Federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii who blocked President Donald Trump's revised travel ban overstepped their bounds by using his campaign rhetoric to justify their rulings, Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz said Saturday, and what's more, he thinks the Supreme Court will uphold the ban.
"I'm putting my reputation on the line," Dershowitz told Fox News in a morning interview. "I predict if the case gets to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court will uphold the major provisions of this ban."
That's because the ban blocks focus more on campaign rhetoric than constitutional law, Dershowitz continued.
"Focusing so heavily on campaign rhetoric and essentially saying, 'look, if Obama had issued the very same order with it would be constitutional, but if Trump issues it it's unconstitutional because he said some things about Muslims in the run-up to the campaign or Rudy Giuliani said some things and other people said some things,' that's not the way the law is supposed to operate," Dershowitz explained.
Dershowitz said he believes the Justice Department under Trump is "getting smart," as it is not filing its appeals to the Ninth Circuit court district, where it will likely get an adverse ruling, but to the Fourth Circuit, a "much more conservative court" that would be more likely to uphold the travel ban.
And if the case makes it to the Supreme Court, Trump will likely win his case, as the vote would be split 4-4, said Dershowitz.
Meanwhile, Dershowitz said he believes the courts, in ruling against both of Trump's travel bans, are performing psychoanalysis, not constitutional analysis.
"There is precedent in extreme cases, where legislators in an in enacting a statute say things that you can look to the legislative intent," said Dershowitz. "I have never heard of a case where the rhetoric of a candidate, ambiguous rhetoric to be sure."
He also said he does not believe the ban is a Muslim ban, but rather focuses on countries like Iran, "the greatest exporter of terrorism."
"Not only no vetting, but it sends terrorists out in order to kill Americans," said Dershowitz. "Iran has so much blood on its hands of Americans and American allies, to exclude a country like Iran from the list would be absurd."
The list of countries that are excluded came from President Barack Obama originally, Dershowitz continued, so "how can you say that the inclusion of the six countries on the list was motivated by what Mr. Trump said when he was [still] candidate Trump? That's just not good legal analysis."
Dershowitz, a lifelong Democrat, on Saturday also responded to comments made by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for The New York Times Magazine about the future of the Democratic Party.
In the article, he says there are some in the party who want to maintain the status quo and that "they would rather go down with the Titanic so long as they have first-class seats."
The party does not stand for Sanders, Dershowitz responded.
"Sanders, first of all, was never a Democrat," he said."He was an independent and a socialist. He is not the mainstream of the Democratic Party. And if the Democratic Party moves left towards Sanders, toward [Rep.] Keith Ellison, it's doomed."
Instead, the party needs to regain support from Middle America in the Rust Belt states, said Dershowitz, and he'd refer to the states not as the "status quo" but as the "vibrant center."
"I want to return America to the center where good conservatives and good liberals, centrists, can argue with each other and get the radicals, the extreme leftists like Sanders marginalized along with the extreme rightist like the alt right," said Dershowitz. "Let's bring the debate back to the center."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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