The Supreme Court smacked down President Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to children of illegal immigrants and tourists Tuesday, quashing a marquee policy of his for the second time in under five months.
Trump’s day one order had been in limbo amid a legal battle over whether it violated the 14th Amendment, which states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The court ruled 5-4 that even those “born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present” are covered by the equal protection amendment, meaning a change to the Constitution would be required to change their status — the worst-case scenario for the White House.
A sixth justice, Brett Kavanaugh, found that the order did not violate the 14th Amendment, but did violate federal law — and a change in the status of children born to foreigners could be brought about by Congress alone.
“If Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. “Words appearing frequently in the Executive Order — ‘mother,’ ‘father,’ ‘lawful,’ ‘temporary’ — are absent from the Clause. For a simple reason: they did not matter.”
Roberts was joined in the majority by fellow conservative Amy Coney Barrett and liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor — a rare combination on the divided court.
Conservative justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas dissented, with Alito arguing in a blistering opinion that the 14th Amendment “confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.”
“This is one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court, and in my judgment, the Court has made a serious mistake,” he fumed. “…The Fourteenth Amendment dictates who must be a citizen, but it does not address who may be a citizen by Act of Congress.”
“The Court’s interpretation saddles this country with an ancient British rule that even the United Kingdom has abandoned, as have other countries whose legal systems share the same pedigree,” he went on. “The Court’s interpretation preserves a powerful incentive to enter or remain in this country illegally.”
Thomas was similarly scathing, writing that “the Court has repurposed the Fourteenth Amendment to protect its own set of preferred rights that the Reconstruction Congress never contemplated and that cannot find support in its text. Today, the Court does so again by recognizing a constitutional right to citizenship for the children of all foreign birth tourists and illegal aliens. --->READ MORE HERE
The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that states can bar transgender female competitors from playing girls’ sports in a landmark decision with major implications for more than half the country, where such policies are in place.
In a 6-3 opinion, the high court determined that neither Idaho nor West Virginia had violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment with their bans, as well as that Title IX allowed states to separate sports teams on the basis of biological sex.
But the majority opinion by conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh also underscored the importance of treating transgender athletes with respect.
“Most of the biological female and transgender student-athletes who are involved in transgender sports disputes around the country are teenagers or in their early twenties,” Kavanaugh wrote.
“Those student athletes want to play sports. Their desire to compete warrants respect. No student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified.”
Kavanaugh, who spent years coaching his daughters’ basketball teams in suburban Maryland, stressed that the court is deferring policy questions on transgender competition in sports to the states and the democratic process.
“Sports are highly competitive and generally zero sum,” he wrote for the majority. “Women and girls who play sports care deeply about all of those things. They obsess about them. They spend extraordinary time and effort to train in the heat and in the cold.”
Two transgender athletes waged similar challenges to the state bans, arguing that the statutes flouted their rights and the law barring programs that engage in sex-based discrimination from receiving federal funds.
The three liberal justices would have allowed the states to proceed with their bans under a much narrower legal rationale that would have left the laws more susceptible to future challenges.
“West Virginia may well have satisfied its burden and seen its ban upheld. The point, rather, is that this Court’s equal protection precedents require a very different approach … than the one the majority follows today,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. --->READ MORE HERE
If you like what you see, please "Like" and/or Follow us on FACEBOOK here, GETTR here, and TWITTER here.
No comments:
Post a Comment