The Supreme Court issued ruling in several cases Friday, including one related to birthright citizenship.
Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images
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Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images
The Supreme Court, on Friday, handed President Trump a major victory, allowing the administration to take steps aimed at implementing its ban on automatic citizenship for all babies born in the United States.
More importantly, the court’s 6-to-3 decision makes it far more difficult to bring a nationwide challenge to other executive orders issued by President Trump or any future president.
Trump, on Friday, hailed the decision as “giant” — a vindication of his plan to bar birthright citizenship for children born in the United States whose parents are not here legally or who are here legally but on a temporary basis.
“Our country should be very proud of the Supreme Court,” the president said in a news conference Friday morning.
Notwithstanding Trump’s celebratory remarks, Friday’s decision took no position on birthright citizenship at all.
Rather, the court’s conservative supermajority granted the administration’s request to curb the ability of lower courts to apply their rulings nationwide, the result being that in most cases, challenges to a presidential executive order will benefit only the individual plaintiffs and groups that bring a case.
Writing for the conservative court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that universal injunctions, which apply a ruling nationwide, were not anticipated by the nation’s founders and have not been authorized by congress.
“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully,” said Barrett, “the answer is not for the court to exceed its power too.”
Writing for the three liberal dissenters, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the president’s executive power “…does not permit him to rewrite the Constitution or statutory provisions at a whim.”
Indeed, both liberal and conservative scholars have said that the text of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution leaves little room for doubt on birthright citizenship, since it explicitly says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
By allowing the Trump policy to continue for now, though, said Sotomayor, the court “endorses the radical proposition that the President is harmed, irreparably whenever he cannot do something that he wants to do, even if what he wants to do is break the law.”
“The real import of the Supreme Court’s decision is less about birthright citizenship policy, which is almost certainly never going to go into effect anywhere in the United States,” says Georgetown Law professor Stephen Vladeck, adding that it will make it “much harder … for plaintiffs in other cases who are trying to challenge other nationwide initiatives of the Trump administration and any future president.”
Justice Barrett’s opinion for the court did leave some loopholes for plaintiffs to use in challenging not just Trump’s birthright citizenship policy, but other policies.
For instance, the opinion said that states can seek universal injunctions, and that citizens can bring class actions on behalf of themselves and others in similar situations.
But, Vladeck called the court’s exception for class actions “ironic,” given that nationwide injunctions became “so popular” after “the Supreme Court in a series of rulings in the 2010s put more and more obstacles in the way of certifying nationwide classes.”
Notwithstanding those difficulties, immigrants rights groups, including one of the organizations that received a nationwide injunction against Trump’s executive order in the lower courts, almost immediately filed a nationwide class action lawsuit challenging the Trump executive order barring birthright citizenship for certain classes of babies born in the United States.
University of Chicago Law professor William Baude said he believes that despite the administration’s win today, Trump’s birthright executive order “is going to be dead one way or another.” Baude, however, sees the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday as “a valuable reset for the ways the courts have been dealing with the Trump administration.”
Other opinions
While the birthright case was certainly the most prominent of Friday’s decisions, the court delivered many more.
The court upheld a provision of the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as Obamacare, that requires most insurers to provide free preventive care without copays.
The justices also upheld the FCC’s longstanding fund authorized by Congress nearly 30 years ago to ensure that people living in rural and underserved areas have access to internet and phone services that are available in big cities.
The court upheld a Texas law that requires anyone seeking online access to sexually explicit material, to provide proof of age, something that adults had objected to as a violation of their First Amendment rights.
And the justices punted to next term an important voting rights case from Louisiana.
Parents can opt out
Finally, the Supreme Court issued a major religion decision about the rights of parents to opt their children out of classes in which material, like schoolbooks with LGBTQ characters, violate their religious beliefs.
At the center of the case was the Montgomery County, Md., school system, the most religiously diverse county in the nation, with 160,000 students of nearly every faith.
A group of parents sued the school board, seeking to opt their elementary school children out of classes because they viewed the material as offensive to their religion. The school system refused, saying that it had tried an opt out program but found it too disruptive.
By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court agreed with the objecting parents. Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said parents challenging the board’s introduction of “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks, along with its decision to bar opt-outs “unconstitutionally burden” the parents’ right to the free exercise of religion.
He said the storybooks conveyed a “normative message” that seeks to separate gender from biological sex, contrary to the parents’ religious beliefs.
Professor Thomas Berg of the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota said he sees the decision as a major advance for religious believers who are required by law to send their children to some school and cannot afford private school.
“If the public school’s the only option,” said Berg, school boards must accommodate “people of different views in public schools.”
But Berg also acknowledges that the court’s opinion on Friday failed to provide much guidance for public school systems as to what age groups must have opt outs and in what circumstances. School boards across the country have allowed kids to opt out of sex education classes, and Maryland is no exception. But beyond that, the Supreme Court provided little guidance for school officials who have long worried about this case.
Sonja Trainor, the executive director of the National School Attorneys Association, concedes that school boards may be loath to use controversial books and materials in class after Friday’s Supreme Court decision.
“I think they will vanillafy but they’re not going to stop teaching,” material like Darwin’s theory of evolution, said Trainor. “They’re not going to stop teaching what they think kids should learn academically.”
