THE BAN IS BACK, BIGGER AND BADDER | Baking Can Be Art Too, Guys | Get Real About The Politics Of SCOTUS
September 25, 2017
THE BAN IS BACK, BIGGER AND BADDER
|Yesterday, PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP issued a new travel ban order indefinitely banning almost all travel to the United States from eight targeted countries. The list of banned countries was expanded to now include travel restrictions on North Korea, Venezuela and Chad. The new ban has no expiration date and officials say that the addition of non-Muslim countries could help address some of the legal attacks on earlier restrictions which were said to have been discriminatory. The new order will take effect October 18, and the Supreme Court will hear arguments on October 10 on whether the issue, at its core, is legal.
WHY CHAD? WHY?
|Joshua Keating with Slate considers why Chad, among others, was added to the list of affected countries under the newest travel ban from TRUMP. He calls the changes something of a “headscratcher” because the most recent State Department Report on Terrorism was mostly positive for Chad, given its own counterterrorism efforts and “valuable” counterterrorism partnership with the U.S. At the same time, the inclusion of North Korea is unlikely to apply to many people. Only 14 North Koreans obtained legal resident status in the U.S. this fiscal year.
NEW STAGE IN LEGAL FIGHT – LET'S DO IT AGAIN
|Greg Stohr with Bloomberg covers the new travel ban from the Trump administration and writes that the updated policy creates a new stage in the legal fight over its legality.
ONE MAN'S ART
|Robert Barnes with The Washington Post covers the friend-of-the-court brief filed by a group of cake artists in the upcoming dispute between a gay Colorado couple and the baker who denied them a cake for their wedding. The cake-makers are hoping their brief will convince the justices that cake-making is “not just baking,” but also an art.
TOP-ED
|In the Los Angeles Times, Thomas Wolf and Michael Li opine that the Supreme Court should strike down “the toxic threat of partisan gerrymandering” when the issue comes before the justices this term. They write, “Partisan gerrymandering has reached an intolerable limit, by any measure and any framework. Maps are only going to get more extreme if gerrymandering isn’t curbed now.”
GET REAL
|“JUSTICE NEIL GORSUCH exemplifies how the Supreme Court has become fully enmeshed in the ranked partisan politics.” That’s Garrett Epps writing in The Atlantic about the cognitive dissonance long suffered by American law and justice. “The ideal of even-handed justice is widely hailed; but everyone at some level knows that, if law in fact has two hands, it hold politics in both of them.”