This is a bit of relevant news that may have been overshadowed on Saturday, due to President Trump’s latest Twitter controversy.
On Monday, Trump is expected to sign a new, revised travel ban executive order.
The order was supposedly slated for last Wednesday, but due to the warm reaction to his address to the joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, he chose to delay the signing. According to staff, Trump wanted the signing to have its own “moment.”
From CNN:
Sources told CNN that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster have all advocated for Iraq to be removed from the administration’s list of banned countries in the new executive order for diplomatic reasons, including Iraq’s role in fighting ISIS. Homeland Security Secretary James Kelly also supported the move, but it remains unclear whether the White House has made a final decision on the issue.
Two sources told CNN they expected that the President will revoke the original travel ban despite repeated statements from White House press secretary Sean Spicer that the new executive order would co-exist with the old one on a “dual track.”
Judge James Robart, the same judge who temporarily put a halt to certain key aspects of Trump’s first version of the travel ban, has also granted the administration a two-week extension to respond to a federal class action lawsuit, brought on by the ban.
Said Robart, in a written statement:
[T]he court will continue to rely on the representations of the government’s attorneys, as officers of the court, which indicate that the new Executive Order will ‘rescind,’ ‘replace,’ ‘supersed[e],’ and ‘substantially revise[]’ the existing Executive Order,” Robart wrote in his decision.
I doubt there is little about the revised ban that will satisfy those who have already deemed it wrong to put any limitations on entry to the nation, since so little of it has to do with the actual purpose of the ban, but rather, partisan politics.
Somewhere out there today, a printer is furiously fabricating the signs for the next “spontaneous” airport protests.
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