Stephen Vladeck: SCOTUS "has reaffirmed the President's sweeping statutory authority when it comes to deciding who may and who may not travel" to the USA, "authority that both...Trump & future presidents will surely rely upon to justify more aggressive immigration restrictions."
Roberts writes, for the majority, that there is "persuasive evidence that the entry suspension has a legitimate grounding in national security concerns, quite apart from any religious hostility" (p. 34)
law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/17-9…
law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/17-9…
More Roberts: "Plaintiffs argue that this President’s words strike at fundamental standards of respect and tolerance, in violation of our constitutional tradition. But the issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements..."
"... It is instead the significance of those statements in reviewing a Presidential directive, neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core of executive responsibility."
on p. 32 Roberts writes "we may consider plaintiffs’ extrinsic evidence, but will uphold the policy so long as it can reasonably be understood to result from a justification independent of unconstitutional grounds."
Sotomayor, dissenting: "The majority here completely sets aside the President's charged statements about Muslims as irrelevant. That holding erodes the foundational principles of religious tolerance that the court elsewhere has so emphatically protected..."
"...and it tells members of minority religions in our country 'that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community,'" Sotomayor writes, comparing the reasoning to the Korematsu v. United States case which justified internment camps of Japanese-Americans in WWII.
Roberts says reference to Korematsu "affords this Court the opportunity to make express what is already obvious: Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—'has no place in law under the Constitution.'"
