Nearly 18 months after President Trump rolled out the first of his clumsy, hamfisted attempts to disguise in legalese the implementation of his campaign promise to prevent Muslim people from entering the United States, the Supreme Court upheld the administration's Muslim ban in a 5-4 decision released on Tuesday morning. The majority opinion in Trump v. Hawaii, authored by Chief Justice Roberts, concludes that since the directive's authors were smart enough to call the ban something other than "Donald Trump's Official Muslim Ban No Burqas Allowed Woo-Hoo," it is therefore a lawful exercise of executive authority and cannot be overruled by judicial fiat.

[B]ecause there is persuasive evidence that the entry suspension has a legitimate grounding in national security concerns, quite apart from any religious hostility, we must accept that independent justification.

The Proclamation is expressly premised on legitimate purposes: preventing entry of nationals who cannot be adequately vetted and inducing other nations to improve their practices. The text says nothing about religion.

As Justice Sotomayor notes in her dissent, just a few weeks after finding in its Masterpiece Cakeshop decision that a few stray comments from members of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission constituted clear evidence of bias against the cakeshop owner's sincerely-held religious beliefs, the majority here decides that then-candidate Trump's explicit calls for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" are legally irrelevant.

The Hawaii decision makes 15 cases this term decided by the Court's most common five-justice conservative bloc: Kennedy, the traditional "swing vote," and then Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch. These result is a grim reminder that the Court's newest justice holds that title only because Mitch McConnell shredded whatever scraps of integrity remained in his body in order to steal an appointment from President Obama—and, when Senate Democrats objected to Gorsuch's nomination on substantive grounds, disposed of some of the same hallowed Senate "norms" he had used to justify his craven power grab in the first place.

Gorsuch's confirmation was the result of a massive, long-shot bet by the majority leader, who—reasoning he would have nothing to lose if Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election—held out hope for a Republican victory and refused to even grant Merrick Garland, President Obama's centrist nominee to replace the late Justice Scalia, the courtesy of a confirmation hearing. For McConnell, Trump's unexpected win yielded not only a Supreme Court pick, but also the ability to gift vacant federal judgeships to a new generation of conservative jurists who also enjoy lifetime tenure. (This landscape came about, of course, because he had prevented President Obama from filling those vacancies, too.) The country will be dealing with the consequences of his outrageous stunt for decades to come.

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Who knows, of course, how a hypothetical Justice Garland would have ruled in any particular case. But given how consistently Gorsuch has sided with the Court's furthest-right members, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that at least some of its decisions this term to excuse racial gerrymanders, and to uphold state voter-roll purge laws that have a disproportionate impact on minorities, and to back the dishonest practices of anti-choice organizations—and, now, to empower the president's unapologetic bigotry—might have come out differently with Garland occupying the seat that is rightfully his. The same people who went all-in on their willingness to ignore the law have been rewarded with the ability to shape it.