Donald Trump’s travel ban has another day in court

By S.M. | NEW YORK

IN APRIL, after two of his executive orders were blocked in court, Donald Trump described the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals as “outrageous”. The court has a “terrible record of being overturned” by the Supreme Court, he said, and should be broken up into smaller jurisdictions. On May 15th, a three-judge panel of the president’s least-favourite federal court heard Mr Trump’s plea to reinstate his revised ban on travel from six Muslim-majority countries. None of the judges, all Bill Clinton appointees, appeared to harbour a grudge against the president for insulting their institution. Judges Michael Hawkins, Ronald Gould and Richard Paez were thorough and even-handed in questioning two exceptional lawyers: Neal Katyal, arguing against the ban, and Jeffrey Wall, the acting solicitor-general, who urged the court to undo a Hawaii judge’s order blocking the executive order.

After an uneven and messy hearing on May 8th at the Fourth Circuit in Richmond—a two-hour-plus inquiry into the travel ban led by a baker’s dozen of judges—the hour-long affair in Seattle seemed disciplined by comparison. But the outcome of Hawaii v Trump also seems harder to predict than its east-coast analogue, International Refugee Assistance Project v Trump. Whereas only a few of the 13 Fourth Circuit judges seemed inclined to come to the rescue of Mr Trump’s second travel ban, none of the three judges at the Ninth Circuit tipped his hand one way or the other.