Posted on 06/26/2018 1:56:40 PM PDT by NRx
The Supreme Court just quietly overturned a decision that upheld the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as part of a ruling upholding President Donald Trump's controversial travel ban that primarily targets majority-Muslim countries.
During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which led the US government to force more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent into detention camps.
The decision overruled by the Supreme Court on Tuesday, Korematsu v. United States, was centered around a man named Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American who refused to comply with the order. On December 18, 1944, the Supreme Court ruled it was a "military necessity" to detain people of Japanese descent during the war and argued the order was not based on race.
Chief Justice John Roberts made it clear he disagrees with this assessment in the majority opinion on Trump's travel ban.
"The forcible relocation of US citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority," Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.
"Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and — to be clear — 'has no place in law under the Constitution,'" Roberts added.
This was partially in response to the dissenting opinion from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which contended the ruling on Trump's travel ban has "stark parallels" with the "reasoning" behind the decision made regarding Korematsu.
"Today, the Court takes the important step of finally overruling Korematsu," Sotomayor added. "This formal repudiation of a shameful precedent is laudable and long overdue. But it does not make the majority's decision here acceptable or right."
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Once again, can we all agree: "Trump’s order is NOT a 'TRAVEL BAN'? It is an INVASION BAN order.
This issue is not "travel". The issue is invasion. This is a most basic constitutional issue that mandates the federal government stop invasion.
The United States...shall protect each [state] against invasion
U.S. Const. art. IV, sec. 4.
Trump's argument is first and foremost a Constitutional argument, not a federal statute argument. Illegal immigration and immigration of our enemies are INVASION which the Constitution specifically mandates the federal government to prevent. Don't repeat the Lying Leftists Labels. This is about an Invasion Ban Order.
“solely and explicitly on the basis of race”... Not an apt characterization.
But, whatever. War is hell.
Of course the clear and stark difference between the internment of US CITIZENS of Japanese descent and prevention of travel by Foreigner to the US is completely ignore by our supposed “best and brightest”
Is Reuters worried that President Trump is about to round-up Japanese-Americans? My grandmother, an immigrant from Germany, was spied on by the FBI for several months. We were in a total war.
“This formal repudiation of a shameful precedent is laudable and long overdue”
Another Democrat policy bites the dust.
Good, but there’s something many don’t know:
Riiiight before the attack on Pearl Harbor, many of the very last Japanese coded cables to diplomatic posts abroad centered on follow-up attacks on the US defense industrial base.
On WHOM do you think Japan was relying..?
Certainly not on the average Japanese-American and also not on MOST Japanese-Americans.
But do you really think ZERO of them were amenable to such plans..?
THAT was the cause of the internment —not, as multiculturalists would have you believe, needless cruelty.
OF COURSE (and this feels super weird to defend the FBI) the FBI couldn’t openly explain WHY they were internning them.
The US breaking of the Japanese codes was a very, very tightly held secret.
Openly explaining there was a tiny contingent of Japanese immigrants willing to attack CONUS targets would have induced a change in Japanese cryptography, and we would have lost key insight into the enemy.
The internment absolutely IS a black-eye for US democracy but there actually WAS a good, if secret, reason for it.
“Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American”
Equating an American citizen with foreigners who have no status is the kind of race baiting nonsense the left and Soto are all to happy to engage in.
“On WHOM do you think Japan was relying..?”
I agree with you. There is MUCH MORE to the story of Japanese internment during WW2 than the Left allows us to know.
They have re-written the history of that, and sadly far too many people REALLY understand the conditions back then.
Paging Mr Sulu, You’re wanted on the bridge
These are supposed to be smart people on the bench of SCOTUS, so this not so smart guy wants to know how the Japanese can be considered victims of racial targeting when in fact it was not their race, but their land of origin that was the catalyst for the unfortunate decision for internment?
I disagree, easily said now some 70 years later with the internment of the Americans of Japanese descent, but I take issue with the cause being racial when in fact it was due their land of familial origin.
What’s done is done now, so onward, and hopefully upward.
I left out:
The readability of the Japanese codes to key US leaders was not instant, not by a mile.
There was a backlog, sometimes weeks, even a month or more.
The key bottleneck was translation.
After the Pearl Habor attack, with 3,000 Americans dead and a good portion of the Pacific Fleet sunk, of course the US interest in exactly WHAT THE HELL was in the intercepted but backlogged Japanese cables on Dec 4th, 5th and 6th sky-rocketed.
They focused monomanically on that raw material, more quickly translating and picking through it and the truth was laid bare:
There WERE going to be attacks on CONUS targets.
Naturally the US leadership was happy to have the American public assume that plain old vengeance played a role in the Internment Decision —they didn’t wish to compromise their cryptographic sources and methods.
Most of the recent generations can’t even comprehend what total war means.
Gratuitous virtue signalling. Korematsu is long dead or very old. What judges think of the case now is moot, unless another country attacks the US and there are second and third generation citizens whose forebears came from that country, whom the military wants to intern as enemy aliens.
Thank you for the link, that is an excellent book, and I have read it.
To this day —my guess is that even 100 years from now— most US decision makers do NOT want to read that book or even (publicly) discuss its content.
A lot of people not yet alive during that time would somehow feel accused.
Far under 1% of the US population know the important truths in that book.
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