Supreme Court grants cert to sub-frivolous appeal
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Normally, the Supreme Court does not decide questions like “can Wyoming declare itself to have 30 senators?” or “can a 3-year-old be elected President of the United States,” but those were different times:
Last January, when Reagan-appointed Judge John Coughenour became the first federal judge to block President Donald Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship, he did not mince words. “I’ve been on the bench for over four decades,” Coughenour said. “I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”
Coughenour was the first judge to reach this conclusion, but he was hardly the last. In the last 11 months, numerous judges have reached the only conclusion that the Constitution’s text permits: Donald Trump does not have the power to strip Americans who are born in this country of their citizenship.
The Supreme Court took its sweet time before deciding to take up this issue, but, on Friday, the Court finally announced that it would hear Trump v. Barbara, a case asking whether the Constitution permits Trump to unilaterally denationalize Americans born in the United States. If the justices are capable of behaving in a nonpartisan manner, Trump will lose this case 9-0.
On the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order purporting to strip citizenship from some newborn Americans. The order, entitled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” claimed to remove citizenship from two classes of Americans. The first is children born to undocumented mothers whose fathers are not citizens or lawful permanent residents of the United States. The second is children with fathers who have similar immigration status and whose mothers were lawfully but temporarily present in the US at the time of birth.
There are few questions in US law that are more settled than the question of whether babies born in the United States are citizens of this country. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the nation ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. Its first line is, “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.”
“All persons” means all persons. That includes people with undocumented mothers or whose parents otherwise have an immigration status that Donald Trump does not like.
My guess is that this will be a rare Trump L. But I also think the minimum number of votes Trump can count on is three, and I don’t think five or six can be ruled out by any means.