One of the president’s options now is to draft a new executive order. Another is to appeal the existing 9th court decision to the Supreme Court, given that the appeals court laid down sufficient information in its findings for the Supreme Court to decide if it wishes or needs to hear an appeal. If the president is well-advised at all, it will come as no surprise if the Supreme Court declines to hear the case and let the appeals court finding stay in place. There is no need for him to ask all 29 judges on the 9th District Court of Appeals to determine whether the three judges who made the ruling were correct; the three judges have already offered to have their ruling reviewed by the full district appeals court if the other 26 deem it important.
I started in one place and wish to end in another. There is no doubt that, for many of us, our productivity has been severely compromised by the new administration. No matter what we are in the middle of, we check our mobile devices to see if other troubling programs have been announced, or if there are new executive orders on any given day. I am heartened by the overwhelming number of lawyers who drove to airports to help ensure that rights were respected on those first days before the ban was stayed. I am impressed with politics at the local level, not just here in Seattle but in other major cities as well, where large demonstrations to protest such actions have taken place. That is just the tip of the spear. There is a relatively new attempt to understand how politics work, to figure out how to let your Congressional representative know your views on a wide range of appointments and bills they will be voting on. Finally, more conversations are taking place face to face, not just on social media.
I was overwhelmed by Adam Gopnik’s column in the latest issue of The New Yorker, which ends thus: "Democratic civilization has turned out to be even more fragile than we imagined; the resources of civil society have turned out to be even deeper than we knew. The battle between these two shaping forces--between the axman assaulting the new growth and the still firm soil and deep roots that support the tree of liberty--will now shape the future of us all."
Next month, I’ll plan to take a look at the dismantling of the Dodd-Frank Act.
“Reprinted with permission from ASA News & Notes, February 2017 issue.”