The President pronounces on the new immigration ruling

February 4, 2017 • 9:47 am

Here’s The Donald’s response to Federal District Court judge James Robart’s ruling temporarily blocking, throughout the U.S., two provisions of the infamous “Muslim Ban” executive order:

“So-called judge”? That’s an insult to the federal judiciary (Robart was appointed by George W. Bush).  It’s unseemly for a President to use Twitter to pronounce on judicial decisions, it’s unseemly for a President to impugn a Federal judge in this way, and it’s unseemly for the President to get himself involved in a court battle on social media.  What hath voters wrought?

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is obeying the judge’s orders, ordering its agents to stop implementing the two affected parts of the ban.

110 thoughts on “The President pronounces on the new immigration ruling”

  1. They hath wrought a full blown idiot to the highest office of the land. The ultimate question is, What does that make us?

    It was well know by any thinking people what this guy is and always has been. If you look for change at the age of 70….sorry.

    1. I like the term “thinking people”. I think.
      It’s probably the opposite of “low information people”, which seems appropriate. I’d like to think there are many more thinking than low information, so that in the end things ought to sort themselves out. Now let’s hope for a terrific, fantastic, high crime or misdemeanor.

      1. I’d like to think there are many more thinking than low information…

        I think it’s about 50-50

        1. I’m not that optimistic. It’s much, much easier to be low-information. And in this day and age there is no price to be paid for being low-information. The few geniuses have removed the filter of natural selection and made living life easy for the many non-geniuses.

    2. Yes, he’s always been a little unhinged, but I remember years ago when he first came into the public eye, a lot of young working class guys thought he was great! Because they thought that’s how they would be if only they had money.

    1. Yeah, mainly, it is the people go rig the election systems to get the bad guys elected who say that, and encourage their victims (generally 99% of the population) to say that.

      1. Wow….I won’t ask if you have any evidence to back that up. I will go with Arkenaten on this view.

  3. Most who voted did not vote for this character. Those who didn’t vote or who voted for ridiculous 3rd party candidates, combined with our wretched & undemocratic electoral system, have put an unrefined authoritarian in office. An authoritarian whose chief adviser is a white supremacist.

    1. It sounds like excuses for what we have. I do not buy that. The system has not changed for many years and perhaps it is way past time to change it, but again, I say…who’s fault is that?

      1. Huh? Read it again.

        The system is biased toward rural voters. This is a product of the way the system was set up at the time of the founding, and the deals made to bring slave owners on board. Today, a voter in Wyoming has much more clout than a voter in California. More people voted for Clinton, but an idiot won because the system is biased and can tip the results in close cases. That’s how we got W too, you may remember. This was a close case because democratic voters have a talent for not showing up at crucial moments, and because some people, with poor political sense, voted for ridiculous 3rd party candidates. The fool got less votes than Romney, but won anyway.

        Who’s to blame? Among others: people who don’t vote (and who would do the right thing if they did) and the party that blocks all attempts to reform our political system, because it depends on rural conservatives.

        1. I understand the constitution and the representation in the Senate and thus the electors, thank you. But you need to look at the whole country as it is today and from Ohio to Nevada it is red. Rural is republican and that is not rigged, it is fact. Maybe get your head out of the big city and count again.

          1. To cast dark upon the subject : 2010 census figures (That’s a ⋅gov site, maintained by the US Govt) :

            Area .. . . . . . Population ... %
            Urban .. . . . . . 249,253,271 . 80.7%
            (Urbanized Areas . 219,922,123 . 71.2%
            + Urban Clusters . 29,331,148 .. 9.5%)
            Rural . . . . . . . 59,492,267 . 19.3%
            Corresponding figures for 2000 were Urban Areas 68.3% ; Urban Clusters 10.7% ; Rural 21.0%
            Quote how that breaks down into states and the electoral college is more complex. But plainly a lot of Trumpeters must live in urban areas.
            I note that the Census site details the definitions of UA and UC for each census, suggesting that the rules change sometimes.

    2. I read somewhere that Trump was elected by about 27% of the eligible voters. Not sure if that is accurate, but it sounds plausible, given how many either chose not to vote or were prevented from voting by the absurd GOP sponsored restrictions on the right to vote. I suspect even that 27% figure is high when you consider the opportunities to falsify vote counts afforded by GOP flack-owned voting machines. Maybe the polls weren’t as far off as they seemed.

