A divided Supreme Court on Friday ruled that individual judges lack the authority to grant nationwide injunctions, but the decision left unclear the fate of President Donald Trump’s restrictions on birthright citizenship.
The outcome was a victory for the Republican president, who has complained about individual judges throwing up obstacles to his agenda.
But a conservative majority left open the possibility that the birthright citizenship changes could remain blocked nationwide. Trump’s order would deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of people who are in the country illegally.
The cases now return to lower courts, where judges will have to decide how to tailor their orders to comply with the high court ruling, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion.
The justices agreed with the Trump administration, as well as President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration before it, that judges are overreaching by issuing orders that apply to everyone instead of just the parties before the court.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The court’s decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the government to bypass the Constitution.” This is so, Sotomayor said, because the administration may be able to enforce a policy even when it has been challenged and found to be unconstitutional by a lower court.
Birthright citizenship automatically makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers in the country illegally. The right was enshrined soon after the Civil War in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
In a notable Supreme Court decision from 1898, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the court held that the only children who did not automatically receive U.S. citizenship upon being born on U.S. soil were the children of diplomats, who have allegiance to another government; enemies present in the U.S. during hostile occupation; those born on foreign ships; and those born to members of sovereign Native American tribes.
The U.S. is among about 30 countries where birthright citizenship — the principle of jus soli or “right of the soil” — is applied. Most are in the Americas, and Canada and Mexico are among them.
Trump and his supporters have argued that there should be tougher standards for becoming an American citizen, which he called “a priceless and profound gift” in the executive order he signed on his first day in office.
The Trump administration has asserted that children of noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, a phrase used in the amendment, and therefore are not entitled to citizenship.
But states, immigrants and rights groups that have sued to block the executive order have accused the administration of trying to unsettle the broader understanding of birthright citizenship that has been accepted since the amendment’s adoption.
Judges have uniformly ruled against the administration.
The Justice Department had argued that individual judges lack the power to give nationwide effect to their rulings.
The Trump administration instead wanted the justices to allow Trump’s plan to go into effect for everyone except the handful of people and groups that sued. Failing that, the administration argued that the plan could remain blocked for now in the 22 states that sued. New Hampshire is covered by a separate order that is not at issue in this case.
As a further fallback, the administration asked “at a minimum” to be allowed to make public announcements about how it plans to carry out the policy if it eventually is allowed to take effect.
(AP)
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6 Responses
So the Supreme Court won’t deal with hypothetical questions. That’s not a hiddush.
The question will probably be litigated when, and if, a state refuses to issue a birth certificate to a child with alien parents (and since this is governed by state law, it will be the child suing the state in the state court). If that doesn’t happen, the test case will be the child (probably of deported alien parents) suing the State Department to issue a passport.
Trump’s position is weak as far as wannabee immigrants, but stronger for transients, tourists, and perhaps foreign students who are in the US with no intention of staying.
This is an incredibly bad decision by the supreme court. Their decision says that a lower court can’t issue a nationwide injunction only to the parties in the suit until the case is worked up the chain to the supreme court, even if it’s clearly an unconstitutional executive order or law.
So this means a democratic president can sign an executive order that shuls are banned, and unless every single shul sued, they would be in violation of the law until the supreme court heard the case and ruled, the same thing goes for an executive order against gun ownership, every single person would need to sue to keep their guns. Just bad news. Once again, Republicans thinking short sightedly and opening the door for Democrats to use the same rules.
Bisimcha: If there were an executive order (or a statute) banning all shuls, each shul, or perhaps association of shul’s in a given state (or federal district) would sue, and one get a restraining order applicable to that shul. If you got an order in Boro Park, it wouldn’t apply to Baltimore, and vice versa. — Trump’s order has several problems, one of which is that the only time one’s citizenship is litigated is in a deportation proceeding, an immigration case, or the application for a passport. Given the order only claims to affect those born after the order was issued, it might be a while for there to be an actual case. — Also, based on a well established precedent it is clear that a child born to a permanent resident is a citizen, but less in situations that didn’t exist 150 years ago, e.g. a baby born while the mother is flying over the United States such as from Mexico to Canada, a tourist on a day trip, a tourist of any sort with no intention of staying).
The issue litigated in this case was not birthright. Birthright was just used to litigate universal injunctions. The issue as I understand it is that universal – nationwide – injunctions did not exist in the country for at least the first 100-150Y. Then they became a thing in the relatively recent past. Now every judge and his uncle is doing it. It means that any federal judge is now the executive and legislature. Any individual judge can create national law. The liberal judges said “you don’t have an example of this being blocked the first 100 y of the country so it’s legal.” The conservative six said “you are idiots. The reason we don’t have an example is because NO ONE DID IT for at least the first century of the USA; there is no precedent for it.
In fact the majority opinion EXPLICITLY wrote in its opinion that Jackson is an idiot and doesn’t understand law. I’m serious. I don’t think that’s ever happened before. It was a major atomic bomb of an attack that the entire majority signed off on.
From Ace:
“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”
— SCOTUS majority opinion today
The full passage is worth the read. Amy Coney Barret calls Ketanji Jackson-Brown dumb, in so many words, incapable of reading, understanding, and applying the law, simply acting like a panelist on The View popping off about what she thinks the law should be while complaining about the “legalese” in the law.
She doesn’t seem to grasp that “legalese” is what makes up the law. She seems to dismiss it because she can’t follow it.
Now, for a layman, this is understandable. Laymen don’t understand legalese and are impatient with it.
But this is, allegedly, a Supreme Court Justice. Shouldn’t the “legalese” and “dry technical arguments” (as she dismisses all legal reasoning) be of some concern to her?
The insanity of this ruling is that it allows the President to unilaterally suspend what has long been accepted as a constitutional right and what has been determined by several district court judges to be an unconstitutional action to remain in effect for the year or two that it will take to get a merits decision from SCOTUS. So when a Democratic President in 2029 decides to confiscate all automatic weapons from gunowners, they will have to individually litigate the matter (or seek to be affirmed as part of a class) while the newly empowered ATF goes door-to-door collecting weapons while the litigation works its way through the lower courts