rejecting the illegal judicial authority.
"Plaintiffs assert that by singling out nationals from the six predominantly Muslim countries, the Executive Order causes harm by stigmatizing not only immigrants and refugees, but also Muslim citizens of the United States," Judge Watson writes.
"Equally flawed is the notion that the Executive Order cannot be found to have targeted Islam because it applies to all individuals in the six referenced countries. It is undisputed, using the primary source upon which the Government itself relies, that these six countries have overwhelmingly Muslim populations that range from 90.7% to 99.8%.12 It would therefore be no paradigmatic leap to conclude that targeting these countries likewise targets Islam,"
And so we're reduced to immigration as a disproportionate impact argument. Except that no such argument can apply to foreigners applying to come to America.
But since terrorism is largely an Islamic activity, any effort to prevent terrorism will disproportionately target Islam. Therefore counterterrorism is illegal.
Even sillier is the claim that our national security has to be endangered because the University of Hawaii "recruits from the six affected countries. It currently has twenty-three graduate students, several permanent faculty members, and twenty-nine visiting faculty members from the six countries listed."
So for 23 grad students, unknown numbers of Americans have to die. Not to mention Hawaii's tourism. "The State contends that the Executive Order will “have the effect of depressing international travel to and tourism in Hawai‘i,” which “directly harms Hawaii’s businesses and, in turn, the State’s revenue.”
So any immigration or tourism restriction would depress international tourism to Hawaii. Requiring people to apply for passports does that.
"The State points to preliminary data from the Hawaii Tourism Authority, which suggests that during the interval of time that the first Executive Order was in place, the number of visitors to Hawai‘i from the Middle East dropped (data including visitors from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yemen). See Suppl. Decl. of George Szigeti, (identifying 278 visitors in January 2017, compared to 348 visitors from that same region in January 2016)"
So due to a drop of 70 tourists, the president's authority to keep Americans safe has to be overriden.
It's a garbage decision from an Obama judge. And it's time to start ignoring them. Or the Trump administration will not be able to get a single thing done.