A prominent left-leaning legal scholar said Friday he thinks the Supreme Court looks poised to agree with the Trump administration that it should stop reviewing the travel ban case while the country hurtles toward a “constitutional crisis.”
The Supreme Court has yet to rule on whether it will dismiss the pending litigation over President Trump’s travel ban that had been scheduled for next week. The high court decided to remove oral arguments from its schedule after President Trump announced a new travel ban, with both sides filing briefs Thursday on whether they thought the court should still hear the original case.
Trump’s opponents from Hawaii argued Thursday that the legal battle should proceed, but the Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to stop its review of the case and erase the lower court rulings against the ban’s implementation.
Georgetown University constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman, a law clerk to the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, said Friday he thinks the Trump administration’s argument is persuasive, and he thinks the justices are likely to agree.
“I don’t think the [Supreme] Court has any desire to get involved in this, and so I think it’s highly likely that this case is going to disappear,” said Seidman, who joined Georgetown’s faculty in 1976, on a phone call hosted by the Federalist Society. “Nonetheless it’s worth talking about for a couple of reasons: One is, I myself think there’s really no question that if Barack Obama had signed the very same order that Donald Trump had signed, nobody would’ve looked twice at it. It wouldn’t have been challenged. If it had been challenged, it would have been upheld.”
Seidman said the two explanations for the courts’ differing treatment of Presidents Trump and Obama are that the lower courts are “just completely politicized” or “that the Trump administration is authentically different from the Obama administration and other administrations that preceded [them].”
“And that leads to the second point, so this case is over, but my strong hunch is that we are moving pretty quickly to a constitutional crisis of really epic proportions that will arise out of the Mueller investigation and out of what seems to me to be quite likely, which is that when it gets too close to him the president will try to shut it down,” Seidman said. “At that point, if it arrives, then there’s also a pretty good likelihood that this will end up in the courts and it may well be that the attitude that the courts, and in particular the Supreme Court, has toward the Trump administration will have a very big impact on what, if it happens, will be one of the major events in the history of the country.”
