Society / The Supreme Court’s Birthright Citizenship Ruling Is a 5-Alarm Catastrophe In Trump v. CASA, the court hands the president yet more unaccountable authority—and yanks us into a neo-Confederate legal nightmare.
Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett greet President Donald Trump after his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
The legal upshot of the Supreme Court’s monumentally disastrous decision in Trump v. CASA (more commonly known as “the birthright citizenship case”) is chaos. Utter legal chaos. In its ruling on Friday, the court’s usual six monarchists granted Donald Trump’s request to reexamine various nationwide injunctions preventing Trump and Stephen Miller from implementing their plans to revoke birthright citizenship to any American who doesn’t happen to be white. With the legal sleight of hand so beloved by the Roberts court, the ruling doesn’t actually allow Trump to end birthright citizenship. It just makes it incredibly difficult for courts to stop him from ending birthright citizenship. It’s a distinction, one that lawyers will try to exploit for an entire rearguard action to defend citizenship in this country, but one that’s unlikely to make much of a difference if you happen to be born on the Republican side of the tracks. Once you read the fine print, it becomes clear that this decision is a historic, five-alarm catastrophe.
For those unfamiliar with this specific kind of court order, let me define some terms. An injunction is an order issued by the court preventing the government from doing a thing. Before today, lower courts had the authority to prevent the government from doing an unconstitutional thing, not just in the jurisdiction where the court sits, but nationally.
I’m not actually a fan of nationwide injunctions. The system can be incredibly politicized. Republican judges use nationwide injunctions all the time to stymie the agenda of Democratic presidents. Democratic judges use nationwide injunctions to slow down the Trump administration. Whether a president gets to have their agenda often depends on whether the opposition party can find a friendly lower-court judge.
However, though flawed, nationwide injunctions make sense when it comes to national issues involving civil and human rights: issues like, say, the Constitution’s very clearly stated definition of national citizenship. After all, one’s fundamental rights should not wildly change if they miss their exit on the interstate.
In one fell swoop, the Supreme Court has thrown that system into the shredder. Trump v. CASA takes away the ability of lower-court judges to issue nationwide injunctions. Instead, lower courts are now limited to issuing rulings that apply only to the litigants who happen to be before them in their local court. Injunctions now must be narrowly tailored to give the active litigants only what they personally need, and nothing more. In other words, if Trump violates my constitutional rights in New York, I can sue and potentially win. But if Trump violates your constitutional rights in exactly the same way in New Jersey, you have to sue for yourself. Indeed, the ruling probably means that if Trump violates your constitutional rights in exactly the same way in New York, you have to bring a separate lawsuit in New York to defend your constitutional rights. Every person has to individually ask for their constitutional rights. It’s everyone for themselves, according to the Supreme Court. Everybody needs to lawyer up.
The decision means that some courts, districts, and states will still defend the concept of birthright citizenship, while others will not. That could mean that whether or not a child born in America on or after June 27, 2025, is considered a citizen of the United States will depend on what state, or even county, that child happens to be born in.
If that setup sounds familiar, it should. It is exactly how this country determined citizenship from June 21, 1788, (when the Constitution was ratified) until July 9, 1868 (when the 14th Amendment was ratified). The idea that citizenship depends on which state recognizes your citizenship has literally been tried before in this country, with Black people and Native Americans having citizenship rights in some states and… not in others. We have already fought over this. It was called the Civil War. We resolved this issue; it’s called the first section of the 14th Amendment. We have tried doing citizenship the Confederate way and realized it was an error.
But that antebellum, neo-Confederate structure is what the Supreme Court brings back to us today. It’s fashionable to say that the court’s ruling is not really about birthright citizenship, because the legal question focused on the power to issue nationwide injunctions. But that sanewashing of the court’s opinion does not survive its first contact with reality. By taking away the ability of courts to enter nationwide injunctions in this case, the court is giving Trump carte blanche to violate the constitutional definition of citizenship in any district where a friendly Trump judge will allow him to. And, in practice, this ruling will extend to every other single issue where Trump has been stopped thanks to a nationwide injunction. Right on cue, Trump signaled today that he intends to move ahead with a slew of agenda items “that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis,” including policies targeting trans children, refugees, immigrants, and, yes, birthright citizenship.
Nationwide injunctions have been a thing for a long time. The court could have addressed the issue in a myriad of other cases (including, you know, any where the Biden administration was subjected to a nationwide injunction). They chose to do so here, on this issue, where lifting the nationwide injunction will have the direct and immediate impact of letting Trump and Miller take away citizenship on a case-by-case basis. If ever there was a reason to have a nationwide injunction, it would be a situation where a president brazenly refuses to follow the most important amendment ever inserted into the Constitution. This opinion is about birthright citizenship, and more broadly about letting Trump yank us back to the 1850s without hindrance; claiming it’s only about nationwide injunctions is like claiming that the tail wags the dog.
To get to the point where she can return us to the state-by-state determination of citizenship practiced during the enslaver period of this country, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote the majority opinion for the Republicans, argues that nationwide injunctions should never be a thing. Her principal reasoning for this is… the High Court of Chancery in England, which existed at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. I wish I were making that up, but I’m not nearly creative enough to do it. Barrett, and the rest of her Republican colleagues, determined that nationwide injunctions cannot be used in 2025 to stop a president from violating the Constitution of the United States, because the High Court in England—which existed during a time of hereditary monarchy—did not use a historical equivalent of a nationwide injunction to enforce the laws against [checks notes] their King.
_TheLonelyStoner on June 28th, 2025 at 12:23 UTC »
Justice Jackson was absolutely right in her dissent. The court has essentially given the president a free pass the break the law as he sees fit, when you add in the immunity ruling and you have an executive that can literally just do whatever it wants until the Court actually decides to take a case about it.
polarparadoxical on June 28th, 2025 at 12:13 UTC »
In her dissent, Jackson ripped off the mask off conservatism and exposed it for what it is:
"Stated simply, what it means to have a system of government that is bounded by law is that everyone is constrained by the law, no exceptions. And for that to actually happen, courts must have the power to order everyone (including the Executive) to follow the law—full stop. To conclude otherwise is to endorse the creation of a zone of lawlessness within which the Executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes, and where individuals who would otherwise be entitled to the law’s protection become subject to the Executive’s whims instead."
This rings strangely reminiscent of Wilhoit's Law:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.]
....
As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.
So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism.
No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:
The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
jarena009 on June 28th, 2025 at 11:59 UTC »
"Barrett, and the rest of her Republican colleagues, determined that nationwide injunctions cannot be used in 2025 to stop a president from violating the Constitution of the United States, because the High Court in England—which existed during a time of hereditary monarchy—did not use a historical equivalent of a nationwide injunction to enforce the laws against [checks notes] their King."
They seriously want a king