Trump vs Judge Robart: What Happened?
By Dan McLaughlin — February 5, 2017
It’s never a dull day in Donald Trump’s Washington. There’s a lot to unpack in Saturday’s controversy over the temporary restraining order issued by U.S. District Judge James Robart of the Western District of Washington (based in Seattle) against portions of President Trump’s executive order on refugees, and Trump’s ensuing tweets in response. For now, let’s start with what happened.
Judge Robart’s decision, handed down Friday night, did four things. First, it concluded that the States of Washington and Minnesota had legal standing to challenge the executive order. Judge Robart seems to have accepted the argument that the states could sue as “parens patriae” (a legal concept that basically says the state can sue as if it is the parent of its citizens) on behalf of various groups of their residents – groups that work with refugees, residents who already have visas or green cards, businesses who want to employ refugees, and possibly the refugees themselves. This is questionable on a number of levels, as the asserted “harms” to some of these groups are too attenuated to create standing for them to sue on their own, and others (i.e., refugees who have not been admitted previously to the country) are not Washington or Minnesota residents unless and until federal immigration law says so – begging the entire question. The states were relying largely on a U.S. Supreme Court case that had allowed Puerto Rico to sue on behalf of Puerto Ricans suffering certain types of discrimination by U.S. states, but in that case there was no question that the Puerto Ricans were both residents of the suing government and citizens of the United States with legal rights here. Judge Robart’s decision appears to draw no distinction between green card holders (who aren’t even mentioned in the order and against whom the Administration is no longer trying to enforce it) and people seeking to enter the country for the first time.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/node/444628/print
