As Written By Jazz Shaw for Hotair:

To say that the Trump announcement got people talking last night would be an understatement in the extreme. (Our own readers expended a lot of energy on that subject through the wee hours of the morning.) We provided most of the political fallout throughout the evening, but I found myself pondering the mechanics of the question. I had a brief Twitter exchange on the subject with Jim Geraghty of National Review, who had asked if anyone was even arguing that it was constitutional. Jim was citing the First Amendment’s Religion Clause and the Article VI “No Religious Test” provisions. (At least in spirit.) Well, you know me. I love a good argument on such things no matter how you might feel about the policy itself so it was time for some reading. This wasn’t a question of would you institute such a ban quite so much as one of…could you?

More than a few cable news talkers rapidly declared that it was either “illegal” or “would be struck down by the Supreme Court.” MSNBC quickly came up with a constitutional opinion from Laurence Tribe, but you can assign whatever value you wish to that. Tribe’s arguments ran essentially along the same lines as Geraghty’s, but we still seemed to be missing some key documentation. Where is the precedent in the courts or the history of laws to guide those opinions? Sure, it might sound wrong to propose such a thing, (depending who you ask) but we need to be able to back it up on paper.

KEEP READING, IT GET’S INTO SERIOUS DETAIL!