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The Supreme Court issued a shocking ruling today, making it easier for President Donald Trump to overturn birthright citizenship. The way the Court did it was in keeping with its disingenuous strategy of using technicalities that allow it to duck the underlying question.
The substance of Friday’s 6-3 decision, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, involved a challenge to Trump’s executive order denying citizenship to children born in the U.S. to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily. His order violated the 14th Amendment, which clearly holds that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen, regardless of the circumstances.
Immigrant rights groups and 22 states sued, and three different federal district court judges issued universal injunctions barring the administration from enforcing the Trump policy anywhere in the country. The Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to overturn the injunctions.
Today's ruling ducks the underlying constitutional question about the meaning and reach of birthright citizenship, but bars the injunctions from taking effect nationwide and explicitly allows Trump's order to take effect in 30 days. This will only give more cover to ICE raids and deportations. Along the way, the high court overturned the ability of lower courts ever to issue injunctions with national reach.
In a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The gamesmanship in this [Justice Department] request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it. Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along.” Justice Sotomayor added that the ruling “disregards basic principles of equity as well as the long history of injunctive relief granted to nonparties.” In a separate dissenting opinion, Justice Jackson termed the majority decision “an existential threat to the rule of law.”
Trump immediately issued a gloating statement claiming vindication, calling the ruling a “GIANT WIN.” The "Birthright Citizenship Hoax," he wrote "had to do with the babies of slaves (same year!), not the SCAMMING of our Immigration process." And though the Court did not pronounce on that underlying question, the Court's rope-a-dope procedural games only serve to egg Trump on, leaving him free to make more outrageous claims and issue more dictatorial orders.
Using similar gambits, this Supreme Court has used variations on the same arsenal of techniques such as the shadow docket to duck ruling definitively all of Trump's major abuses of executive power, such as illegal impoundment of appropriated funds, intimidation of universities and media that Trump doesn't like based on viewpoint, illegal firing of public employees, illegal deportations, and illegal seizure of data by DOGE. And in the few cases where the court has ruled definitively, such as its 2024 ruling in Trump v. United States that a president or former president is literally above the law and cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed if there is some tenuous connection to his official duties, the Court has gone the wrong way.
Those who have hoped that the Roberts court would serve as a counterweight to Trump will be disappointed again. Chief Justice John Roberts may in some sense be an institutionalist, but he is also a coward. Resistance will need to take more robust forms. |
