Trump presidency triggers immediate legal and direct action
In a per curiam decision, State of Washington, et al. v. Trump, et al., a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently and unanimously affirmed a landmark ruling against the Trump Administration’s travel ban concerning people from certain nations with large Muslim populations. The District Court imposed and the Ninth Circuit upheld a nation-wide stay of the Trump Administration’s travel ban, determining that the ban appears to violate due process and religious freedom protections under the Constitution. In other words, the Federal courts have rebuked the Trump Administration for evidently disregarding – on a class-wide basis – fundamental civil liberties and civil rights.
The Ninth Circuit decision relied directly on settled Supreme Court precedent to uphold the ruling against the Trump Administration by a Federal District Court judge appointed by President George W. Bush. In other words, there are no principled legal grounds on which the Supreme Court could side with the Trump Administration here. The Trump Administration also continues to face litigation pursued by the American Civil Liberties Union and others to address asserted conflicts of interest and numerous other apparent violations.
The immediate and ongoing action against the Trump Administration has not been confined to litigation. The largest protest in the country’s history occurred the day after the Presidential inauguration. On that day, approximately 4.5 million people peacefully marched and rallied from Washington, DC to Los Angeles, from New York to Seattle, and in hundreds of other cities and towns across the nation.
Since the Presidential inauguration, the peaceful protests and rallies have continued around the country, including at various airports and city centers. Another large-scale march and rally will occur in Washington, DC in the near future when tens of thousands of scientists converge on the capitol to protest the Trump Administration’s actions. The concerns of scientists include the Trump Administration’s climate-change denial, funding freezes for research agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, and prohibitions on government scientists from communicating their scientific findings.