      1. Unlike Trump, I don’t just “hear things”. I “read things somewhere”. My citations are just that tiny amount more credible for it. 🙂

    1. Perhaps even an unseemly human.

      Nope – that one you can’t blame on the electorate – just on the brothel-keeper’s son and … whoever Trumpet’s mother was.

  6. Among the innumerable things to completely hate about this is that we will, at different rates, become inured to these embarrassments.

      1. I’m afraid “we” will, or in fact are. “We” means the population at large. It is far, far easier to neglect critical thinking and listen to base instinct.

        Pinker has shown that our overall tendency is toward a reduction of violence, but I think there’s another metric we ought to pay attention to: our overall tendency toward stupidity.

  7. That Trump tweets this does not surprise me in the least. He can’t stand anyone saying he is wrong.

    Welcome to the Tweetocracy…government by Twitter.

    1. I think he uses Twitter because it accommodates
      his limited brain power and lack of speaking and writing abilities. Certainly, we’ve seen and heard what wonderful speeches he gives… a
      bunch of verbal tweets, one after the other, without relevance to one another or anything else.

      1. It won’t make any difference to his supporters. Until it *directly* affects them, like cutting of their Medicare or Social Security.

  10. “The tweet of this so-called president, which essentially erodes the separation of powers, is ridiculous and will be ignored.”

    Fixed it for him.

    1. Pissing on judges seems to be to his taste, like Russian ladies of negotiable affection.

  12. There’s a scene in the latest season of Supernatural where Hitler has been brought back to life and he says ‘Mein Kampf sold a million copies – just think what I can do with Twitter!’

    The platform should never have been given the power it has. Those who spent a decade turning a medium which reduces complex issues to memes, insults and soundbites helped make it the default channel for political discourse.

  14. “Unseemly” is the very nicest thing you can say about him.
    It’s important to vote for character. You don’t know what’s going to happen 2 or 3 years down the road, and you want somebody with the integrity and character to deal with any eventuality. Some voters evidently wanted somebody who could thrash around and bluster and bluff–somebody who promises to uphold the Constitution but doesn’t seem to have ever read it.

          1. At the time I have in mind, Frederick Douglass hadn’t been discovered yet; nor had Harriet Tubman, but anyone pretending to be President now should certainly be conversant with their biographies.

          2. I keep on hearing that name bandied about and wondering how the father of tree science got dragged into the mire of politics.
            OIC – an anti-slavery campaigner.

      1. I define a trump supporter as a shallow-thinking person with the heart of a bully. They are getting exactly what they wanted from their demagogue (with no redeeming qualities.) I hope rational citizens organize and have the courage to fight after trump’s dreadful cabinet is confirmed and ramps-up the destruction.

        1. Polls show 80% of republicans approve of Trump’s performance so far. That’s a lot of bullies.

      1. This is going to expose my sartorial illiteracy, but isn’t that a Dolce to Gabbana story, not a glad rags to glad rags story?

  15. Trump is far from the most worrying part of this administration. Bannon worries me the most (if only because he makes Cheney seem respectable), followed by the idea of Pence as president, and then by DeVos and the swamp of Wall Street cronies and science-deniers in the cabinet. Then there’s the legislative branch full Republicans who apparently have sold their metaphorical souls to their hypocritical leadership. The Democrats need to choose between fighting losing battles on principle or cooperating in the (vain) hope that they can compromise with the GOP in the future (a position they got themselves into by distancing themselves from Obama in the 2014 elections.)

    1. It’s turtles, all the way down: super conservative or evangelical Christians, racists, misogynists, Nazis, anti-LGBTetc.,
      anti-science, anti-education. What an interesting time we are living in.

    1. Ben Franklin said to a question put forth as he was leaving the Convention, what kind of government do we have? A Republic, if we can keep it.

  17. I still can not believe this. Now, literally every day I cringe at when I look the news, always to be confronted with a new confirmation that Trump is as ill-suited and idiotic as we feared.

    4 years.

    at least 4 years of being in this Twilight Zone episode.

    (BTW, some financial guru on the Radio said he’s not the only one predicting Trump will prove so bad, piss so many off including republicans, that he won’t make it through the term. I doubt it, but I also don’t know that the option for replacing Trump won’t be awful too).

