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Hillary Clinton Reacts To Travel Ban Ruling

Former presidential nominee is back, y'all. Sure, she's not shouting her opinions from the rooftops and making the rounds of the talk show circuit. But she's speaking up when she needs to — softly, calmly, and intelligently. Look no further than Clinton's response to the travel ban ruling for a little schooling on the underrated art of the subtle burn.

President Trump's efforts to obtain a temporary restraining order that would allow the government time to reinstate his controversial travel ban was denied on Thursday. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals came to a unanimous decision not to reinstate the 90-day travel ban Trump had imposed on seven Muslim-majority countries, which include Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Lybia, and Somalia. The ban also intended to restrict all refugees from entering the country for 120 days, and looked to bar refugees from the war torn country of Syria indefinitely.

The original ruling by U.S. District Court Judge James Robart to suspend the ban was attacked by the Justice Department, which insisted that the decision would "harm the public" and accused the judicial system of "second-guessing the President's national security judgment," according to CNN. On Thursday, the aforementioned president (whose judgment we are apparently meant to trust implicitly) took to Twitter to throw a tantrum:

Clinton, in turn, shared this brilliant bit of Trump-baiting:

The "3-0" refers, of course, to the unanimous decision by the judges, who were not taken in by Justice Department lawyer August Flentje's argument that the president was well within his rights. "This judgment was well within the president’s power as delegated to him by Congress and it is constitutional as the court in Boston … recently held," he had attempted to argue.

Flentje was referring to an earlier ruling by U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton not to extend a temporary injunction against Trump's executive order. It was a matter of hours before Judge Robart of Seattle moved forward with suspending the travel ban on Friday.

The three-judge panel in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the latter ruling unanimously on Thursday. The panel disagreed with the Justice Department's assertion that the court lacked the authority to review the president's executive order:

There is no precedent to support this claimed unreviewability, which runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy.

Clearly, Hillary Clinton (a former lawyer herself) agreed. And now we wait for Trump to be "baited with a tweet", as Clinton once famously noted during her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.

This isn't the first time Clinton has spoken out against Trump's unconventional (and unconstitutional) travel ban either. In a tweet following the initial executive order back in January, Clinton wrote, "I stand with the people gathered across the country tonight defending our values & our Constitution. This is not who we are."

Not only did she tweet that she "stands with people gathered across the country tonight," Clinton also linked to two stories (one about famed Gold Star father Khizr Khan) pointing to the valuable contributions Muslims have made in the United States.

It was a classy move, and while some detractors will no doubt use her tweets as ammunition, for tonight, let's just enjoy a subtle victory — and the return of the subtle burn.