Carrie Johnson

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.

And today in the arguments, the solicitor, General John Sauer, once again asked for relief that would be prospective.

In other words, this order wouldn't go back and take away the citizenship of babies already born in the U.S.

But Justice Sotomayor really raised questions about that.

She basically said the argument, the import of the argument that Trump administration is making would allow somebody to go back and potentially denaturalize lots and lots of people who are already born in this country.

And, you know, that would be a tremendous, tremendous change and a real upheaval.

In another passage, other justices asked about, you know, how that could play out moving forward.