SCOTUS hears birthright citizenship arguments
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Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Myles Parks. I cover voting.
I'm Carrie Johnson.
I cover the Supreme Court and justice. I'm Nina Totenberg, and I cover the Supreme Court. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
And today on the show, a major court case over the future of citizenship in this country. For more than two hours, the Supreme Court discussed if all babies born in the United States, regardless of their parents' status, are automatically granted citizenship. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer began by laying out the thrust of his argument.
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.
Throughout the arguments, though, justices returned to that concept again and again with skepticism. Justice Neil Gorsuch pressed the matter in exchange with Sauer.
Who's domicile matters? I mean, it's not the child, obviously. It's the parents you'd have us focus on. And, you know, what if, is it the husband? Is it the wife? What if they're unmarried? Who's domicile?
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.
Well, but 1868 matters, you're telling us. So what's the answer?
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.
In her argument, Cecilia Wong, the national legal director for the ACLU, said the Trump administration's interpretation would upend the Constitution and the lives of millions of people.
The executive order fails on all those counts. Swaths of American laws would be rendered senseless. Thousands of American babies will immediately lose their citizenship. And if you credit the government's theory, the citizenship of millions of Americans, past, present, and future, could be called into question. All of this tells us the government's theory is wrong.
One of the biggest moments came when Chief Justice John Roberts directly rebuked the government's argument.
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.
Well, it's a new world. It's the same Constitution.
I want to bring in now NPR Supreme Court correspondent Kerry Johnson, senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro, and joining us from the Supreme Court is NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg.
What arguments were presented regarding birthright citizenship?
Hi to you all.
Hi there.
Hey. So let's start with the main takeaways. Nina, let's start with you.
Well, you know, with the President of the United States, for the first time ever, as far as we know, in the courtroom and sitting in the audience, I thought the court actually went out of its way to not beat the crap out of any of the counsel and to ask very probing questions without completely tipping their hands. At the same time, you heard this constant refrain of, This is pretty clearly what the Constitution says. I know it has problems today, policy problems, but it is what the Constitution says, and that is sort of the way the court Because this is a very originalist court, it doesn't think it's a living constitution. And in the same way, it believes, for example, that there are quite severe restrictions on what kinds of regulations there can be.
of firearms, of guns.
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