Jeff Sessions dismisses Hawaii as 'an island in the Pacific'

(Image credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

published 20 April 2017

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is apparently flabbergasted a federal judge from "an island in the Pacific" — also known as Hawaii — had the right to block President Trump's executive orders temporarily banning immigration from several Muslim majority nations. "I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power," Sessions said during an interview Wednesday night on The Mark Levin Show.

Hawaii might be more than 4,000 miles away from Sessions' home state of Alabama, but it's certainly still on the map as a U.S. state. That means that, yes, the sitting federal judge who serves in that Hawaiian district court has the same constitutional right as federal judges in other states to push back on executive branch powers as part of that whole separate but equal branches of government thing.