A trio of judges who upheld a temporary injunction blocking implementation of President Trump’s immigration order “got offended” by the government’s legal arguments, but the ruling could lead the way to circumventing the lawsuits, a Republican senator is arguing.
“It seems like the court got offended is what it is,” Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, who sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the homeland security committee, said on Fox News. “Apparently the government attorney said they don’t have the right to review this. So they spent lots of time saying yes, we do have the right to review it.”
That issue arose in response to the Justice Department’s assertion that the judges didn’t have the authority to question national decisions that Trump made that pertain to people outside the United States. The judges rejected that argument, but they also denied that Trump’s order only applied to non-citizens, because it was written to cover green card holders (who are lawful permanent residents). Trump’s top lawyer advised federal agencies not to apply the order to lawful permanent residents, but the court said that’s not good enough.
“The government has offered no authority establishing that the White House counsel is empowered to issue an amended order superseding the executive order signed by the president and now challenged by the States, and that proposition seems unlikely,” the Ninth Circuit Court panelists wrote. “Nor has the government established that the White House counsel’s interpretation of the executive order is binding on all executive branch officials responsible for enforcing the executive order. The White House counsel is not the president, and he is not known to be in the chain of command for any of the executive departments.”
That argument suggests that Trump could escape at least some of the legal challenges by revising the official executive order to include the policy revisions that his administration announced a few days after issuing the original order.
“The administration [should] take a look at this and not go back and press it to court, to go back and clean up the document and to be able to make it clear,” Lankford said.
