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No, the Supreme Court Won’t Stop a Runaway President (Politico)
The travel-ban ruling today contained a strong rebuke to Trump—but a warning to anyone expecting the Court to be a last line of defense.

By RICHARD PRIMUS

June 26, 2018

     The Supreme Court’s decision upholding President Trump’s travel ban on Tuesday came with a number of interesting wrinkles. It contained an implicit rebuke of Trump’s motives in signing the order, even though it let the order stand. And it repudiated Korematsu vs. United States, a discredited 1944 decision that allowed the U.S. to send Japanese-American citizens to internment camps during wartime, even as it upheld a policy with a discriminatory motive on grounds similar to that 70-year-old ruling….
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     … Sometimes the Court is willing to deem a government action constitutional by pretending that the government’s underlying purpose was something acceptable, rather than something forbidden. And sometimes the Court decides that even if a governmental action is or might be fully unconstitutional, there's simply nothing to be done about it by the justice system. In other words, the Court sometimes lets unconstitutional behavior stand. If Tuesday’s decision is read closely, it is possible to see both of those limits at work. Indeed, it is reasonable to read the opinions to mean that at least five Justices, not just the dissenting four, believe the President acted unconstitutionally in proclaiming his travel ban. But just because something is unconstitutional doesn’t mean that the Court will strike it down.
     Consider first the majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, which found a way to acknowledge the President’s unconstitutional motivations without concluding that the policy itself was unconstitutional. Roberts’s opinion spent no less than a page and a half chronicling some of Trump’s statements, as a candidate and as President, suggesting that the travel ban is motivated by anti-Muslim animus. (The ban, which restricts travel from Iran, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Venezuela and North Korea, is the third version of an order that originally applied only to a group of Muslim countries.) An anti-Muslim motive would make the ban unconstitutional under the First Amendment, which forbids the government to disfavor particular religions. But that’s not what Roberts ruled. In the end, the Chief Justice decided for the President on the theory that the policy “can reasonably be understood to result from a justification independent of unconstitutional grounds.” This is what constitutional lawyers call the “rational-basis test”: even if the actual reason the ban exists is rooted in an unconstitutional motive like religious bigotry, the Court will let the ban stand if the judges can imagine some legitimate interest that could have motivated the order….

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