“Pure Prejudice”

Stephen Griffin on Trump’s irritable racist gesture:

There is an additional very troubling feature of Trump’s action that should not get lost in what I assume will be an enormous reaction to its discriminatory character. The action is also wholly arbitrary. There is no rational basis for this policy. This is like policy as fantasy football, policy as vanity plate. There is no evidence of an increased danger to the US from Syrian refugees or any other refugees. If terrorism is the problem, I suppose we might be more concerned by people traveling from France and Belgium than Yemen and Somalia. But however we analyze the policy, the underlying reality is that it is not the result of any rational policy process. There was no process. This is pure prejudice.

Dara Lind on how the utter lack of process and not-at-all-thinly-disguised discriminatory nature of the order will aid legal challenges:

In all, it didn’t give the impression that the drafting and implementation of the immigration order had been terribly careful or cautious. Spicer all but admitted the government hadn’t taken much time to disseminate the policy and explain it to relevant officials before Trump signed the order: “What we couldn’t do was telegraph our position ahead of time to ensure that people flooded in before that happened, before it went into place.”

From a political standpoint, the inconsistency is eyebrow-raising, if perhaps not uncharacteristic of this administration. But from a legal standpoint, it could be a big liability.

Judges have already been less than deferential to the administration in emergency lawsuits filed around the country to prevent the detention and deportation of people who’ve entered the US since Friday. In at least one case, in New York, the government’s discombobulation in implementing the order appeared to be a big reason Judge Ann Donnelly wasn’t sympathetic to their side of the case…

“The government hasn’t had a full chance to think about this” is a really good argument for granting an injunction, to prevent any harm from happening while the government figures it out. And it’s a good reason for a judge to be skeptical about the constitutionality of the order itself — it’s going to be hard for a government attorney, in a full hearing, to argue that the order was carefully planned to conform to the Constitution if the judge has evidence it wasn’t carefully planned at all.