Or subscribe with your Google account and let Google manage your subscription.
After the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the government’s argument to reinstate a sweeping executive order on immigration, President Donald Trump attacked the unanimous decision Friday morning on Twitter as “disgraceful.”
Trump cited an article on the judicial blog Lawfare, which noted that the appeals court’s decision had not addressed a statute which the government had used to justify the order halting immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
But author Benjamin Wittes in fact argued that the 9th Circuit was right to reject reinstating the travel ban, because “there is no cause to plunge the country into turmoil again while the courts address the merits of these matters over the next few weeks.”
“The court has to confront the clash between a broad delegation of power to the President—a delegation which gives him a lot of authority to do a lot of not-nice stuff to refugees and visa holders—in a context in which judges normally defer to the president, and the incompetent malevolence with which this order was promulgated,” he wrote.
Shortly afterward, Trump slammed the New York Times for reporting that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping had not spoken since November when the two leaders held a call yesterday.
According to Mark Landler, one of the reporters on the story, the Times “reported accurately that Xi wouldn't talk to POTUS without One China pledge. Updated story when he did just that.”
The Times’ chief White House correspondent Peter Baker also responded to the tweet, pointing out that the paper had reported the call after it happened, and that the paper had correctly reported the two had not spoken since November prior to Thursday’s call.
But the update reporting Thursday’s call seemed to follow the printing of the day’s physical paper, which Trump is known to read. The White House released a readout of the conversation with Xi shortly after 11 p.m. Thursday.
The long silence between Xi and Trump had followed Trump’s assertion after his election that the United States might not honor the “One China” policy, which holds that Taiwan — which has asserted its independence — is part of a single China under the government in Beijing. Trump had made the comment after a call with Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen in December, which had also exacerbated the tension between the United States and China.
In the White House statement Thursday, Trump walked back that suggestion: “President Trump agreed, at the request of President Xi, to honor our One China policy.”