A Good Vox piece on the arguments before the case on May 15th…..
The piece points out that despite the media narratives?
The High Court is NOT being asked to rule on COMPLETE Birthright Citizenship….
The Trump side is NOT contesting THAT….
They ARE indirectly going after the over 200 rulings by Federal Judges in separate courts that cover the entire actions by the Trump admin….
The piece points out that against Biden?
That court supported the concept that a judge or court in California could hand up a ruling that stops the Trump Admin from doing something countrywide (Side point?….Trump HAS followed most court rulings in everything EXCEPT Immigration, were Stephen Miller is involved)…
Will the current court change directions for a Republican President?
Oh?
Birthright Citizenship also has money part for the states ….
Funding from Congress for mmany programs ARE based on populations….
Before we dive deeper into the nationwide injunctions issue, it should be noted that the merits of the CASA case are as straightforward as any issue that has reached the Supreme Court in recent memory. Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship is obviously unconstitutional, and there are no good-faith arguments for his position.
On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order that purports to strip citizenship from many babies born in the United States. The order targets children born to undocumented mothers whose fathers were neither citizens nor lawful permanent residents at the time of the child’s birth. It also targets children of fathers with similar immigration status, and mothers who were lawfully, but temporarily, present in the United States when their child was born.
The order does not apply retroactively — by its terms, only babies born 30 days after it was issued would be ineligible for citizenship. Had it applied to adult citizens, however, it would likely denationalize many very prominent Americans, including former Vice President Kamala Harris.
The problem with this order is that the 14th Amendment provides that “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, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.
As the Supreme Court held in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), moreover, the 14th Amendment’s exception for children who are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States is very narrow. The United States has “jurisdiction” over anyone who is bound by its laws — if the US did not have jurisdiction over undocumented immigrants, for example, then it would not be legal to deport them.
Wong Kim Ark explained that there are three classes of people, two of which are still relevant today, who are not subject to US jurisdiction. One is the children “born of alien enemies in hostile occupation.” The other is children of “diplomatic representatives of a foreign state,” who have diplomatic immunity from US law. (The third category is some “children of members of the Indian tribes,” but a 1924 law established that tribal citizens are also US citizens.)
Indeed, it’s worth noting that Trump’s lawyers didn’t even ask the Supreme Court to fully restore his birthright citizenship order — they merely asked the Court to limit the scope of the lower courts’ injunctions so that they only apply to the specific plaintiffs challenging the order. That strategic decision by Trump’s lawyers is unsurprising, because the unconstitutionality of Trump’s order was settled more than 125 years ago in Wong Kim Ark….
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While there is no serious argument that Trump’s birthright citizenship order is legal, there are very serious arguments on both sides of the nationwide injunction question. Gorsuch and Prelogar are correct that, when a single trial judge can set policy for the entire nation, it can needlessly disrupt the federal government’s legitimate activities.
At the same time, a blanket rule against nationwide injunctions would render many court orders worthless. As one of the plaintiffs challenging the birthright citizenship order points out in their brief, the appropriate remedy in a gerrymandering case is that the entire gerrymandered district must be redrawn — not that the individual plaintiffs who brought that case be moved to another district. A more limited order would be unworkable and would impose impossible burdens on election officials who would have to track which voters are plaintiffs in which lawsuits in order to determine which candidates they may vote for.
Similar problems would arise in the birthright citizenship cases if the Supreme Court attempted to limit the injunctions against Trump’s executive order. Two of the plaintiffs challenging that order, CASA, Inc. and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), say that they have “more than 800,000 members, spread across all 50 states.” When an organization secures an injunction against a federal policy, that injunction typically covers every member of that organization…
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Fortunately, the Supreme Court’s current precedents offer a framework that can be used to resolve this tension between giving judges too much power to set national policy and forcing them to draw arbitrary lines that needlessly burden both the plaintiffs and the government. As the Court said in Califano v. Yamaski (1979), the ordinary rule is that “injunctive relief should be no more burdensome to the defendant than necessary to provide complete relief to the plaintiffs.”
In many cases, Califano will preclude nationwide injunctions. But, in the birthright citizenship cases, it’s hard to see how anything other than a nationwide injunction could suffice. CASA and ASAP members won’t receive complete relief if they are constantly having to prove their membership (or their parents’ membership) in one of these two organizations to obtain the benefits of citizenship, including the right to be free from deportation. And states can’t administer programs like Medicaid, where eligibility often turns on a beneficiary’s immigration status, if they can’t tell who is or is not a citizen.
It’s worth acknowledging one additional wrinkle in this case, which the Court could decide to take up at the May 15 argument. The Trump administration claims that the state plaintiffs aren’t entitled to any relief at all because they lack “standing” — the requirement that a litigant show that they were injured in some way by the defendant they are suing before bringing a federal lawsuit.
But the states have a very strong argument that they have standing to challenge the birthright citizenship order. As one bloc of states explains in their brief, many federal programs tie funding to the number of citizens within a particular state, so states will lose money if the birthright citizenship order goes into effect. Loss of funding is one of the most common ways to establish standing to bring a federal lawsuit…..
More…
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