Judge Andrew Napolitano lambasted the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for blocking President Donald Trump’s executive order, calling the ruling “an intellectually dishonest piece of work.”
“The statute specifically says the president on his own, by proclamation, meaning he doesn’t have to consult with anybody else, can make the decision,” Napolitano said during an appearance on Fox News immediately after the court’s ruling. “The decision to ban is not reviewable. Judges are incapable of second-guessing the president on it.”
“For that reason, he may be thinking the Supreme Court is going to invalidate it.”
Napolitano went on to call the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling “an intellectually dishonest piece of work” because it “consists of substituting the judgment of three judges for the President of the United States when the Constitution unambiguously gives this area of jurisdiction, foreign policy, exclusively to the president.”
A statute signed into law in 1952 permits the President to restrict or suspend the immigration of any class or classes of people into the United States for reasons of public health or national security.
“When the president exercises powers granted to him by the Constitution or federal statutes or when Congress passes bills, one cannot simply sue the government in federal court because one does not like what has been done,” Napolitano said in the Washington Times.
Napolitano called the decision by the Ninth Circuit Curt of Appeals to question the threat posed to national security admitting migrants from the seven selected countries “the kind of judicial second guessing – substituting the judicial mind for the presidential mind – that is impermissible in our system.”
George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley also suggested the merits of the law favored the Trump administration, noting the arguments made by the Trump Justice Department mirrored those made by the Obama administration when it imposed its own immigration restrictions.
“Well, it was a poorly crafted executive order, and it was a terrible rollout,” he said during an appearance on MSNBC. “But I still think that the law favors the administration once you get to the merits. I don’t agree with many of those, some of those cases. But the courts have been highly deferential to the president, and they generally don’t second-guess.”
“I think the people also have to acknowledge that the Trump administration here is making virtually the identical argument to the Obama administration.”
Turley noted that “for all the Democrats objecting now, I didn’t hear a peep of objection from them when just last year these arguments were being made by the same Justice Department.”
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