About a week ago, the Supreme Court “dismissed one two cases over President Trump’s ban on visitors from mostly Muslim countries, suggesting it will step away from the controversy for now.” According to CBS News, the dismissed case originated in Maryland and involved a now-expired ban. That ban has since been replaced with an updated one.
All nine Supreme Court justices agreed that the case should be dismissed.
But even though they were all in agreement, the court did nothing when handed a similar case from Hawaii. This other case “concerns both the travel ban and a separate ban on refugees, which does not expire until Oct. 24.”
While dismissing one of these cases is a step in the right direction, dismissing both would allow the court to “avoid ruling on difficult legal issues” and pave the way for “the next round of litigation” on the next stage of the president’s ban.
According to CBS News and The Associated Press, the cases had originally been combined for argument, but “after the travel ban expired last month and a new policy was rolled out” the court decided to weigh the legality of such a policy.
The ban from September of this year was created “after a vigorous security review that administration officials said provided a legally unassailable rationale for the travel restrictions,” according to The New York Times. This means that President Trump would be protected from “definitive ruling” on whether or not he had violated the Constitution and exceeded his authority.
The latest version of the travel ban is set to take effect on October 18, 2017. That’s just two days away. About five or six of the countries that were up for court review remain in the latest version.
Critics are arguing that this latest version is just “a dressed-up Muslim ban,” with questions still circulating about how exactly the ban will be implemented, how it will be enforced, who exactly will be affected, and how the countries noted within the ban itself were picked.