D. John Sauer
speaker
19 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 2 Apr
D. John Sauer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.
Appearances
You had a majority of the Supreme Court's justices peppering the Solicitor General, D. John Sauer, with really skeptical questions about the Trump administration's position about birthright citizenship.
I mean, I'm going to be watching some of these justices for what they think specifically, you know, what their interpretation winds up being specifically on things like bloodline versus born in the country soil.
Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court, the Citizenship Clause was adopted just after the Civil War to grant citizenship to the newly freed slaves and their children whose allegiance to the United States had been established by generations of domicile here.
It did not grant citizenship to the children of temporary visitors or illegal aliens who have no such allegiance.
Well, in the executive order, it draws a distinction between the mother and the father.
That's really the mother's domicile.
I think that would matter.
The 1868 sources talk about parental.
I'm not aware of them drawing a distinction between mother or father, but they say the domicile of the child follows the domicile of the parent.
We're in a new world now, as Justice Alito pointed out to, where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who's a U.S.
citizen.
Respectfully, I think what we have are lower courts making snap judgments on the merits that ignore the fundamental principle of the 14th Amendment, that it was about giving citizenship to the children of slaves, not to the children of illegal immigrants.
I don't think they do anything different. What the executive order says in section two is that federal officials do not accept documents that have the wrong designation of citizenship from people who are subject to the executive order. How are they going to know that? The states can continue to, the federal officials will have to figure that out. How?
So you can imagine a number of ways that the federal officials could. Such as? Such as they could require a showing of, you know, documentation showing legal presence in the country. For a temporary visitor, for example, they could see whether they're on a B-1 visa, which would exclude kind of the birthright citizenship in that context.
Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court.
Universal injunctions exceed the judicial power granted in Article III, which exists only to address the injury to the complaining party. They transgress the traditional bounds of equitable authority, and they create a host of practical problems.
They create what Justice Powell described as repeated and essentially head-on confrontations between the life-tenured and representative branches of government. And they disrupt the Constitution's careful balancing of the separation of powers.
In appropriate cases, courts have certified class actions on an emergency basis. We found at least four cases in recent years where that was done.
Generally, our practice is to respect circuit precedent within the circuit, but there are...
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