– Badtux the Chocolate-lovin’ Penguin
]]>Unless the FBI can come up with a ‘plot’ by refugees and immigrants from the affected nations to blow up Ghirardelli Square, the Ninth en banc won’t bet on the DoJ winning, I wouldn’t guarantee that Kennedy wouldn’t vote against the government on this case, So, Supremes 4-4 best case, 5-4 probable. Looks like Drumpf will get shut out by the courts, who want real facts, not ‘alternate facts’.
If the Supremes tie, the Ninth Circuit’s finding stands.
]]>Basically, the DoJ lawyer attempted to make arguments about evidence that was not briefed or submitted for the record at the circuit court level. Appeals courts don’t work that way. They examine the evidence on record, they don’t go looking for new evidence. If it’s not on record then as far as they’re concerned it doesn’t exist. The appeals court seemed unimpressed when the DoJ lawyer told them he hadn’t had time yet to submit that evidence to the trial judge, pointing out that it was the DoJ lawyer who chose the time for the appeal of the stay / preliminary injunction, not the trial judge, and it was his responsibility to have entered that evidence before appealing. I listened to the entire 1 hour podcast of the hearing and just shook my head as time after time the DoJ lawyer was just totally flummoxed upon basic things like this being pointed out to him. The appeals court was *not* impressed. They sounded a bit annoyed, actually, by the time they were finished with him, like “why are you wasting our time with this crap when you haven’t even done the minimal preliminary homework to make this worth our while?”. They went pretty hard on the State of Washington lawyer too, but they didn’t sound like they were annoyed with him, they were just pressing him on whether he had his shit together. He did.
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