The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision Tuesday upholding President Trump's travel ban sends a troubling message, writes Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. In choosing to effectively overlook Trump's past comments on a Muslim ban, the court has opened the door for plenty more prejudiced policies. Chief Justice John Roberts "argues, because the order itself doesn't mention Islam, the president's remarks about the travel ban, and his express intent in imposing it, can be safely ignored," Serwer writes. "Whatever message the Court intended to send, the one that Trump and his administration will take from the ruling is that the president is free to implement any discriminatory policy he likes, so long as his advisers launder the president's bigotries through facially neutral language." "In addressing the constitutionality of the order, Roberts writes, 'we must consider not only the statements of a particular President, but also the authority of the Presidency itself.' So the president need not even cease to make bigoted generalizations about religious and ethnic minorities publicly—the high court's conservative justices will, in evaluating the policies motivated by such prejudices, disregard them, so long as they can find some other superficial basis for their existence." |
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