After court humiliation, Trump team to draft new travel ban

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals delivered a stinging and humiliating loss whenthey ordered a stay on Donald Trump’s highest profile executive orders: a de facto selective “Muslim Ban” that essentially forbade individuals from seven countries, including those with visas, from entering the United States. It looks as if Trump’s team has decided that any further attempts to appeal the stay will only result in further embarrassment, so they are going back to the drawing board:

The Justice Department told a federal appeals court on Thursday that it would not seek a rehearing of a decision that shut down President Trump’s targeted travel ban. Instead, the administration will start from scratch, issuing a new executive order, the department said.

Last Thursday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, blocked the key parts of the original executive order, which suspended the nation’s refugee program as well as travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries. The panel said the original ban was unlikely to survive constitutional scrutiny.

The Justice Department said that the panel’s decision was riddled with errors but that the flaws it noted would be addressed in the new executive order.

“Rather than continuing this litigation,” the Justice Department’s brief said, “the president intends in the near future to rescind the order and replace it with a new, substantially revised executive order to eliminate what the panel erroneously thought were constitutional concerns.”

“In so doing,” the brief said, “the president will clear the way for immediately protecting the country rather than pursuing further, potentially time-consuming litigation.”

By: dave-dr-gonzo

David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.

* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.