Four US States — New York, Washington, Massachusetts and Virginia — are suing President Donald Trump over his executive order suspending immigration of refugees for four months and barring entry of citizens from seven predominantly Muslim nations for three months.
The four States, all with Democratic Governors and Attorney Generals, announced that they would be joining legal challenges separately filed by civil rights groups and individuals against Trump’s “harmful, discriminatory and unconstitutional” action.
New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman called Trump’s order “unconstitutional, unlawful, and fundamentally un-American” and announced that New York State has joined a lawsuit that was originally filed by the American Civil liberties Union. Similar statements were put out by the other three States.
Separately, San Francisco became the first city to sue Trump’s order to withhold federal funding from so-called “sanctuary cities”, even as American tech giants are waging their own battle with the Trump administration. Amazon and Expedia have already filed declarations of support for Washington State’s lawsuit against the Trump order.
legal actions by the four States came even as an unfazed Trump administration continued to defend the executive order and President Trump opened a new front against Democrats on Tuesday by naming a conservative judge to the US Supreme Court.
Trump’s pick, Neil Gorsuch, currently a Denver-based judge of US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, is regarded as someone in the mould of the late Antonin Scalia whose place he would be taking in the apex court, if confirmed by the Senate.
“Judge Gorsuch has a superb intellect, an unparallelled legal education, and a commitment to interpreting the Constitution according to its text. He will make an incredible Justice as soon as the Senate confirms him,” Trump said in his prime-time announcement.
An alumnus of the Harvard law School and Oxford University, the 49-year-old Gorsuch, picked from among a panel of 21 judges that Trump had put out during his presidential campaign, is the youngest person to be nominated for the Supreme Court in a quarter century.
Judge Gorsuch will need 60 votes in the 100-member Senate, where the Republican strength is only 52. Gorsuch will be meeting with a host of Democratic Senators in the coming weeks to persuade and convince them to back him in the confirmation vote.
But the first comments from Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer seemed far from helpful for Gorsuch. Accusing him of having “repeatedly sided with corporations over working people” and “demonstrated a hostility toward women’s rights”, Schumer said: “Make no mistake, Senate Democrats will not simply allow but require an exhaustive, robust, and comprehensive debate on Judge Gorsuch’s fitness to be a Supreme Court Justice.”