Trump Tried to Intimidate the Judges Over His Ban, and He Failed

“Make this one out of cast-iron,” the late Judge John Butzner said to me one day in chambers. “There are going to be a lot of weasels sniffing around it.”

I was Butzner’s clerk. He was assigning me to draft an opinion in a case on an abstruse point of federal law. No court had ever decided this particular question—and a lot of money was riding on the answer. Some judges on the Fourth Circuit would object to the result his panel had reached. Once Butzner’s opinion was published, they might try to persuade the other judges to rehear the case “en banc”—meaning on a bench including all members of the Circuit.

It was a high-stress assignment, even though he gave me all the time I needed.

Imagine the atmosphere in chambers this week as three Ninth Circuit judges and their clerks worked frantically to produce an opinion in the case testing the constitutionality of President Trump’sbanning refugees from around the  world, and all visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries.