As predicted, the Supreme Court's disastrous compromise ruling, which split the difference and the Constitution, didn't stop Judge Derrick Watson, an activist Obama pal, from playing President Derrick Watson.
Here's Attorney General Sessions on President Watson's latest decree.
"By this decision, the district court has improperly substituted its policy preferences for the national security judgments of the Executive branch in a time of grave threats, defying both the lawful prerogatives of the Executive Branch and the directive of the Supreme Court," Sessions said.
Well yes, but then again so did the Supreme Court.
Derrick Watson however made a mockery of the Supreme Court decision. Forget for a moment the whole debate over family members. Let's look at the real issue, refugee resettlement.
In the realm of refugee resettlement, the administration stood by the contention that a connection to a resettlement agency alone would not meet the criteria to avoid the ban.
Judge Watson disagreed with those interpretations, however, and said the government’s guidance contradicted the Supreme Court’s order.
The federal judge added that a refugee with a commitment from a resettlement agency met the standard for a “bona fide” relationship spelled out in the Supreme Court order.
“It is formal, it is a documented contract, it is binding, it triggers responsibilities and obligations, including compensation, it is issued specific to an individual refugee only when that refugee has been approved for entry by the Department of Homeland Security, and it is issued in the ordinary course, and historically has been for decades,” he wrote.
“Bona fide does not get any more bona fide than that.”
Except of course that's nonsense. Here's what the Court wrote.
An American individual or entity that has a bona fide relationship with a particular person seeking to enter the country as a refugee can legitimately claim concrete hardship if that person is excluded
Note that the hardship part is to the "institution". The whole lunatic decision rested on claims by, among others, the University of Hawaii. A refugee resettlement arrangement is not a business arrangement. Or it shouldn't be. But in practice of course it is. And the VOLAGs do suffer "financial hardships" if they don't dump their share of future terrorists, rapists and welfare cases on local American communities.
(The local American communities who suddenly have to provide Urdu interpreters don't get to sue. Obviously.)
But if refugee resettlement agencies get to claim hardship, then the decision is meaningless, the 50,000 cap is void and effectively the President of the United States has no control over immigration. Only Judge Derrick Watson does.
That's why I wrote that this farce of judicial supremacy has to come to an end. Or America will.
President Trump isn’t just defending us against Islamic terror. It’s up to him to defend government of the people against two political coups; one that seeks to reverse the results of the election with a manufactured scandal based on a Hillary conspiracy theory and the other that aspires to make elections irrelevant through a judicial ruling class.
During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Abraham Lincoln asserted that the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case did not suffice to “have the citizen conform his vote to that decision; the member of Congress, his; the President, his use of the veto power”.
Lincoln then quoted Thomas Jefferson’s warning that, “to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions” would be “a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy”.
And that is exactly what judicial supremacy has done.
Thomas Jefferson cautioned that judges have "the same passions for party, for power" and "their power is the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control."
He stated firmly, "The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that, to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign with themselves."
Trump can either listen to Derrick Watson or to Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln.