The Supreme Court and Trump: From Birthright to Presidential Power

0:05Today, on the final day of its term, the Supreme Court handed down a major ruling on birthright citizenship. The headline today is that the Supreme Court resoundingly rejected one of Donald Trump's most aggressive policy moves, his bid to curtail birthright citizenship. That's our colleague James Ramoser. He covers the Supreme Court. And why is this decision so important? Well, it's really important because if Trump had succeeded in ending the deep-rooted understanding of birthright citizenship, it would have transformed what it means to be a citizen in America. and it would have jeopardized the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of future children born on American soil to undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors.

1:00And it's quite a note to end on for this term. But when you look back on the Supreme Court term, which goes all the way back to October of last year, how would you describe it in a couple of words? In a couple of words. A couple of sentences? Frankly, it's one of the most historic and consequential terms that the Supreme Court has had in decades.

1:27The court's docket was dominated by really significant Trump-related disputes. The court weighed in on Trump's global tariffs program. It weighed in on his bid to exert control over formerly independent agencies. And finally today, in its last opinion of the term before the justices rose for their summer recess, it ruled on birthright citizenship.

1:56Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Tuesday, June 30th.

2:09coming up on the show a monumental term at the supreme court

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3:59Birthright citizenship is the idea that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen. It's enshrined as a right in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, under what's called the Citizenship Clause. The Citizenship Clause says, quote, All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States. This clause gave citizenship to formerly enslaved people after the Civil War. And it's come to shape who gets to be an American, anyone born here, no matter where their parents are from. But today, with more immigrants coming into the U.S.

4:38illegally, President Trump and other conservatives have grown louder in their calls to rethink birthright citizenship. And what Trump and his supporters say is that the guarantee of birthright citizenship essentially attracts illegal immigration. They call this the concept of birth tourism. They say that immigrants come to the United States without authorization. They come here illegally for the purpose of having children here, knowing that their children will be automatically entitled to citizenship. And on his first day in office, Trump took action on it right away. He signed an executive order limiting birthright citizenship only to children born to U.S.

5:22citizens. Almost immediately, advocacy groups challenged the executive order in court. Numerous lower courts immediately blocked Trump's executive order from taking effect. Various judges called it flagrantly unconstitutional and illegal. The Trump administration eventually appealed some of those decisions up to the Supreme Court, and that's what put the issue before the justices. The case was so important for Trump that when the time came for oral arguments in April, he attended in person. President Trump will do something no modern president has done before. He'll attend a hearing at the Supreme Court.

6:03The case that made it to the high court was Trump v. Barbara. Barbara is a pseudonym for a Honduran immigrant who was in the U.S. illegally and was pregnant in 2025. If the executive order had taken effect, her child would have been denied citizenship. She was the lead plaintiff in a class action suit represented by the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union. The challengers to Trump's executive order essentially relied on text and history and Supreme Court precedents. The text of the Citizenship Clause itself, it's worded very broadly. It says all persons born who are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States are citizens of the United States.

6:50And under the conventional understanding of the word jurisdiction, even people who are in the country without authorization are, in some sense, subject to the jurisdiction. They can be prosecuted, for example, for breaking laws. They also emphasized historical practice. They went back and they mined the record about the debates over the 14th Amendment, and they marshaled a ton of evidence from the 1860s showing that the clause was always understood to sweep quite broadly.

7:28On the other side, the Trump administration, represented by the Solicitor General, argued that birthright citizenship was never meant to include the children of non-U.S. citizens present in the U.S. Trump and his supporters say that conventional view is wrong and that the amendment was never intended to sweep so broadly and was certainly never intended to cover the children of unlawful immigrants, especially in a time when illegal immigration is such a big problem facing the country.

8:05Today, the court handed down a 6-3 decision against Trump's executive order. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that citizenship gives people the right to freely participate in our political community. He wrote, quote, The framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today. What stood out to you about the decision today? I assume you've read all of it. Yeah, the majority opinion, along with the concurrences and the dissents, total 194 pages. You've been busy. So it's quite a volume of discussion. And one thing that stood out to me was actually just how close a case this was.

8:53I think coming into the argument this spring, the Trump administration's position in the case was considered by most legal observers to be quite adventurous and even far-fetched. The administration was taking a revisionist position about what birthright citizenship means, a revisionist position about what the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause means. So based on the historical record, based on the longstanding consensus, based on the lower court rulings, I think most observers expected this case to be a sure loser for the Trump administration. And when we got the ruling today, it was closer than most people anticipated.

9:45The court's three most conservative justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, were all dissenting. They all supported the Trump administration's interpretation of birthright citizenship. In his dissent, Justice Alito called the court's ruling a serious mistake. He added that the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment, quote,

10:14And also importantly, although there were six justices who voted against Trump in this case, three conservatives and three liberals, one of those six, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, ruled only on narrow grounds. Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, delivered what's called a concurring opinion, meaning he agrees with the outcome of the ruling, but his legal thinking is different. Kavanaugh said that the president alone doesn't have the authority to change the rules around birthright citizenship. But... If Congress wanted to pass a new statute to carve out new exceptions to the birthright citizenship guarantee, Congress could do that in the view of Brett Kavanaugh.

11:03It's just that the president can't do it on his own in an executive order. After the ruling, Trump posted on social media that the decision was, quote, too bad for our country. He added he would support efforts in Congress to pass legislation to address the issue. The Justice Department separately said it would crack down on what it called birth tourism schemes that violate the law.

11:29Ultimately, the ruling is still a major loss for Trump's immigration agenda. But James says, overall, this Supreme Court has been friendlier to some of Trump's policies, including his bid to expand executive power. That's next.

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13:09So, James, while the birthright citizenship case ultimately didn't go the president's way today, how would you say this Supreme Court term has gone for Trump and his policies? I would say he obtained a number of important wins as well as several quite significant losses. So for Trump, I would say the term was a mixed record. The court allowed Trump to enact vast swaths of his agenda, often using short-form orders on the court's emergency docket, even after lower courts had ruled against aspects of that agenda. However, he also piled up a few really important losses that Trump in particular has noticed and talked a lot about.

13:53The first big loss came in the tariffs case. In February, the Supreme Court struck down Trump's global tariffs program, saying that Trump's unilateral attempt to impose those tariffs exceeded his authority under the federal statute that he cited. The president responded forcefully, using sharp language to criticize the justices who ruled against him, calling them unpatriotic and disloyal to the Constitution. So that was the first big loss. And then in the last couple of days, Trump suffered a couple other big losses. Yesterday, the Supreme Court blocked him from reshaping the Federal Reserve by firing one of its members.

14:33The justice is ruling that President Trump does not have the authority to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. It comes months after the president attempted to remove Cook from the Fed's board of governors. And then today in the birthright citizenship case, the court, as we've talked about, struck down that attempt as well. So those were the big losses that he saw. What about the wins? The wins occurred largely on the Supreme Court's emergency docket. when there were a number of different legal challenges to various aspects of Trump's policy agenda. Things like his mass firing of government employees, his slashing of research grants and foreign aid, his stepping up of deportations.

15:18And so that series of rulings has effectively allowed Trump to implement much of his second-term agenda. These rulings aren't just consequential for Trump's agenda. The expansion of presidential power applies to every president to come after him, Republican or Democratic. To James, though, the biggest winner from this Supreme Court term wasn't Trump or the office of the president. It was actually the conservative movement, and in particular, policies that many on the right have fought for for decades. So my view is that, you know, a lot of these Trump-related fights kind of took up all the oxygen in the room.

15:59That's where all the attention was focused on. And a lot of the Trump-related fights were somewhat unconventional, right? So enacting a global tariffs program or trying to threaten the independence of the Federal Reserve are not typical actions from a typical Republican president. And so the court, you know, had to spend a lot of capital on those somewhat unorthodox cases that we haven't seen from prior presidents. But at the same time, and I think with, you know, somewhat less fanfare, the court, in a separate batch of cases, has continued to march the law steadily to the right on a number of pillars of the traditional conservative legal movement.

16:48The Voting Rights Act, for example. In the spring, the court ruled that states cannot draw maps for congressional districts based on race. The court did that in a way that critics say will really curtail the ability of minority voters to elect their preferred candidates. And that ruling has already begun to help Republicans gerrymander congressional maps in red states in a way that will help that party in the midterm elections. So that Voting Rights Act case is really important. And today, just a few minutes before the birthright citizenship decision was announced, the Supreme Court gave conservatives two more wins.

17:29It struck down a limit on campaign spending, and it ruled that states can ban transgender girls and women from competing on female sports teams. So a lot of these cases that don't directly involve Trump really do continue to advance priorities of the broader conservative legal movement. And I think what those cases show is that even though the court has been willing to push back against Trump in some cases, like in birthright citizenship, we still have a quite conservative Supreme Court that is dominated by six Republican appointees who continue to move the law and the country to the right.

18:18And now that it's, you know, the final day of the term, the court's going to go into summer recess. I mean, are you relieved that it's kind of over? It's been, sounds like it was a lot to cover the past few months. Yeah, I mean, well, it really has been a whirlwind. But in this day and age, you know, the court actually doesn't even get that much of a summer vacation because even though it's not formally hearing cases for arguments during the summer, the court's emergency docket is alive and well. and so I expect the court to continue to hand down important decisions throughout the summer and then of course in early October they'll be back on the bench for what's already shaping up to be another blockbuster term.

19:06So no break for them, no break for you. Not much of a break now. Well James, thank you so much for your time and your reporting. You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.

19:29That's all for today, Tuesday, June 30th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

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