James Romoser

speaker

123 appearances 5 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 25 Aug

James Romoser’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The Journal. · The Supreme Court and Trump: From Birthright to Presidential Power · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

You've been busy.

So it's quite a volume of discussion.

And one thing that stood out to me was actually just how close a case this was.

I think coming into the argument this spring—

The Trump administration's position in the case was considered by most legal observers to be quite adventurous and even far-fetched.

The administration was taking a revisionist position about what birthright citizenship means, a revisionist position about what the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause means.

So based on the historical record, based on the longstanding consensus, based on the lower court rulings, I think most observers expected this case to be a sure loser for the Trump administration.

And when we got the ruling today, it was closer than most people anticipated.

The court's three most conservative justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, were all dissenting.

They all supported the Trump administration's interpretation of birthright citizenship.

And also importantly, although there were six justices who voted against Trump in this case, three conservatives and three liberals, one of those six, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, ruled only on narrow grounds.

But— If Congress wanted to pass a new statute to carve out new exceptions to the birthright citizenship guarantee, Congress could do that in the view of Brett Kavanaugh.

It's just that the president can't do it on his own in an executive order.

I would say he obtained a number of important wins as well as several quite significant losses.

So for Trump, I would say the term was a mixed record.

The court allowed Trump to enact vast swaths of his agenda, often using short-form orders on the court's emergency docket, even after lower courts had ruled against aspects of that agenda.

However, he also piled up a few really important losses that Trump in particular has noticed and talked a lot about.

The first big loss came in the tariffs case.

In February, the Supreme Court struck down Trump's global tariffs program, saying that Trump's unilateral attempt to impose those tariffs exceeded his authority under the federal statute that he cited.

So that was the first big loss.

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