John Yoo quoted by Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2017
I think the new order will withstand judicial scrutiny. Because it grants admission to all existing visa holders and permanent resident aliens, it is difficult to see who has standing to challenge this order
John Yoo quoted by The New York Times, Feb. 20, 2017
Mr. Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, recalled with amusement a dinner last summer with a dozen Claremonters at a Philadelphia restaurant famous for singing waiters …. “Between arias, I had to listen to these very distinguished scholars go on about the great intellectual virtues of Donald Trump,” he said. “It was hard to keep down my wonderful Sicilian meal.”
John Yoo quoted by Los Angeles Times, Feb. 16, 2017
“Then the only people harmed by the order would be outside the U.S., and the Supreme Court has said people outside the country don’t have constitutional rights,” said Yoo. … “The class of people who would be harmed are not the people who have legal rights to sue,” he said.
John Yoo quoted by The Gazette, Feb. 14, 2017
“The idea of looking at motive has never really been applied to the president,” said John Yoo. … “It would represent a serious expansion of judicial oversight of what the president and the entire executive branch does.”
John Yoo co-writes for The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 12, 2017
Questioning judicial decisions, and even the judiciary’s legitimacy, is entirely proper. But a wise president will reserve such attacks for extraordinary matters of state involving the highest constitutional principles. To do otherwise risks dissipating the executive’s energy, weakening the president’s agenda, and wasting his political capital.
John Yoo quoted by Chicago Tribune, Feb. 12, 2017
“Simple murder is not a violation of federal law,” he said. “I don’t think the conditions in Chicago have any relationship to federal law.” The only way Chicago’s situation could possibly fall under the Insurrection Act, Yoo said, is if the murders also violated some aspect of federal law, such as acts committed by drug cartels or terrorists.
John Yoo interviewed by WSJ Video: Opinion Journal, Feb. 10, 2017
Essentially, all the Ninth Circuit did was refuse to block a lower trial court judge’s decision that we have to suspend the order so that people aren’t harmed, while the courts take a longer, more normal, deliberate look.”
John Yoo quoted by Las Vegas Review-Journal, Feb. 9, 2017
“They should have lost. The order was done badly,” University of California at Berkeley law professor and former Bush attorney John C. Yoo agreed. “The government badly defended it in court by claiming the 9th Circuit couldn’t even review the executive order.” Yoo called the ruling “a rebuke.”
John Yoo quoted by Los Angeles Times, Feb. 9, 2017
The inclusion of green-card holders in the travel ban doomed it legally, Yoo said, and the Supreme Court rarely agrees to hear such emergency appeals in any case.
John Yoo quoted by Los Angeles Times, Feb. 9, 2017
Yoo said the 9th Circuit ruling was on less solid ground on other issues: whether the states had standing to sue and whether visa holders had a right to a hearing before their visas were canceled. The administration lost because “it rushed out this order in an ill-considered and haphazard way,” the conservative legal scholar said. A “more cautious, more modest” executive order would have survived legal scrutiny, he said.