    1. He’s already thrown his hat in the ring for the next election. He made a lot of money (around $12 million) from the campaign funding for using his properties and other possessions for the campaign. Apparently, he can continue to draw money from the campaign fund since he’s announced he’s running again. What a sleaze.

  20. He’s so-called a judge because he is a judge. What a doofus. So goes the dismantling of institutions that protect democracy.

  21. Considering that this judge is not a public figure, can it be considered slanderous of Trump to call him “so-called”? Why or why not?

    1. The problem with “slander,” is that you have to find someone who believes it and relies on that belief to the detriment of the person “slandered.” I think it would be hard to find a credible witness who would testify to that.

    2. How can a judge not be a public figure?
      Even in the depths of the “Troubles,” although the Diplock courts were held in camera and the names of the triumvirate of judges not published, we knew who was on the bench and therefore might have been on the tribunal.

  22. What hath voters wrought?

    David Deutsch in “The Beginning of Infinity” reminds us:

    “Thus, systems of government are to be judged not for their prophetic ability to choose and install good leaders and policies, but for their ability to remove bad ones.”

    So can we get on with that, at least?

    1. That is pretty good but history, in this country at least, does not look so good on this. We have so far, managed to get rid of only one and that was by threat of impeachment. The thing about this whole theory of government and how it is to be judged – we simply do not want to remember that it is we, in this republic, who are the government.

      1. Of course there’s always the possibility of impeachment or resignation in disgrace (though I’m not particularly fond of any of those in the line of succession). But I was actually thinking about the midterms in 2018 and the election four years hence. I’m optimistic enough to think that this folly will be popularly recognized by then — heaven help us if it isn’t — and the work will begin repairing all the damage done.

        2. Ah, yes. Remove the bad ones by the vote. I had hardly thought of that, being less optimistic than you. I get the feeling after this last one that they will continue making poor choices and as I mentioned, the other method of removal is pretty thin.

        3. Impeachment would be welcome, but wouldn’t it be nice if the dems would embrace Trump’s constituency and give them a better offer? Trump is seemingly doing what he said he would do, but that’s not quite true. He is looking out for the Billionaire class and counting on “trickle down” to placate his angry mobs. That’s not likely to work well. Someone should be ready to pick up the pieces and promise a different approach.

  23. The sad-excuse-for-a-human-being-in-chief just shows himself once more as a narcissistic seven year old. He will implode or be impeached before 2017 is complete. Most likely, he will quit in a rage when his approval rating falls below 20 somewhere around July.

      1. Your reasoning? (The number may be one written in American minds in league-high letters of fire. But for those of us in the RoTW … 3^3 is an interesting number, but not terrible significant compared to (say) 256.

  24. This creature has the very same job that Obama had…
    ‘All politicians are alike’, I have heard someone saying. Yeah, right.

  25. It’s ironic that Trump’s older sister Maryanne Trump Barry is a retired federal judge. One wonders if he also considers her to be a ‘so called’ member of the judiciary.

    It’s hard to fathom how the same family could have spawned so radically different siblings. And they even resemble each other!

  26. hmmm…maybe it won’t take the whole six months I expected for Trump to publically lose it.

  27. “Siren Song” by Margaret Atwood (1974)

    This is the song everyone
    would like to learn: the song
    that is irresistible:

    the song that forces men
    to leap overboard in squadrons
    even though they see the beached skulls

    the song nobody knows
    because anyone who has heard it
    is dead, and the others can’t remember.

    Shall I tell you the secret
    and if I do, will you get me
    out of this bird suit?

    I don’t enjoy it here
    squatting on this island
    looking picturesque and mythical

    with these two feathered maniacs,
    I don’t enjoy singing
    this trio, fatal and valuable.

    I will tell the secret to you,
    to you, only to you.
    Come closer. This song

    is a cry for help: Help me!
    Only you, only you can,
    you are unique

    at last. Alas
    it is a boring song
    but it works every time.

  29. The Twit-in-Chief doesn’t seem to realize that being president of a country is not the same thing as being president of a company – the latter has far more freedom of action, though also far less ability to do large-scale damage. But unless Trump thinks he can both find and place a justice on the Supreme Court who thinks that Marbury v. Madison was wrongly decided, judges are always going to have the last word.

