Summary
A third federal judge, Joseph N. Laplante, blocked Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants.
His ruling follows similar decisions from judges in Seattle and Maryland.
The lawsuits, led by the ACLU, argue Trump’s order violates the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to nearly all born on U.S. soil.
The Trump administration contends such children are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. Legal battles continue, with appeals underway and further rulings expected in other courts.
So I guess they’re targeting lawsuits in multiple federal districts, in hopes that having consistent rulings across the districts will appeal to the SCOTUS thin concern of legitimacy and they’ll either refuse an appeal or uphold the lower court rulings against Trump?
The second the Supreme Court rules a section of the constitution that is in plain language is invalid will throw out what little credibility they had left. And will lead to states ignoring them entirely. It’s not gonna be a pretty decade.
They already disregarded the 14th amendment last year when they ruled that Colorado and other states couldn’t keep an insurrectionist of the ballot.
I seem to remember those decisions were made during the primaries and were not retried for the general election. Honestly not sure though.
They basically said it wasn’t up to a state to decide if someone could run for a federal office. Instead it would require an act of Congress.
Which was odd, since the amendment says that Congress can act to override the decision to bar an insurrectionist running for office.
So yeah, this court has shown they are all about intentionally misinterpreting the 14th amendment. They won’t save us from the worst of MAGA.
I swear they’re going to argue the founders themselves misinterpreted the language of the constitution and the amendments are all invalid and no longer applicable.
That’s what I’m thinking regarding the locations the law suits are being filed in. Traditionally (I know, didn’t matter with Roe) one predictor if SCOTUS will take an appeal is if there are conflicting rulings being made in different states/districts.
More or less, yes. When the circuits are in agreement, it’s still not binding on SCOTUS, but traditionally it’s been powerfully persuasive. If they can get a similar ruling out of the 5th or 11th, then even for this court it’s likely game over, eventually. The gross thing is the cruelty and uncertainty of the Trumpian attitude towards the rule of law, which is simply, “I know what it says. Fuck it. Make 'em sue me.” It’s in bad faith and erodes the simple, predictable functioning of government, to say nothing of, y’know, being directed towards evil ends.
SCOTUS is very conservative and increasingly activist about it, but Roberts in particular doesn’t like being dragged through the political mud and he can usually prevail upon Kavanaugh or Barrett to be less crazy for a day. Roe was a special case in that it extended the legal idea of the “penumbra,” which was by definition fuzzy, and I learned about attacks on the idea over twenty years ago, so the Democrats bear a certain amount of blame for not spending some political capital at some point to ensconce it in statute, if not in an Amendment (which admittedly may have been a bridge too far). It was always a bit fragile. RBG also did her legacy no favors by being short-sighted about how her successor would be selected.
Anyway, all the “But dis iz whut it sez!” reasoning from the Second Amendment cases mostly works against MAGA here. The idea that you’re not subject to America’s laws because you broke one of them when entering the country is pretty absurd, and that concept only works in a context of international law. It was meant for Diplomats and their families with immunity, and for Female troops or officially-employed camp followers of another nation’s invading army (operating on the assumption here that “traditional” war pregnancies will involve mothers who are subject to the jurisdiction of the US) - also Native Americans, but we “fixed” that in 1924 at least. There was no significant bar to immigration at the federal level when the 14th amendment was drafted, but super racist senators explicitly whined that Chinese immigrants’ kids would become citizens, and others said, “Yeah? And?” Add in various court decisions over the decades since that have clarified who is and isn’t subject to jurisdiction, and it should be a settled question. There’s a dissent here and there, and an occasional whinge from the right, but there is very little for an “Originalist” court to complain about here, at least legitimately.