There is much quoting from the inscription on the Statue of Liberty this week, but it cannot be heard too often in light of the Trump ban on immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

An across-the-board ban on immigrants from Muslim countries, many of them refugees, may be Donald Trump's way but it is not the American way.

Nor is it the American way to be thankless, as in the case of blocking Hameed Khalid Darweesh, an Iraqi who interpreted for United States forces during the invasion in 2003, from entering the country Friday.

The bumbling, Friday-afternoon rollout of the presidential order ignored American standards of decency. It complicated law enforcement by federal, state and local authorities and effectively made airlines into agents of the U.S. government by putting them in the position of refusing their customers access to flights for which they were already booked.

The bull in the china shop is the president himself, whose haste to sign the order looks suspiciously like a move to hog the news cycle and divert attention from other developments, notably his appointment of his chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, to the National Security Council Principals Committee. On Saturday Trump also ordered that the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were to attend only those NSC meetings "where issues pertinent to their responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed."

Americans, unsurprisingly, rose up in protest to the immigration ban Friday and all weekend long. On Monday, Democrats in Congress, including Connecticut's Chris Murphy and Joe Courtney, castigated the move.

Courtney, the 2nd District congressman and member of the House Armed Services Committee, spoke from the floor of the House of Representatives, and Murphy offered a bill to withhold funding for the order and declare it illegal under the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.

But it wasn't only Democrats. Sen. John McCain said on his Facebook page that the ban was not properly vetted, as demonstrated by the chaos at the airports, and that the government should not be stopping interpreters who risked their lives in working with American forces.

Murphy's bill has a contingent of solely Democratic co-sponsors, so it may be doomed. But that bill, or something like it that congressional Republicans could support, would make a fine first response by Congress to the barrage of executive orders being shot off by the White House.

For now, the Department of Homeland Security has clarified that holders of "green cards," non-citizens who legally reside in the United States and come from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen, are not blocked by the ban. Holders of H-1B visas — the work visa that has covered many employees of Pfizer, Google and other giant multinational corporations — who come from those countries and want to re-enter the U.S. remain blocked.

Altogether, last Friday and Saturday, the new president reformatted the National Security Council by downgrading two top intelligence officials and putting a political aide on the roster; bullied the president of Mexico out of a meeting; and ordered the immigration ban that has prompted lawsuits, civil protests and at least one bill that would declare it illegal. That's a frightening combination; who will be at the NSC meeting that floats the next antagonistic, isolationist, even racist plan? Who will talk sense to power?

Remember who we are, Mr. Trump. This is the face America has presented to the world since the gift of the people of France in 1886, the Statue of Liberty ("Liberty Enlightening the World"): 

The New Colossus 

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, 

With conquering limbs astride from land to land; 

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand 

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame 

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name 

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand 

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command 

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. 

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she 

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, 

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, 

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"