Jeff Sessions to challenge Hawaii judge’s decision that Donald Trump is enforcing the travel ban too narrowly after the Supreme Court decision

  On June 26th the Supreme Court decided to hear the challenge to Donald Trump’s travel ban during the next session and decided to let parts of the ban move forward while the case is pending.

  A few days ago a Federal judge in Hawaii decided that the Trump administration misinterpreted the decision and was implementing the ban in too narrow a way so he decided to open it up a little bit. Here is more:

a federal judge’s decision to allow grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles and other relatives of people in the U.S. to circumvent the Trump administration’s travel ban policy.

The order, issued Thursday evening local time in Honolulu by Judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii, deals a temporary blow to one of the president’s signature initiatives. It also prohibits the administration from blocking refugees with a commitment from a resettlement agency in the U.S., a move that could revive the flow of refugee admissions this year.

  This certainly sounds like a Federal judge creating policy instead of interpreting law, in fact I would say this is a classic example. Jeff Sessions, in announcing his decision to appeal this to the Supreme Court, agrees: 

“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.

Sessions said the Justice Department intends to return to the Supreme Court to overturn the district court’s interpretation.

  Here we go again!

  But there is one thing about the way Donald Trump has handled this travel ban that bothers me. The travel ban is temporary, 90 days if I remember correctly. The reason given for the ban was that it would take that amount of time to review the vetting process to make sure we are doing it properly.

  Several months have now passed and Donald Trump did not have to wait for the travel ban to go into place before starting the vetting review, shouldn’t it have been completed by now if these refugees are the threat many of us feel they could potentially be? And yet it does not appear as if anything has been done on this front, if something has been done I would think the President would have informed us. It makes me question this whole thing.

  Having said that this is still an important case because it could be a bellwether decision on the power of the courts verses the power of the Executive branch.

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium