The obscure doctrine that could save Trump's travel ban

The plenary power doctrine gives the president sweeping powers to disregard the Constitution when setting immigration policy

Protests against Trump's travel ban went global.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Last week, a federal judge in Hawaii refused to lift his block on President Trump's revised travel ban. The reason he refused, he said, was because the legal challenge against the ban — which will surely reach the Supreme Court — has a "strong" likelihood of succeeding. But this may be overly optimistic, thanks to the lingering hold of something called the plenary power doctrine, which gives the president and Congress sweeping powers to set immigration policy without regard to the Constitution's usual checks.

If there were ever a case crying for this doctrine to be thrown out, Trump's travel ban would surely be it. The national security rationale that the administration is offering to justify its ban is so pathetically weak that the Supreme Court justices will have to suspend a lot of disbelief to swallow it.

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.