*Judges Enter Twilight Zone In Bid To Block Trump Over Temporary Travel Bans*
*By SETH LIPSKY <http://www.nysun.com/authors/Seth+Lipsky>, From the New York Post | March 16, 2017* *Bing. Bing. Bing. Bing.* You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind — a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone. Or, more formally, the United States Court for the District of Hawaii. That’s where Judge Derrick Watson has just blocked President Trump from suspending travel to America <http://nypost.com/2017/03/15/judges-blocks-trumps-second-immigration-ban/> from certain Muslim countries seething with Islamist terrorism. Judge Watson issued on Wednesday his own nationwide ban against Mr. Trump’s plan to stem migration from specific war zones. The president’s aim is to beef up the vetting of such migrants — a staple of his campaign promises. Nor is Judge Watson alone. He was followed Thursday by a Maryland-based federal judge, who also issued an order temporarily restraining Mr. Trump. These two geniuses reckon that, among other things, Mr. Trump could well be violating the First Amendment. That’s the part of the Bill of Rights that declares: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” It’s the part of America’s supreme law that the judges reckon gives Muslim plaintiffs standing to challenge Mr. Trump. It’s not my purpose here to question the patriotism of the vast majority of America’s Muslims. Or to deny the excruciating predicament in which they’ve been put by our common enemies operating in the name of Islam. In what dimension, though, are these judges living? Their orders are totally detached from what the framers of the Constitution meant when they prohibited Congress from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” Why did the Founders word it that way? History suggests their aim was not to separate religion and state. It was, rather, to prevent Congress from enacting a national religion while also protecting already enacted religious establishments — official religions — at the state level. At least six states had established religions in our early years, according to the Heritage Foundation. This finally came to an end in 1819, when Massachusetts disestablished the Congregationalist church. Our judges have long since plunged past original intent on religious establishment. But the Founders would have been aghast at the idea that the Establishment Clause prohibited, say, a president from vetting refugees to intercept terrorists. We can suppose this because of what happened in 1785, when a group of Algerians hailing from the Barbary Coast, with whose pirates America was in effect at war, entered Virginia. The Commonwealth’s legal sticklers passed a law authorizing the governor to hold, question, and expel them. The governor, Patrick Henry, had already expelled the Algerians by the time Virginia’s legislators finished the law authorizing him to do so. Its author was none other than Jas. Madison, who went on to write the very First Amendment now being used against Mr. Trump. When it comes to traveling to another dimension, the judges’ folly on the First Amendment is nothing compared to their attempts to go beyond reading Mr. Trump’s presidential order. They are trying to read his mind. This is the business about the presidential motive, which keeps cropping up in these orders. In the latest, the judge in Maryland, Theodore Chuang, reckons Trump’s campaign stumping about a ban on Muslims is evidence of him having a “religious purpose.” Judge Chuang holds Mr. Trump to account not only for his own words but also for Rudolph Giuliani’s. The record is so explicit, Judge Chuang suggests, as to “allow the Court to identify the purpose” of Trump’s travel ban “without resort to ‘judicial psychoanalysis.’ ” So Judge Chuang, like Judge Watkins in Hawaii, is prepared to issue a nationwide restraining order against the president — in the middle of a war. Even if there might be other reasons than religious bias for temporarily tightening up the vetting of visas. Justice Robert Jackson once warned that wartime presidents are sometimes forced to operate in a “zone of twilight.” But restraining a president on a bias claim based on his remarks on the stump represents an entirely new doctrine — one without limits. Think what a Republican judge could do with such a doctrine if, say, someone sued to block the Democrats from funding abortions by citing the leaked anti-Catholic comments of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. 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