President Trump’s “Muslim ban,” the focus of so much Left hysteria, is dead for the time being, after the hard-Left 9th Circuit Court of Appeals struck it down. What is odd, however, in their ruling is that it never even mentions the relevant law by which Trump claims the authority to limit immigration in the first place. Here it is:

(f) Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President

Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.

Despite the fact that the appeals court ignored this law, it is the core of the whole controversy turns on this law. It’s hard to see how any Presidential action restricting immigration can be overruled in light of it, as it specifies that “whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States,” he can “suspend the entry of _all aliens or any class of aliens._”

President Trump knows this, and tweeted about it Friday morning: “LAWFARE: ‘Remarkably, in the entire opinion, the panel did not bother even to cite this (the) statute.’ A disgraceful decision!”

The quote within the President’s tweet comes from Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, who also noted in an article on the ruling that on the vital question of the ban being necessary for national security, the decision spends “spends only one sentence and one brief footnote.” Wittes, however, took issue with Trump’s quoting him to support his opposition to the ruling, and tweeted: “You decide whether the POTUS is quoting me in context. Here’s the article. For the record, I support the decision.”

Very well. Let’s decide. In the first place, Wittes’ affiliation with the Brookings Institution calls his motives into question, as Brookings’ funding from Qatar has turned it into an apologist for jihad terror, with jihadi preachers and Islamic supremacists frequently featured and lauded at its events, including Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the internationally renowned Muslim preacher who has praised Hitler and expressed the hope that Muslims would finish his work of killing Jews.

Second, Wittes notes that the decision omitted all discussion of the relevant law, but then brushes that aside not on legal, but on pragmatic grounds: “The Ninth Circuit is correct to leave the TRO in place, in my view, for the simple reason that there is no cause to plunge the country into turmoil again while the courts address the merits of these matters over the next few weeks.” He also opposes Trump’s executive order because he attributes malign motives to the President himself, referring to the “incompetent malevolence with which this order was promulgated.”

Incompetent is arguable, but malevolence? President Trump and everyone around him has been consistent: this ban is, from first to last, about national security. For the Left, apparently now even any concern for national security is inherently malevolent. Shortly before the appeals court’s ruling, the Trump administration released a list of terrorism cases involving suspects from the seven countries included in his temporary suspension of immigration: Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Libya.

This list gave the lie to the claim of Judge James Robart of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington state, who ruled against Trump’s ban earlier; Robart had claimed that no one from the seven countries on the ban list had been involved in terror activity inside the United States.

Robart’s false claim and the bizarre omission of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals show that the opponents of Trump’s plan to restrict immigration in the name of national security care about as much about the facts as they do about protecting Americans. These nakedly political rulings should not and must not stand, both for national security reasons and for the health and sanity of our judicial system going forward.