Yesterday the Supreme Court wrapped up its last session of the term with oral argument in one of this term’s marquee cases, Trump v. Hawaii, a challenge to the latest version of the Trump administration’s entry ban. Andrew Hamm rounds up early coverage of and commentary on the argument for this blog. At Fox News, Bill Mears reports that “[t]he last scheduled oral argument of the term appeared divided along the usual conservative-liberal lines.” For The Wall Street Journal, Jess Bravin and Brent Kendall report that “the ban appeared likely to survive the Supreme Court’s scrutiny …, after the government’s lawyer argued that current restrictions on entry from five Muslim-majority nations traced not from the president’s provocative campaign statements but the deliberate assessments of national-security professionals.” Another account of the argument comes from Michael Bobelian at Forbes.
At Vox, Dara Lind breaks down the argument, suggesting that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy “appeared most worried about the national security implications of striking down the ban — with the idea that this would limit some future president from doing what needed to be done to keep America safe.” Garrett Epps writes at The Atlantic that “[t]he two advocates put forward their cases as well as they can be made; how you assess them will depend on whether you see the case in terms of equality and religious liberty or … as a matter of danger, world conflict, and defense.” In an op-ed for Bloomberg, Noah Feldman maintains that “Justice Elena Kagan has a strategy to persuade swing Justice Anthony Kennedy to vote against the ban” – “to depict the case as a watershed moment in the court’s jurisprudence about bias — thus making it extraordinarily difficult for Kennedy to find himself on the wrong side of history.” At PrawfsBlawg, Howard Wasserman wonders “whether the lack of interest in the scope of the injunction hints at where the Court will come down on the merits.” Additional commentary comes from Will Rosenzweig at Hosts of Error and Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns & Money.
At Real Clear Policy, Nathan Chapman argues that Justice Neil Gorsuch’s separate concurrence in Sessions v. Dimaya, in which the court ruled that the catchall section of the immigration law’s criminal-removal provision is unconstitutionally vague, “may portend a return of the rule of law — within, and through, due process.” At American Greatness, Mark Pulliam wonders why “so many right-of-center scholars praise[d] Gorsuch’s erroneous decision.”
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