Takeaways from the Supreme Court's ruling on power of judges and birthright citizenship

CNN

7 hours ago

The Supreme Court delivered a major win to President Donald Trump on Friday in his ongoing war with the federal judiciary, limiting the power of courts to step in and block policies on a nationwide basis in the short term while judges review their legality.
Though the case was intertwined with Trump's executive order effectively ending birthright citizenship, the ruling does not settle the issue of whether the president can enforce that order. And there were signs that lower courts could move swiftly to block the policy.
But the high court's decision does mean that Americans seeking to challenge Trump's future policies may have to jump through additional hoops to succeed. Exactly how that will work remains to be seen and will be hashed out by lower courts in coming days.
Here's what to know about the court's decision:
The Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling could have far-reaching consequences for Trump's second term, even if his birthright citizenship order is never enforced. That's because it will limit the power of courts to strike down other policies in the future.
Presidents of both parties have complained about nationwide injunctions for years and Trump has noted, correctly, that there have been far more issued against him than presidents in the past. Lower courts, for instance, have used the orders to temporarily block his efforts to deport migrants under the Alien Enemies Act and prohibit transgender service members in the military.
'This was a big decision,' Trump said from the White House shortly after the ruling was issued. The president described the outcome as an 'amazing decision, one that we're very happy about.'
But exactly how future litigation shakes out remains to be seen. Private parties – in the birthright citizenship case, a group of pregnant women who sued – may still be able to get a court to shut down a policy temporarily through a class-action lawsuit.
And states may still be able to secure a hold on an administration's policies in the short term as well.
By siding with Trump, the conservative Supreme Court ended a term with a second blockbuster decision in his favor for the second time in as many years.
Last year, a 6-3 majority ruled that Trump – and other presidents – are at least presumptively immune from criminal prosecution for actions taken in office. The decision allowed Trump to avoid a trial on federal election subversion charges that were pending against him.
And since taking office again in January, Trump has won case after case on the Supreme Court's emergency docket. A decision earlier in the week allowing Trump to deport certain migrants to countries other than their homeland marked the 10th time the court has granted a request from Trump on the emergency docket, though a few of those cases amounted to a mixed win for the administration.
The court has allowed Trump to fire board members at independent agencies, remove transgender Americans from military service and end other protections for migrants, even those in the country legally.
Friday's ruling, from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who Trump has disparaged behind closed doors, is his biggest win yet.
The court's three liberals split from their conservative colleagues' blockbuster ruling in blistering dissents, ringing the alarm on how the decision will permit Trump or future presidents to enforce unlawful policies even as legal challenges to them play out.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the liberal wing, said the majority had 'shamefully' played along with the administration's 'gamesmanship' in the case, which she described as an attempt to enforce a 'patently unconstitutional' policy by not asking the justices to bless the policy, but instead to limit the power of federal judges around the country.
'The court's decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution. The executive branch can now enforce policies that flout settled law and violate countless individuals' constitutional rights, and the federal courts will be hamstrung to stop its actions fully,' she wrote.
The court's senior liberal member took the rare step of reading parts of her dissent from the bench on Friday for around 20 minutes. In doing so, she added in a line not included in her written dissent to invoke the court's landmark ruling last year that granted Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution.
'The other shoe has dropped on executive immunity,' Sotomayor declared from the bench.
Separately, in a scathing solo dissent on Friday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared to raise the stakes of the injunction case even more, accusing her conservative colleagues of creating 'an existential threat to the rule of law' by allowing Trump to 'violate the Constitution.'
'I have no doubt that, if judges must allow the executive to act unlawfully in some circumstances, as the court concludes today, executive lawlessness will flourish, and from there, it is not difficult to predict how this all ends,' she wrote. 'Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional republic will be no more.'
Though the court significantly curtailed the ability of Trump's legal foes to get the type of court orders that block or slow down his enforcement of various policies nationwide, the conservative justices left on the table one key legal avenue: class-action lawsuits in which a litigant sues on behalf of a larger group of similarly situated individuals to get relief for all people who could be potentially be affected by a policy.
Several groups moved quickly Friday to do just that.
The immigrant rights groups and pregnant women challenging Trump's order in Maryland pressed the federal judge who previously blocked the policy to do so again through a class action lawsuit.
Such class-action litigation could potentially lead to the same outcome as nationwide injunctions – and during arguments in the case, several justices questioned the significance of shifting the emphasis to class-action suits. One difference is that a judge generally must take the extra step of thinking about who should be covered by an injunction.
During arguments in the case in May, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the difference may be nothing more than 'technicality.'
'We care about technicalities,' he said at the time. 'And this may all be a technicality.'
Lawyers for the Maryland plaintiffs asked US District Judge Deborah Boardman to certify a nationwide class that would include any children who have been born or would be born after February 19, 2025, and would be affected by Trump's order. They filed an updated lawsuit that would challenge Trump's order on behalf of all of those potential class members.
They also asked Boardman, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, for an emergency order that would temporarily block Trump's executive order from applying to members of a 'putative class' of individuals that would be impacted by the policy.
'Consistent with the Supreme Court's most recent instructions, the Court can protect all members of the putative class from irreparable harm that the unlawful Executive Order threatens to inflict,' the lawsuit states
The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing challengers in another case over Trump's order, on Friday filed a new class action lawsuit targeting Trump's order.
'That's one of the ways in which people who are harmed around the country by President Trump's effort to end birthright citizenship will be able to go and get protection from the courts for this fundamental American right,' ACLU national legal director Cecillia Wang told CNN.
Barrett was careful to say that parties could still seek nationwide relief to pause a policy if that was required to address their harm. That is precisely the argument nearly two dozen Democratic states made challenging the birthright policy and while the court didn't directly address it, it left wide room for states to make that claim again.
The states had argued they needed a nationwide block on Trump's birthright citizenship policy because it was too easy for people to cross state borders to have a baby in New Jersey – where that child would be a citizen – rather than staying in Pennsylvania, where it might not.
Now, the states will likely return to a lower court and argue that the birthright policy should remain on hold while courts decide its constitutionality.
'We believe that we will prevail and that we've made the case already, and when the lower courts, under the instruction of the US Supreme Court, do that review, we will secure a nationwide injunction to provide relief to the plaintiff states,' California Attorney General of California Rob Bonta, a Democrat, told reporters.
'It's now up to the lower courts to reconsider if the nationwide injunction is appropriate and necessary to provide complete relief to the states whose AG's sued to challenge this order,' he said.
That litigation could eventually work its way back to the Supreme Court.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the administration was 'very confident' the Supreme Court would eventually rule in its favor on the merits of Trump's executive order.
'Birthright citizenship will be decided in October, in the next session by the Supreme Court,' Bondi predicted at the White House.
While Bondi's predicted timing might be optimistic, given the court's usual pace, there is a good chance the issue will eventually wind up before the justices.