--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: I'm Sean's guest today, Emily Bazelon, writer for the New York Times Magazine.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Emily, thanks for joining us. Let's dive right in. The Supreme Court made a big decision today, upholding President Trump's travel ban. Can you walk us through what happened?
--:-- Emily Bazelon: The biggest case of the Supreme Court's term was decided today, President Trump's travel ban in a 5-4 decision. The Supreme Court said the ban is constitutional, correct?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, that is exactly what happened. It was a 5-4 ruling, and the conclusion is that the president was well within his authority.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: And the majority opinion by Chief Justice Roberts says that the plaintiff's challenge based on the idea that this ban was a Muslim ban, that it was discrimination based on religion, that that doesn't work. That because the president was in his authority, whatever problems there were with the president's statements don't infect the ban enough for the Supreme Court to strike it down.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And was that the only question they were trying to answer? Is this a Muslim ban or not? Or did they get into the idea of whether the president could just ban immigrants from these countries?
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Well, to back up a step, the first question is, did the president act within his authority? And that's where the majority opinion is on the most solid ground. The president has a lot of authority under immigration law in general, but in particular in terms of issuing visas.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The people who challenged this ban were kind of starting out at a disadvantage.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: So the majority opinion says, OK, the president has lots of authority here, especially in terms of issuing visas. And then we have this question, kind of a secondary question about the criteria the president used.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the court did quote from some of Donald Trump's more controversial statements about keeping Muslims out of the country.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: But then the court said, look, by the time this ban was issued, it had gone through a regular process, at least on its face, within the government. And that was really good enough for the majority.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, says that the plaintiffs argue the president's words strike at fundamental standards of respect and tolerance in violation of our constitutional tradition.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: But the issue before us is not whether to denounce those statements, it's whether the significance of those statements in reviewing a directive that's neutral on its face address a matter within the core of executive responsibility.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you can kind of see there, I would argue, that Roberts is holding his nose at everything the president said and Sotomayor is saying that Trump's statements are the crux of this case.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Yeah, exactly. And she sort of won't be fooled by the claims otherwise.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, she can start out with some grand principles about how we're a country built on the promise of religious liberty. And then she can say that the repackaging of the travel ban does little to cleanse it from the appearance of discrimination that the president's words have created.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: I think for a lot of people who've been following this, especially from the beginning when we had those horrible scenes at airports of people's lives being thrown into chaos, these words from Sotomayor are going to resonate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In a moment, there are seven countries included in the president's travel ban. Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, and Venezuela. What this decision means for them.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: This is Today Explained.
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--:-- Emily Bazelon: What does this mean for this travel ban? Is it on the books until a president or this president decides to take it off?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, it is. And the court addressed that because one of the arguments was, can you suspend this kind of issuing of visas indefinitely? And the court said today, yes, the president can do that indefinitely.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: So did anything really change today as far as how our immigration policies work? Because this travel ban was already in place, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right. I mean, at this point, the answer essentially is no, because the court had already lifted the injunctions that were preventing the ban from going into place.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: You know, the evolution of this is that it started out in this moment of like terrible upheaval and protested airports. In a sense, the United States just become utterly uncaring.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Overnight, another surge of protests against President Trump's controversial executive order. My mom arrived at 7:24 and then Mr. Trump was like, signed the paper. She's already in the air when he signed the paper and we've been waiting for her. All we want is our mom.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: So we had all of that turmoil. And then we had these different iterations of this travel ban. We're now, I believe, on the third one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A federal judge has nullified the president's executive order restricting travel from seven mostly Muslim countries.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: This executive order, just as the first executive order, is a lawful and proper exercise of presidential authority.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump's second travel ban has met the same fate as his first one, blocked again by the courts.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: The administration issued another travel ban, its third in eight months. The travel ban, the tougher, the better. Each time the idea was to make it seem more regular more normalized.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: By the time we got to this third version the government had kind of gotten its act together in terms of presenting at least the appearance of neutrality.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Exactly. And so we had this list of countries that wasn't all just keeping out the Muslims. It sort of had some veneer of a more neutral way of thinking about the world and the way in which the United States could be threatened by various countries.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've been living with it for a while and we're going to continue to live with it in its current form.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Do you know what effect this travel ban is already having since it's been around for I guess this current iteration for at least many, many months?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I think you've probably heard the stories too. There are certainly people who are trying to get to the United States to study, to work, to get medical treatment. Those have been some of the heartbreaking stories who have not been able to get in, and they do not sound like they are individually threats to the country.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: And the idea that this case-by-case review that's going to lead to waivers seems to be not attainable for a lot of people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think it's hard to talk about this now outside the context of all the family separations at the border.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: And I think, you know, it's all kind of of a piece, this idea that the Trump administration is very interested in immigration as a wedge issue in the election and also in broadcasting an image that the United States is protecting its borders, it's closing its door against any perceived threat.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the notion of, you know, the Statue of Liberty seems quite out of fashion.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Did the president just become more powerful? You mentioned up top that Roberts was saying and the majority was saying, look, the president has this power, but did he just gain a bit of power?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He had his power reaffirmed.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: I mean, And one point Roberts makes, and it's a smart point for him to make, obviously, is that President Reagan banned a class of visa seekers from Cuba. President Carter did the same thing for Iranians at one point.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have seen presidents suspend entry for a group of foreign nationals from a particular country in other cases.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Because of President Trump's statements that were so anti-Muslim. There was a question of whether he still had the same authority previous presidents had or whether he essentially jeopardized it or sacrificed it by expressing this kind of religious prejudice.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so what we've discovered is he has the same authority every other president had and all the stuff he said and tweeted that seemed problematic, the court is not willing to hold against him, not in a way that really matters.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: I think that it is clear that a conservative majority is going to go out of their way to treat President Trump like any other president.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They are going to hold their nose. They know that he says things that are unpresidential and make it difficult because he seems to be flouting our constitutional norms.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: But they are going to do the best they can to ignore all of that and just plow ahead with the usual kind of analysis about a president's authority.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that could have widespread implications. We don't really know how far they would go with that or how far President Trump will take it.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: He will certainly see this decision today as a great triumph.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Emily Bazelon hosts the Political Gab Fest podcast. I'm Sean Rameswaram for him.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained. The show today was supported by Quip.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Quip makes electric toothbrushes. You can get your first one starting at just $25 at getquip.com slash explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And your first refill pack is free. After that, you need one every three months for just $5, including free shipping worldwide. G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explained.
