Carrie Johnson

each year and potentially be used to help revoke the citizenship of many others born earlier.

Trump attended for the Solicitor General's arguments but left as Attorney Cecilia Wong made her case.

for people challenging his order.

Wong told the justices to agree with the president would radically rewrite the Constitution and upend more than 150 years of settled law.

A decision is expected near the end of the Supreme Court term this summer.

Carrie Johnson, NPR News.

I'm Carrie Johnson.

Yeah, a number of the justices at the center of the court, from the Chief Justice John Roberts to Neil Gorsuch, another Trump appointee, to Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee, raised some questions about the Trump administration's case.

Roberts said their arguments in some ways were quirky and idiosyncratic.

Kagan called them esoteric.

Gorsuch talked about how the Solicitor General John Sauer was reticent

reaching to sources in Roman law to make his argument that the 14th Amendment didn't mean what it says.

And I think all of those things were significant.

Also, you know, the Trump administration has been advancing this argument that people are coming to the U.S., people from Russia and China, to have babies here, and that could pose some kind of national security threat or a threat to allegiance to the United States.

Roberts basically said...

We may have a new social problem here in that, but we don't have a new constitution.

And that's an issue that other justices came back to as well.

Justice Kagan in particular basically said, I understand the policy considerations that this administration is putting forth, but it's not maybe enough or we would need a tremendous magnitude of evidence and argument to solve

turn away from birthright citizenship, which this country has basically understood to mean something for 160 years or so.

Trump's day one executive order, of course, only dealt with babies born 30 days after the date of that order.