The Supreme Court Appears Poised to Bless Trump’s Travel Ban

“What if the military advisers tell the president that, in their judgment, the president ought to order a strike, an air strike against Syria,” Chief Justice John Roberts asked Neal Katyal from the bench on Wednesday, “does that mean he can’t because you would regard that as discrimination against a majority-Muslim country?”

Katyal, a former acting solicitor general and one of the most formidable appellate lawyers in America, was, as ever, unflappable. “I don’t think there’s any immigration issue in your hypothetical. I might be misunderstanding it, Mr. Chief Justice,” he said.

In a normal world, Roberts’s question would be bizarre. Immigration law and the war power are distinct. But in the strange twilight world of 21st-century America, it made a certain twisted sense. Nearly 17 years after Congress responded to the 9/11 attacks with an Authorization