CONRAD BLACK: Trump Cannot Lose the Travel Ban Fight.

The President should not have referred to Judge Robart as a “so-called judge,” but the whole business is a frame-up. The Democrats must have had in the back of their minds the hope that Mr. Trump would impetuously ignore Judge Robart’s order, as President Jackson famously invited Chief Justice Marshall to try to enforce a decision of his Supreme Court.

This would have enabled them to start already on the line they are bursting with impatience to raise — that this was grounds for impeachment. This too would be nonsense, but it would help them to ratchet up the righteous obstruction and start agitating for the complete immobilization of this unconstitutional billionaire megalomaniac who was assaulting constitutional propriety.

Instead, Mr. Trump has been more compliant than necessary, and gone through the charade of appealing to the notoriously flaky and leftist Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, and will probably have to go on to the Supreme Court, which could entangle this issue with the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacancy on that court.

Mr. Trump will get the political credit for trying to safeguard the country whether he is sustained or not, but can be almost a bystander between the raving Democrats and a serious Court when the issue arrives at one.

Whatever its actual utility proves to be (and leaving aside what even Black describes was a “botched” rollout), the travel moratorium is a popular and easy-to-understand issue, with the President at his most reasonable on one side of it, and a bunch of screeching and weeping Democrats on the other.