Here's something you don't see every day and may not see ever again.
Oral arguments are set to begin at the Supreme Court this week where Trump regime lawyers will be defending Trump's Muslim travel ban, but this case is far from ordinary.
Trump's solicitor general has a unique problem on his hands; he must convince the court to ignore what the president himself has said.
The justices will consider how much weight to give to Mr. Trump’s campaign statements. And they will act in the shadow of their own decision in Korematsu v. United States, which endorsed Roosevelt’s 1942 [Japanese internment] order and is almost universally viewed as a shameful mistake.
The Justice Department has worked hard to limit the damage from Mr. Trump’s campaign statements, which were often extemporaneous and rambling. It was hard to tell, for instance, precisely which Roosevelt policies Mr. Trump referred to or endorsed in his 2015 remarks.
“Impugning the official objective of a formal national security and foreign policy judgment of the president based on campaign trail statements is inappropriate and fraught with intractable difficulties,” Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco told the justices in a brief filed in February.
The solicitor general is apparently going to argue that no one can be sure what the hell the "president" is talking about at any given moment and I suppose there's a kernel of truth to that.
If there is another case in the historical record of government lawyers arguing in front of the Supreme Court -- or any court -- that they should ignore what the president has said, or that the president doesn't understand the words coming out of his own mouth, I am unfamiliar with it.
I have no idea how the court will rule in this case, but I have no doubt that plaintiffs challenging Trump's ban will present a much better argument than the solicitor general.
This is the last case the Supreme Court will hear during their current session. The next session will not begin until October.