02/09/2017
Many years ago, sportswriter/novelist Dan Jenkins referred to the West Coast/Hollywood as the “Left Coast” — because if you stand on Texas and look north, that’s what it is.Well, the Ninth Circuit Court of appeals covers mostly the Left Coast, as you can see in the map above, and they are incredibly liberal, especially on immigration, because of the two kinds of left-wing voters out there — Californian and Portlandian et cetera whites, and minorities. (The normal people states have less population, and thus fewer judges — California has 53 Congressional Districts, Montana has one.)
Because of the Senatorial veto on judges in a Senator’s state, even a conservative president can’t nominate conservative judges to the Ninth Circuit. They’re all liberals. And their rulings are so bad, they keep getting reversed by the Supreme Court.
This latest one features a (literally) unprecedented attack on the President who issued the travel ban. Unprecedented as in “No judge has ever done anything like this since we’ve been keeping records.”
Law professor Eugene Kontorovich writes in the Washington Post:
The 9th Circuit’s dangerous and unprecedented use of campaign statements to block presidential policy, By Eugene Kontorovich, Volokh Conspiracy, February 9, 2017That’s why Daniel Horowitz has been writing Want to take back our sovereignty? Start by breaking up the Ninth Circuit .The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has just upheld a nationwide temporary injunction on President Trump’s executive order relating to refugees and visas from certain countries. I think the court’s opinion is weak in most respects, but I will address one of the most interesting and potentially far-reaching aspects.
Generally, the president has vast discretion in issuing visas. One of the major arguments against the executive order is that while in principle a president can limit immigration from the seven affected countries, it would be unconstitutional for President Trump in particular to do so, because in his case the action is motivated by impermissible religious bias. The central exhibit for this argument is his campaign statements about a “Muslim ban.”
While the 9th Circuit did not address this at great length, focusing instead on due-process arguments, it did accept the basic validity of the form of the states’ argument. “The States’ claims raise serious allegations and present significant constitutional questions,” wrote the court.
There is absolutely no precedent for courts looking to a politician’s statements from before he or she took office, let alone campaign promises, to establish any kind of impermissible motive. The 9th Circuit fairly disingenuously cites several Supreme Court cases that show “that evidence of purpose beyond the face of the challenged law may be considered in evaluating Establishment and Equal Protection Clause claims.” But the cases it mentions do nothing more than look at legislative history — the formal process of adopting the relevant measure. That itself goes too far for textualists, but it provides absolutely no support for looking before the start of the formal deliberations on the measure to the political process of electing its proponents.
Indeed, a brief examination of cases suggests the idea has been too wild to suggest. [More]
Below, a dozen previous VDARE.com articles on the Ninth:
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.