The US Supreme Court agreed on Friday to allow President Trump to end birthright citizenship in some parts of the country, even as legal challenges to the constitutionality of the move proceed in other regions.
In a ruling on Friday the highest court in America limited the ability of federal judges to temporarily pause President Trump’s executive orders, a major victory for the administration.
But they made no ruling on the constitutionality of Dnald Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship, and stopped his order from taking effect for 30 days.
The 6-to-3 decision, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett and split along ideological lines, may dramatically reshape how citizenship is granted in the United States, even temporarily.
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In a separate dissent for herself alone, Justice Jackson says she agrees with Justice Sotomayor but wants to emphasize that the majority’s decision permits the executive branch to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued, and thus is ”an existential threat to the rule of law.” She says the technical arguments about what judicial authority in the 18th Century are a “smokescreen” to give the president “the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate.”
In her dissent, joined by the other two liberal justices, Sotomayor accuses the majority of allowing the government to play games with constitutional rights. She writes: “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates. Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship. The majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief. That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit. Because I will not be complicit in so grave an attack on our system of law, I dissent.”