    1. Actually, Marbury didn’t get the job as I recall but the point was made by Marshall and the power of review went to the court.

  30. I am actually enjoying this. People do like him. The only thing these Tw**ts accomplish is to further make the middle ground populists shameful and alienated for supporting him.

    They like what he does. They just thought he would grow out of puberty.

    They like what he stands for. But they hate to see him crawling on the floor like a baby with soiled diapers.

  34. Unseemly? I’m no expert on US law, but from what I learned from “The Good Wife” and other (100% accurate?) law related TV series, there is such a thing as contempt of court and it is kind of a big deal. Does the rule of law not apply to the president?

    1. Stolen from Wikipedia: There are broadly two categories of contempt: being rude or disrespectful to legal authorities in the courtroom, or wilfully failing to obey a court order.

      Telling a judge he sucks in a public forum qualifies as neither.

      1. I do not know what may be the position at federal or state level in the US, however, in England and Wales the crime of “scandalising judges” is still extant. It consists of publishing anything which ridicules the judiciary to the extent that it is likely to bring the administration of justice into disrepute. A similar crime is extant in Scotland and from ancient times has been called “murmering of judges”.

        The last prosecution however seems to have been in 1931. A leading case is from 1900. This related to a journalist describing a judge as “an impudent little man in horsehair, a microcosm of conceit and empty – headedness.”

        Trump has not gone quite that far ——-Yet.

        1. Interestingly, that description most aptly applies to the so-called president. Judicial ethics prevent Judge Robart from commenting on pussygrabber’s character or his appearance.

  35. I am afraid one of these days we will hear from the president about the “so-called” constitution.

  36. America has got it easy. We in the UK have got Trump on top of Brexit. I predict that May will go perfectly mad. One can see it already in her face, which becomes more rigidly mask-like with each passing day.

  37. I was much impressed with the words of the Attorney General and Solicitor General for the State of Washington, both in their statements and responses to questions at the press conference following the decision of Mr Justice Robart. In saying that no one is above the law – not even the President, the Att. Gen. was reiterating the words of Thomas Fuller written in 1733 and directed to the trial of Charles I. – “Be ye never so high the law is above you.”. The same words which were quoted with approval by Lord Denning in the case of Gouriet -v- Union of Post Office Workers [1977] 2WLR, a case involving judicial review of the alleged powers of, and a decision taken by, the Attorney General of England & Wales.

  38. Wonder how long it will be before some foreign leader annoys the idiot and he calls them the ‘so-called President of xxxxx’ ?

    cr

  39. Trump has taken an emergency appeal of Judge Robart’s temporary stay. When the Ninth Circuit denies that emergency request (which it is likely to to do, given the applicable legal standards), will Trump start tweeting insults about “this so-called appellate court”?

    How about when Trump’s next round of emergency requests falls on the desk of Anthony Kennedy, sitting as the “circuit Justice” for the Ninth Circuit. I hope when Justice Kennedy turns Trump down, the Donald starts tweeting insults at him. Kennedy is the swing vote on the Court; Trump could push him a bit further to the left.

  40. Did anyone see the tv show Scandal last week. The president elect was shot and killed i laughed. You know what the writers were thinking .If only

    1. Correction. Not an outright rejection. Further written submissions are to be ingiven by parties by Monday.

      1. I hope the judge asks Justice to provide statistical evidence of harm caused by immigrants and refugees. The actual numbers, for example, of terrorists likely to be among them. If they can only name the small numbers I’ve seen, that should clear the way for a permanent block of the executive order.

        Remember too, Obama issued an order to improve chances for illegals to stay. That was shot down in the courts as well.

  42. Well, and I remember when Obama attacked the Supreme Court to its face during a State Of The Union Address, over Citizens United. But that was different because shut up.

    1. You have chosen a singularly inept example to set against Trump’s outburst. Obama certainy criticised the decision of the Supreme Court in that instance. However, his criticism was measured and at no point did he indulge in any ad hominem attack on any Supreme Court Justice.

      1. … in fact if anyone wanted to point up the difference between Obama and Drumpf, there’s an example right there. Obama had class.

        cr

  43. The Puppet isn’t the problem here, it’s the Puppeteer, Trump is the ideal mouthpiece for Bannon, Bannon loads the Gun and Trump pulls the trigger.

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