Lawsuits have been percolating over President Trump’s unprecedented attempt to undermine birthright citizenship since the beginning of his second term, but it took until Friday for the Supreme Court to announce that it will hear the case on the merits.
A previous iteration of the fight over Trump’s executive order — that would deprive the children of “temporary visitors” and “illegal aliens” of automatic citizenship if they’re born in the United States — had reached the Court already, although the Court did not rule on the actual question of whether Trump’s order complied with the Constitution. As a result of that case, in June, the Court dramatically narrowed district courts’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions, the method by which multiple federal judges had blocked the new birthright citizenship policy from going into effect.
That order left the door open to class action lawsuits as a means of challenging the policy, which the ACLU used after the summer ruling. Now the Court will decide whether the policy violates the Citizenship Clause — “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” — and the law that codifies it.
The Court has yet to announce a date for oral argument.
It will be a significant test of the right-wing justices’ loyalty to the president. The theory, once fringe, has permeated conservative legal thought in the Trump era.
Well, that’s one way to get rid of a wife without paying out the prenup, right Donnie.
The photo of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh looking adoringly at DJT makes me want to vomit. Whatever happened to fidelity to the U.S. Constitution, strict construction interpretations, and the rule of law??
Tragic that there is even a suggestion that this isn’t a fucking slam dunk.
That the Court will even hear this matter scares me.
I posted this in a previous SCOTUS thread, but the message works better here.
Birthright citizenship is common in the New World (Canada, US, Mexico, Central and South America, and Caribbean nations). This fact is intimately related to the origin of these nations as they overthrew their colonial masters and abolished slavery. There are obvious reasons why New World nations did this; in particular to encourage growth, integrate diverse populations, and build national unity. Reasons that the Old World nation did not need (who would want foreigners coming into centuries old nations disrupting their culture?).
Astonishingly the NYT, in its story about SCOTUS taking up the 14th amendment review at Trump’s request to limit birthright citizenship, misinforms its readers that birthright citizenship is not common in developed nations. I am suspecting Trump’s DOJ sent a fax to the NYT with this misinformation in order to justify Trump’s position. The NYT editor was then too lazy to do a simple AI query about birthright citizenship in the world.
From the NYT story as originally published