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Dori: SCOTUS travel ban decision a smack-down for Bob Ferguson

Jun 26, 2018, 8:03 PM | Updated: Jun 27, 2018, 10:22 am

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Attorney General Bob Ferguson, left, speaks as Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, center, and Solicitor General Noah Purcell look on. (AP file Photo/Elaine Thompson)

(AP file Photo/Elaine Thompson)

Isn’t it a wild coincidence that the day the United States Supreme Court delivered quite the smack-down to Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson is the first time in months he can’t find a microphone? He is apparently off on a family camping trip and is unavailable for comment.

For months now, Ferguson has been bragging about the five, 10, 27 lawsuits that he has filed against the Trump administration. The latest one is getting national attention. It was a lawsuit filed by Hawaii against the Trump administration over the 2016 travel ban.

As you know, President Trump promised during the campaign to work on national security. And so, he took several countries — countries that had been identified by the Obama administration as the prime sponsor nations of terrorism — and decided to do more extensive vetting before allowing people from these nations into this country. The countries currently on the ban list are Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, and Venezuela.

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So Ferguson and Gov. Jay Inslee need attention. Jay Inslee wants to run for president in 2020 and Ferguson wants to be governor. They claimed this was an unconstitutional “Muslim ban.” (Although some of the most populous Muslim nations, such as Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, were not on the list.) They went to the most overturned court in the country, the radically leftist Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The court used the things that Trump said on the campaign trail — where there is always an awful lot of hyperbole by every candidate — as a reason to strike down the travel ban.

It went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, on Tuesday, upheld the travel ban as constitutional (5-4). I had talked to legal experts on the show who told me that Ferguson didn’t stand a chance, and further said that it is a bizarre decision to take words that a candidate said on the campaign trail and use them to strike down a travel ban months later.

Inslee is whining and crying about this, blasting it as racist. He called the Supreme Court’s decision “abhorrent” and said the justices are “turning a blind eye” to “our country’s constitutional protection against discrimination.”

It’s obvious that Donald Trump has prevailed over the grandstanding of Bob Ferguson’s 27 lawsuits. I think it’s good news that the President of the United States is able to heighten vetting of people who come to the United States from the world’s primary terrorism-sponsoring countries. That’s a victory by the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Dori: SCOTUS travel ban decision a smack-down for Bob Ferguson