Why Trump’s Executive Order on Refugees Violates Establishment Clause
ACLU – According to the Supreme Court, “the clearest command of the Establishment Clause is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.” But that command is apparently not clear enough for President Donald Trump. On Friday he signed an executive order on refugees that imposes a selective ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries as well as establishes preferential treatment for refugees seeking asylum who are identified with “minority religions” in their country of origin. In case there was any doubt about the latter provision’s intent, Trump told Christian Broadcast News that it was intended to give priority to “Christians” seeking asylum over “Muslims.”
In both respects, the executive order violates the “clearest command of the Establishment Clause.” First, as I developed in an earlier post, the Constitution bars the government from targeting Islam. One of the lowest of many low moments in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was his December 2015 call for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslim immigration. The proposal treated as presumptively suspect a religion practiced by about 1.6 billion people worldwide, nearly a quarter of the globe’s population. Trump soon retreated to talk of “extreme vetting,” but he never gave up his focus on the religion of Islam. Friday’s executive orders are of a piece with his many anti-Muslim campaign promises.
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#ImpeachTrump
IfP announces the release of the Trump Formal Impeachment Petition. This method for impeaching a President uses a rarely used part of the Rules of the House of Representatives (“Jefferson’s Manual”). This document empowers individual citizens to initiate the impeachment process themselves. Our previous versions of this document were merely PDFs that people could download and send in themselves. This left us without the ability to track our progress toward impeaching any particular individual. Upon the inauguration of President Donald Trump, we have released a new version of the document that can be filled out online, and will allow us to track the progress nationwide, and state-by-state, as individuals fill out the petition.
