Moreover, as Andy McCarthy noted, the Court actually held that the President, despite acting on national security and with a clear statutory grant of authority, is powerless to even inconvenience foreigners who want to travel to the U.S. to visit relatives, start jobs or go to school. That is mind-boggling.

In addition, I think it is notable that it was the three conservatives, and not the liberals, who dissented; clearly Roberts and Kennedy have sincere doubts about the President’s ability to inconvenience, much less bar, foreigners. Combined with the Court’s admonition that the Administration get cracking and roll out its enhanced vetting procedures pronto, this seems a not-to-subtle signal to Trump that he make sure the ban is mooted by October because he won’t like the outcome if they adjudicate the merits.

Finally, I don’t understand the notion that the Fourth and Ninth circuits were somehow slapped down by this. Does anyone think they care about that? They wear Supreme Court repudiation as a badge of honor; none of them are going to get demoted or fired or take a pay cut no matter how many times they get overturned. The Supreme Court could have (and in fact, under the rules applicable to justiciating injunctions, should have) addressed the circuit courts’ reasoning under an analysis of the likelihood of success on the merits, but it didn’t. If the Court wanted to chasten the circuit courts that’s where it would have done so — but it declined to do so.

This is not a perfect ruling, and the results will not be everything we could have hoped for, but it is a fitting and proper rebuke to the lower courts who relied on Trump’s campaign rhetoric to delay implementation of his effort to limit Obama’s porous borders policy.

This is an important ruling not for what it accomplished, but for what it signals to the lower courts.

The media are still using that Muslim majority crap in reporting the SC decision. It is as if CAIR controls the media.

Perhaps he threw the girls a bone to get the per curiam. This pushes the mess back to December or January when it may become moot. This is the best the Liberals can hope for as they certainly don’t want SCOTUS to formally affirm the president’s plenary authority.

For instance, how can the US vet anyone from Iran? We don’t have an embassy or consulate in Iran as we don’t have diplomatic relations. On top of that Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism. I can provide the documentation, if anyone wishes, but in this off-the-cuff comment I’ll simply note that during the Obama era the Obama administration (to their credit; I can cite things I should credit the Obama administration for on one hand) thwarted an Iranian effort to assassinate the Saudi ambassador. It involved at least one American citizen of Iranian descent and another Iranian who was a foreign national. Moreover they intended to plant the bomb while the Saudi ambassador was dining out at a popular, crowded Washington D.C. cafe in order to kill as many Americans as possible.

I won’t go into the other five nations effected by the travel ban, a toxic cocktail of failed states and state sponsors of terrorism. Suffice to say there is a reason the Constitution makes the executive, not the judiciary, responsible for national defense.

That is why I think Roberts gave the liberal wing something to come away with- he wanted the order to be per curiam precisely as a slap down of the appeals courts. He is hoping, I think, to stop the injunction fest in its tracks. The court can enforce this by summarily lifting any further injunctions, but I don’t think Roberts wants to have to do this. I don’t think he will be successful, however.

The practical effect of the ruling is a full repudiation of both the 4th and the 9th circuits. It places the burden of proof on the individual petitioner not only to prove merit but to establish standing.

It puzzled me as to why the administration did not raise the standings issue in the lower courts. I now believe that Trump wanted the issue dead and buried as soon as possible in the most definitive way. Now, no judge in the land is going to go anywhere near the land mine of messing with a 9-0 decided with such dispatch. I think that in a broader sense it also signals that SCOTUS is taking a dim view of lawfare as a political tactic.

Was this an audacious move by Trump? You betcha.

“Moreover, I fear that the Court’s remedy will prove unworkable. Today’s compromise will burden executive officials with the task of deciding–on peril of contempt– whether individuals from the six affected nations who wish to enter the United States have a sufficient connection to a person or entity in this country. See ante, at 11—12. The compromise also will invite a flood of litigation until this case is finally resolved on the merits, as parties and courts struggle to determine what exactly constitutes a “bona fide relationship,” who precisely has a “credible claim” to that relationship, and whether the claimed relationship was formed “simply to avoid §2(c)” of Executive Order No. 13780, ante, at 11, 12. And litigation of the factual and legal issues that are likely to arise will presumably be directed to the two District Courts whose initial orders in these cases this Court has now– unanimously–found sufficiently questionable to be stayed as to the vast majority of the people potentially affected.”