“What do you do when a sloppy court ruling blocks a poorly written and incompetently defended executive order?” That was the question a Washington Examiner editorial asked a week ago in response to President Trump’s executive order temporarily blocking entry into the United States for immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Our answer was that Trump needed to “rewrite the executive order substantially, to eliminate the genuine legal issues and moral concerns that buttressed ersatz arguments against it. This must be done while still addressing the central security concerns that the order was intended to address.”
Trump announced in his wide-ranging raucous press conference on Thursday that he will issue a new order next week.
There’s a strong argument to be made that America’s refugee vetting system is already “extreme” enough, to use Trump’s word. Karen Jacobsen, an expert on global migration from Tufts University, made that case in a recent Washington Examiner op-ed.
Trump’s initial executive order, issued in late January, raised constitutional and humanitarian questions as nobody seemed to know exactly who was barred from the county. The poorly written order created confusion, as travellers from affected countries who were in transit were detained at airports. The order was enforced against people who already had visas, including permanent U.S. residents.
The ruling of the three-judge panel of a federal appeals court that shot the order down seemed to suggest that a more clearly written order—one that didn’t affect those who already have visas—could pass constitutional muster. Trump said Thursday that the new order will be tailored to react to the court’s ruling.
Let’s hope the new order is clearer and is the result of input from all the relevant federal agencies (many of whom were excluded or mostly excluded from the original drafting), not just a small group of Trump loyalists in the West Wing.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
