The Justices Aren’t Buying Trump’s Attack on Birthright Citizenship |
The Justices Aren’t Buying Trump’s Attack on Birthright Citizenship
A clear majority of the Supreme Court on Wednesday was unimpressed by the president’s attempt to reinterpret the Constitution.
The Supreme Court appears ready to reject Donald Trump’s war on birthright citizenship. During oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara on Wednesday, most of the justices—including at least two of the president’s own appointees—ranged from skeptical to hostile toward the government’s case.
Solicitor General John Sauer, arguing for the administration, invoked the purported dangers of birth tourism, at one point, to illustrate the government’s case for limiting citizenship for newborns. “Based on Chinese media reports, there are 500 birth tourism companies in the People’s Republic of China, whose business is to bring people here to give birth and return to that nation,” he claimed, without real evidence.
“Having said all that,” Chief Justice John Roberts asked him, “you do agree that that has no impact on the legal analysis before us?” Sauer countered that the prevailing interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause had consequences that its “nineteenth-century framers” could not have imagined. He suggested that “we live in a world now … where eight billion people are just one plane ride away from having a child who is a U.S. citizen.”
Roberts sounded unmoved. “Well, it’s a new world, but it’s the same Constitution,” he replied. His blunt skepticism confirmed that there was no clear pathway for Trump, who attended the arguments, to obtain five votes in his favor in this particular case—in part because siding with the president would require the conservative justices to fully abandon their devotion to an originalist reading of our founding document.
Wednesday’s case centers an executive order targeting birthright citizenship that Trump signed the day he was inaugurated last year. It instructed executive branch officials to not “issue” documents recognizing U.S. citizenship or “accept” documents from state and local officials in certain cases. The order specifically targeted children born to parents in the United States on temporary visas or as undocumented immigrants.
Federal courts blocked the government from implementing the order almost immediately, with one judge describing it as “blatantly unconstitutional.” The Supreme Court sided with Trump last year to rule that plaintiffs could not seek nationwide injunctions against the administration, but it did not address the merits of his effort to rewrite birthright citizenship.
The Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause is fairly straightforward: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” For more than 150 years after........