President Trump now faces one of his biggest choices so far: Double down on his executive order, which a federal appeals court eviscerated last night as poorly drafted, overly broad and overreaching. Or does he hit pause and come up with tighter, more defensible entrance restrictions for entrance by migrants?

Many legal experts say a more careful executive order could actually stand — that much of the policy behind Trump’s current order is defensible. Rather it was the haste and harshness that undermined it — combined with the mood music of his attacks on the judiciaryn — and his December 2015 call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”