Reflections on the Travel Ban Decision One Year Later

It’s been a year since the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s travel ban. What are the lessons for the census case now pending at the Court?

A year ago, a divided Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s travel ban. In a new op-ed published today in the New York Times, ICAP Faculty Chair Neal Katyal and ICAP Executive Director Joshua Geltzer explain why that decision looks even worse a year later — and what lessons it holds for the Court’s imminent ruling on the challenge to adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. Here’s an excerpt:

[T]he point isn’t just that the court’s decision a year ago has aged poorly — it’s that key foundations for that decision have crumbled. The court’s majority embraced Mr. Trump’s representations that his travel ban was temporary, subject to regular reassessment and softened by the availability of waivers. Those premises looked arguably faulty then but are now downright far-fetched.

Today, the court prepares to issue its biggest decision since the travel ban, on the 2020 census case. Yet again, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have offered the court premises that look like pretexts. The claims of a need to bolster Voting Rights Act enforcement are belied by the citizenship question’s nakedly political origins and by the government’s own assessment that adding a citizenship question would hinder Voting Rights Act enforcement.

It’s now up to the justices whether to indulge these premises. Doing so would be wrong today — and would look even worse in the future.

Check out the whole piece here and let us know what you think of it.