David Bennett

Remember the back and forth over the legality of President Trump’s travel ban?

Trump said it was not a travel ban that targeted muslims but a ban that targeted countries that might send people who posed a risk to the USA.

No one bought that argument because of what he had said previously and because the countries affected were Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, North Korea, and Venezuela – most of which are countries with majority muslim populations.

Courts ruled against the legality of the ban, and the Trump Administration re-crafted the wording. Courts ruled against that and the Trump Administration re-crafted the wording of the ban again. It is that third iteration that went before the Supreme Court.

What happened in the end?

The Supreme Court first decided that it would proceed as though it had jurisdiction to decide the case even though the granting of visas are matters of sovereignty, and might therefore be seen as being beyond review.

To me that reads like a decision to trundle along and see whether they hit any bumps in the road to their substantive decision. In the end they rule with the Administration, which is unlikely to challenge their jurisdiction, so the court gets home safe and dry.

The substantive decision:

In a 5–4 decision the Supreme Court ruled that the third iteration of the travel ban does not exceed the president’s authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act and that ban does not violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.

A win for the Administration.

The dissenting voices said that whatever the wording of the ban, when viewed together with what was spoken about by the President and the Administration about the intent of President Trump’s travel ban, it was clearly not about security but about religion.

The question for me is what the practical consequences have been? What is actually happening in terms of who can and cannot get into the country and in terms of who is trying or no longer trying to get in?

Here are a couple of observations about the weather and Brexit.

Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, said in his speech on 5th July that a full blown trade war was likely to hit the USA harder than it would any of the countries upon which tariffs were imposed.

He said that

the US economy is growing robustly, momentum has faded a little in the euro area and, more markedly, in some emerging market economies.

He also said that

The softness of UK activity in the first quarter was largely due to the weather, not the economic climate. A number of indicators of household spending and sentiment have bounced back strongly from what increasingly appears to have been erratic weakness in Q1.

Now we have a heatwave in the UK, so we shall very quickly see whether there is an uptick in Q2. That will show whether his analysis is right or whether he has to think of another reason why the economy does not pick up.

If he is right and the economy does pick up, it will be bad for last ditch efforts to reverse Brexit.

I remember my wife Tamara telling me on the morning of the UK referendum on leaving the EU ‘It is raining in London’. There was particularly heavy rain that day, some flooding in parts. It deterred people from voting.

My wife feared the result and predicted the result. London was and is a Remain stronghold. In a referendum, where every vote counts, those lost votes in London were crucial.

The weather and Brexit: Is the weather in charge of UK politics?