‘Manchester’: The Missing Word in the Fourth Circuit’s Ruling

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit refused Thursday to overturn fully a lower court ruling that blocked President Donald Trump’s new executive order suspending travel from several terror-prone countries.

The opinion and dissents cover 205 pages. (The list of supporting briefs from left-wing organizations takes up two pages by itself.) But amidst the arguments, there is a key word missing from the entire document: “Manchester.”

The opinion of the court was clearly written before Monday evening’s horrific terror attack. And while court rulings do not generally follow current events, the way those rulings are received by the public is affected by the context.

The Manchester attack makes the case for Trump’s executive order. True, the terrorist was a British citizen, and so he would not have been stopped by a similar executive order, had one hypothetically existed the United Kingdom.

However, the bomber had traveled to Syria and Libya, two of the countries identified by the order as places where terror is rampant and whose governments lack the ability to vouch for their citizens at foreign ports of entry.

The fact that those countries were relevant to the Manchester attacks boosts the administration’s argument that it needs to review its procedures for screening foreigners from terror-prone countries to prevent enemies from infiltrating.

What the Fourth Circuit’s decision essentially says is that President Donald Trump is uniquely unable to make any decisions on immigration policy because of things he said about Muslim and Islam during the 2016 campaign.

In other words, the judiciary wants to disarm America in the face of a spreading global threat. The timing could not have been worse, and this decision is likely to provoke more of a public backlash than any that have preceded it.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.