WASHINGTON — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., reading for the majority on Tuesday morning, spoke clinically. Justice Stephen G. Breyer followed, working his way through his dissent mildly and analytically. Then it was Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s turn. Steely and unwavering, she began: “The United States of America is a nation built upon the promise of religious liberty. Our founders honored that core promise by embedding the principle of religious neutrality in the First Amendment.” The crowded courthouse fell silent. In upholding President Trump’s ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries, Justice Sotomayor continued, the Supreme Court had failed to “safeguard that fundamental principle.” For the next 20 minutes, she remained resolute as she delivered an extraordinarily scorching dissent, skewering the court’s decision and condemning the ban as “harrowing” and “motivated by hostility and animus toward the Muslim faith.”<doc-sep>Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a member of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing, admonished her colleagues on the right in a striking dissent from the court's decision to uphold President Trump Donald TrumpTrump lashes out after grand jury seated for New York criminal probe Schumer tees up vote on Jan. 6 commission bill Senators struggle to save Jan. 6 commission MORE’s travel ban. ADVERTISEMENT In a scathing dissent on Tuesday, Sotomayor said the court’s majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, blindly accepted the government’s misguided invitation to set aside problematic comments Trump made before and after taking office. “Ultimately, what began as a policy explicitly ‘calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ has since morphed into a ‘Proclamation’ putatively based on national-security concerns,” she said. “But this new window dressing cannot conceal an unassailable fact: the words of the President and his advisers create the strong perception that the Proclamation is contaminated by impermissible discriminatory animus against Islam and its followers.” Sotomayor described in detail how Trump pledged on the campaign trail to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. and then criticized the Department of Justice for submitting a “watered down, politically correct version” after the president's first order was struck down by the courts after he took office. “People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” Trump tweeted last June. Sotomayor also said Trump has never disavowed any of his prior statements about Islam. “Instead, he has continued to make remarks that a reasonable observer would view as an unrelenting attack on the Muslim religion and its followers,” she said. “Given President Trump’s failure to correct the reasonable perception of his apparent hostility toward the Islamic faith, it is unsurprising that the President’s lawyers have, at every step in the lower courts, failed in their attempts to launder the Proclamation of its discriminatory taint." But in upholding the ban in a 5-4 ruling, Roberts said there was persuasive evidence that ban had a legitimate grounding in national security concerns and the court must accept that independent justification. The ban, now in its third iteration, restricts nationals from five majority Muslim countries — Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen — from traveling to the U.S. Chad was also originally included, but the White House decided to drop it from the list in April.<doc-sep>Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor chided her colleagues on the nation’s highest court for what she viewed as a double standard in their decisions on the travel ban and a baker who refused to serve gay couples. In a dissent joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sotomayor noted that the court decided in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission on June 4 that a Colorado bakery owner was improperly treated by a state commission after a member said the baker had used “despicable” rhetoric about gays and lesbians. But she noted that the court’s conservatives did not find a similar problem with Trump’s own words about Muslims and the travel ban his Administration put in place. “Unlike in Masterpiece, where the majority considered the state commissioners’ statements about religion to be persuasive evidence of unconstitutional government action, the majority here completely sets aside the President’s charged statements about Muslims as irrelevant,” she wrote. The Masterpiece case involved a same-sex couple that requested Masterpiece Cakeshop bake a cake for the couple’s upcoming wedding. The owner of the shop, Jack C. Phillips, declined to do so on the grounds that baking a wedding cake for a same-sex marriage would violate his religious beliefs. The court decided, in a 7-2 vote, that Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s conduct in evaluating Phillips’ reasoning for not making the wedding cake violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion. Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor also dissented in that case. In January of 2017, President Trump issued an executive order banning citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries into the United States for 90 days. It also served as an indefinite pause on entry into the country by Syrian refugees. The state of Hawaii, three of its residents, and a Muslim-American group challenged this iteration of the executive order, claiming that it was implicitly based on religious prejudice. They argued that the proclamation improperly singled out Muslims, violating constitutional protections against discrimination. While campaigning for president, Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims coming into the United States, argued that “Islam hates us” and regularly cited a fake and discredited story about a U.S. general shooting Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood. The Supreme Court’s 5-4 majority opinion found that the president has broad powers to make decisions on national security grounds and that the travel ban was narrowly written enough that it did not run afoul of the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of religion. “The Court must consider not only the statements of a particular President, but also the authority of the Presidency itself,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts. Correction: June 26 The original version of this story misstated the name of the Supreme Court case. It is Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, not Masterpiece Bakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Get our Politics Newsletter. The headlines out of Washington never seem to slow. Subscribe to The D.C. Brief to make sense of what matters most. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check the box if you do not wish to receive promotional offers via email from TIME. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Abby Vesoulis at abby.vesoulis@time.com.<doc-sep>(CNN) — Chief Justice John Roberts treated Donald Trump as if he were any other president. Impossible, responded Justice Sonia Sotomayor. As the 5-4 conservative majority of the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s travel ban on nationals from certain majority-Muslim countries, the nine justices implicitly revealed for the first time how they regard a commander in chief who repeatedly insulted Muslims and more broadly has mocked the rule of law and constitutional norms. At bottom, five conservative justices signaled that even though they might not like what Trump has said, they will look past it – in Tuesday’s case and possibly in future disputes over administration actions related to immigration. “This is an act that could have been taken by any other president,” Roberts said from the center chair of the bench on Tuesday. Roberts wanted to make clear that the majority was not ignoring Trump’s anti-Muslim remarks, but concluded that they lacked legal significance. Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, acknowledged that Roberts’ opinion recounted some of Trump’s inflammatory statements. But, she declared, that “does not tell even half of the story.” One of the most dramatic moments in the courtroom came as Sotomayor paused after reading aloud a litany of Trump remarks, including “Islam hates us” and “we’re having trouble with Muslims coming into the country,” “Take a brief moment,” she said, “and let the gravity of those statements sink in.” She said such hostility was not expressed by just anyone; it was the man who is now President. “Our Constitution demands, and our country deserves,” Sotomayor said in her written opinion, “a judiciary willing to hold the coordinate branches to account when they defy our most sacred legal commitments.” Her message: Trump is so unconventional he cannot be treated conventionally. Roberts was unconvinced. Suggesting a degree of normalcy that dissenters simply would not adopt, the chief justice referred to prior presidents’ orders suspending the entry of certain foreigners, including a proclamation involving Cuban nationals by President Ronald Reagan, for whom Roberts worked in the 1980s. In fact, Roberts said, Trump’s 12-page order is more detailed that prior presidential orders. Trump had tried and failed twice before with more broadly written orders, including one that came a week into his presidency. And Roberts noted but swept away a Trump tweet a year ago this month that asserted: “The Justice Department should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down politically correct version they submitted to S.C.” Trump’s history of fighting with judges Since his days as a candidate, Trump has tangled publicly with judges, as when in May 2016 he derided US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, hearing a lawsuit against Trump University, for his “Mexican” heritage and claimed he was being “railroaded” in the litigation. Regarding the travel ban specifically, Trump referred in February 2017 to US District Judge James Robart, of Washington state, as a “so-called judge” and described his order temporarily blocking the travel ban “ridiculous.” As the ban in various forms headed toward the Supreme Court, lower court judges declared it discriminatory and pointed to Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric. The ban, in its third iteration, now targets five Muslim-majority countries, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, as well as North Korea and Venezuela. RELATED: These numbers help explain Trump’s travel ban, and how it could play in November Supreme Court justices watched as this played out and, overall, kept quiet about how they regarded Trump’s inflammatory remarks, whether on immigration or other aspects of the rule of law and due process. As late as Monday, the President asserted that immigrants at the border are owed no due process and should be summarily deported without any hearing to determine if they deserved asylum or were US citizens wrongly apprehended. On Tuesday, the justices’ assessments of Trump emerged. Roberts said that presidents possess “extraordinary power to speak” to the public. Roberts referred to statements by Presidents George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower rejecting religious bigotry, with tacit negative implication to Trump. Roberts noted that those challenging the travel ban believe Trump’s statements violate the spirit of such tolerance and, ultimately, the Constitution’s protection for religious liberty. “But the issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements,” Roberts wrote, joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. “We must consider not only the statements of a particular president,” Roberts said, “but the authority of the presidency itself.” Kennedy shows his hand The conservatives are not necessarily of the same mind on Trump, however. Kennedy wrote a two-page concurring statement that went beyond the travel ban and targeted statements that might not be subject to judicial scrutiny – but that matter. “An anxious world must know that our Government remains committed always to the liberties the Constitution seeks to preserve and protect,” Kennedy wrote, “so that freedom extends outward, and lasts.” Kennedy may have been looking to future Trump actions as he referred to the oath that presidents take to uphold the Constitution – an oath that Roberts administered to Trump on January 20, 2017. “The oath is not confined to those spheres in which the judiciary can correct or even comment upon what those officials say or do,” Kennedy wrote. “Indeed,” he added, “the very fact that an official may have broad discretion, discretion free from judicial scrutiny, makes it all the more imperative for him or her to adhere to the Constitution and to its meaning and its promise.” RELATED: ‘What happened to us should never happen again’: Japanese-American protesters weigh in on travel ruling<doc-sep>
As the Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump's travel ban by a margin of 5-4 on Tuesday, it was two of its female justices—Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg—who provided the harshest critiques of both the ruling and the policy itself. As a refresher, this version of the travel ban (the administration's third) restricts entry into the United States from seven countries, many of which have majority Muslim populations: Iran, North Korea, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Venezuela. The rules for entry vary by country. For example, immigrants (even those seeking asylum) and nonimmigrants from Syria are barred from entering the country, but most Venezuelans will be unaffected. (Per CNN, the ban will mostly affect government officials from that country.) Citizens from banned countries are able to apply for waivers on a case-by-case basis, like traveling to the U.S. for medical treatment, or to visit a close family member. But The Guardian reports that there are a very limited number of waivers actually being granted. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent, boldly stated that the court failed to uphold the fundamental right of freedom of religion in her opening remarks. "The United States of America is a nation built upon the promise of religious liberty," she wrote. "Our founders honored that core promise by embedding the principle of religious neutrality in the First Amendment. The Court’s decision today fails to safeguard that fundamental principle." She continues by calling the ban one that is designed to keep Muslims out of the country and calls out attempts to repackage it. "It leaves undisturbed a policy first advertised openly and unequivocally as a 'total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States' because the policy now masquerades behind a facade of national-security concerns." Sotomayor calls out fellow justices in the majority saying they are "turning a blind eye to the pain and suffering the proclamation inflicts upon countless families and individuals, many of whom are United States citizens." And the justices were not afraid to mention the President directly in their formal dissent. “Ultimately, what began as a policy explicitly ‘calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ has since morphed into a ‘proclamation’ putatively based on national-security concerns,” the dissent reads. “But this new window dressing cannot conceal an unassailable fact: The words of the President and his advisers create the strong perception that the proclamation is contaminated by impermissible discriminatory animus against Islam and its followers.” Sotomayor did not shy away from noting the instances of Trump calling the policy a "travel ban" and his negative remarks about Islam and Muslims. "Despite several opportunities to do so, President Trump has never disavowed any of his prior statements about Islam. Instead, he has continued to make remarks that a reasonable observer would view as an unrelenting attack on the Muslim religion and its followers.” "History will not look kindly on the court's decision today—nor should it," Sotomayor concluded. While many applauded the justices' passion in calling out the bigotry in the policy and ruling, The New York Times classified Sotomayor as having "lashed out" against President Trump in a tweet—and Twitter users were not happy about it. You can read the full dissent here. Related Stories: The Hypocrisy in the Supreme Court's Backing of California's Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers What Does That Supreme Court 'Narrow Ruling' on the Same-Sex Wedding Cake Case Really Mean?