This Could Be the Year the Supreme Court Pushes Back on Trump |
There will be no shortage of major legal cases and rulings at the Supreme Court in 2026. The ones we already know about will touch upon topics ranging from tariffs to the structure of federal agencies to Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments. At the core of many of these cases, however, will be one simple question: How much power should Donald Trump have? Up until now, the Roberts court’s rulings have suggested that there aren’t many appreciable limits to Trump’s presidential privilege in his second term. Those boundaries might finally be in sight.
By far the most important Supreme Court case of the year will be Trump v. Barbara. At issue will be the meaning of Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause—and, more specifically, whether the president can unilaterally refuse to recognize birthright citizenship.
The amendment’s drafters wrote the clause in 1869 to overturn Dred Scott v. Sandford, to indisputably confirm the citizenship of formerly enslaved Americans, and to remove future questions of U.S. citizenship from the political sphere. To that end, the constitutional language is sweeping and definitive: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
For roughly a century and a half, all three branches of the federal government have interpreted it to apply to anyone born on U.S. soil, except for children of foreign diplomats, who aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States because they have diplomatic immunity. Many Native Americans were also previously excluded, but the closing of the frontier and the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 eliminated that exception.
Trump and his allies want to change that long-settled meaning. The White House issued an executive order last January that instructed federal agencies to refuse to recognize the U.S. citizenship of the future children of certain groups of noncitizens. Lower........