Supreme Court Paves Way for Trump Mission to End Birthright Citizenship

President Donald Trump has said that he is “promptly” moving forward in ending the constitutional right of birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court paved the way for him to do so in a wide-ranging ruling on Friday that grants Trump enormous power.

In a 6-3 ruling on Friday, the Supreme Court drastically narrowed the circumstances where a judge can impose a nationwide injunction against a policy. This allows Trump to move forward with steps to implement and enforce his executive order seeking to redefine the birthright citizenship clause in the 14th Amendment and effectively end the practice — a move that legal scholars and the liberal justices in the Court have said is nakedly unconstitutional.

In a press conference after the ruling, Trump celebrated the ruling as a “monumental victory.” He thanked the Supreme Court.

“We can now properly file to proceed with these numerous policies and those that have been wrongly enjoined, including birthright citizenship,” Trump said.

However, the Supreme Court’s order has far wider implications. It effectively overturns the judiciary’s ability to stop Trump from implementing a huge range of policies.

This could not only affect orders against Trump’s birthright citizenship order, but in numerous other cases where judges have halted Trump’s actions — effectively giving the executive branch the power to make decisions without checks from the judiciary.

Indeed, Trump said during his press conference that he is now going to move forward with other policies that have been blocked by judges, which he called “excessive.” He specifically named ending funding for sanctuary cities; shutting down refugee resettlement; ending funding for gender affirming care; and “freezing unnecessary funding,” without specifying what he means.

Trump’s birthright citizenship order had been blocked by judges in three cases, but the administration can now move forward with enforcing its order in other states where the cases didn’t take place, or even within those states. Rights groups have already filed in court seeking to challenge the ruling.

The Supreme Court did not rule specifically on birthright citizenship; the administration has focused on attacking nationwide injunctions in its court arguments, perhaps knowing that the birthright citizenship order specifically could fail.

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, indeed, that the Court’s conservative majority only ruled on injunctions because they knew that overturning birthright citizenship would be unconstitutional.

“The Government does not ask for complete stays of the injunctions, as it ordinarily does before this Court. Why? The answer is obvious: To get such relief, the Government would have to show that the Order is likely constitutional, an impossible task in light of the Constitution’s text, history, this Court’s precedents, federal law, and Executive Branch practice,” she said.

“So the Government instead tries its hand at a different game. It asks this Court to hold that, no matter how illegal a law or policy, courts can never simply tell the Executive to stop enforcing it against anyone,” Sotomayor went on. “The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it. Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along.”

She warned of the “new legal regime” created by the Court’s decision; analysts have long warned that the Trump administration’s end game in this and numerous other rulings is to consolidate all power into the executive branch, to establish a dictatorship or otherwise authoritarian rule.