Ordinarily I would not be caught dead reading the 29-page court finding from the Ninth Circuit Court on the travel ban, but a friend of mine was excited about it and made me look at it online with him. I was actually glad he did. He has some business law knowledge and writes contracts occasionally, but this was personal interest. We ended up scanning the entire thing, except the citations.

It is so thorough, and so thoughtful, that I am amazed at that court. This ruling was put together in about 2 days, and it’s just beautiful.

Two things they really emphasized: 1. That people do not have to be citizens to have rights to due process here. And 2. That every action of the executive branch is to be considered reviewable by the judicial branch.

Those two ideas were points Trump tried to crush. Especially this “unreviewable” right of the executive to put bans on immigration. The wording they quoted from Trump’s lawyers made it sound like he thinks he’s the Pope, or king, or something. At one point, his lawyers tried to say that the job of the judicial branch is NOT to interpret what the law is.

The court also made clear that the parties who brought this lawsuit — a couple of U.S. states, and the heads and even professors of numerous universities — definitely had standing to do so. They are interested parties affected profoundly by the ban.

By the end, I was laughing in relief to discover we’re actually a nation of laws.



My friend also started talking about another executive order: the one about tossing out 2 regulations to every new one written. He said this puts the FAA for one in a seriously dangerous position -- and it might be a good idea not to fly now. Every month, the FAA writes and issues approximately 60 new regulations on what they’ve found to be safety problems with aircraft — for instance, say if a type of plane has turbine blades that tend to crack too easily and shouldn’t be flown anymore. The FAA is like the safety-recall agency for aircraft.

As a result of Trump’s EO, NO air-worthiness rules have been written by the FAA since his inauguration.

In other countries, you may see planes crashing for senseless reasons, like that plane (I don't know where it originated) that just crashed in Colombia killing almost everyone, simply because the pilots decided to skip the refueling at their last stop. They ran out of gas. Here, regulations normally prevent this kind of thing.


….Somebody on Reddit had an answer for how to get around this problem of having to get rid of 2 (still-needed) regulations every time you need to write one.

What you do is include those 2 old regulations within the new one. There is no stipulation on what a regulation is, so it can have many parts.