Justice Kagan Has a Plan to End Trump’s Travel Ban
Her questioning at oral arguments seemed designed to sway Justice Kennedy to strike down the order as anti-Muslim.
There’s a lot at stake.
Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg
One thing became clear during Wednesday’s oral argument at the U.S. Supreme Court about President Donald Trump’s travel ban: Justice Elena Kagan has a strategy to persuade swing Justice Anthony Kennedy to vote against the ban. Her approach will be to depict the case as a watershed moment in the court’s jurisprudence about bias — thus making it extraordinarily difficult for Kennedy to find himself on the wrong side of history.
Legally speaking, the travel ban case has lots of moving parts: Do Muslims in the U.S. have a legal avenue to challenge a ban that excludes only non-Americans outside the country? How is power divided between the president and Congress with respect to immigration? Did the president offer sufficient reasons to justify the ban, which currently applies to five majority Muslim countries?