https://www.thenation.com/article/society/supreme-court-birthright-citizenship-ruling-trump-v-casa/ The Supreme Court’s Birthright Citizenship Ruling Is a 5-Alarm Catastrophe In Trump v. CASA, the court hands the president yet more unaccountable authority—and yanks us into a neo-Confederate legal nightmare. "Barrett, and the rest of her Republican colleagues, determined that nationwide injunctions cannot be used in 2025 to stop a president from violating the Constitution of the United States, because the High Court in England—which existed during a time of hereditary monarchy—did not use a historical equivalent of a nationwide injunction to enforce the laws against [checks notes] their King."
Agree. The picture at the top of the article speaks wonders too, in a very psychological creepy thriller kind of way.
link will work for everyone When Liberals Hated National Injunctions Biden and Democrats griped when conservative judges blocked their plans. Their views have changed now that Trump is President. https://www.wsj.com/opinion/when-li...4?st=j1atnR&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Sotomayor Had To Explain The Law To KBJ Like She Was A 5th Grader In recent case in which eight Justices voted to grant a stay of a lower court injunction, and KBJ wrote another fiery dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote a separate concuring opinion directed at KBJ and “explained it to her like she was a fifth grader, in very simple terms that apparently Justice Jackson to the end was unable to grasp.” https://legalinsurrection.com/2025/...ain-the-law-to-kbj-like-she-was-a-5th-grader/
I have never in my life complained about a district judge being able to pronounce a nationwide injunction, but conservative press now wants to insinuate that I must be hypocritical to decry the SCOTUS decision because of arguments democratic officeholders have made in the past.
The Supreme Court’s Super-Neutral Principle That Applies Only to Democratic Presidents This week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus is a mailbag special in which co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern answer listeners’ burning questions about the law under the joint reign of Donald Trump’s monarchical presidency and our imperial Supreme Court. Amicus listeners have a lot of smart questions, so we’re continuing our occasional “Dear (Juris)Prudence” series, in which we share your questions, as well as Dahlia’s and Mark’s answers. Write to amicus@slate.com to pose a question to Dahlia and Mark. The following transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity. Dear (Juris)Prudence, Can you explain why the major-questions doctrine wasn’t invoked when deciding the Trump v. CASA birthright citizenship case but was used in overturning student loan relief under President Joe Biden? Is it because the justices didn’t decide the merits of CASA but did decide the merits of student loan relief? And if so, why can the court seemingly then choose to decide procedure rather than merits? —Paul Michael Davis Mark Joseph Stern: I’ll start with the procedural question vs. the merits. That is totally at the Supreme Court’s discretion. The court could have asked the parties in Trump v. CASA to talk about birthright citizenship and tee up a ruling on Trump’s executive order because it obviously violates the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. And it shouldn’t have been difficult for the court to say so. But instead, it manipulated the docket, manipulated the case, to make it an attack on the universal injunctions that had been holding this executive order back from being implemented, and ignored the merits altogether. The converse happened in the student loan case. That was really a case about standing, because no one was clearly injured by the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness. The Supreme Court, as Justice Elena Kagan wrote persuasively in her dissent, should have started and ended by saying that nobody had standing in that case. Instead, the court manipulated its standing doctrine to pretend that there was standing by some party, and then the court swiftly reached the merits and invoked the so-called major-questions doctrine, saying that the policy was unlawful. In doing so, Kagan expressly said, the majority violated the Constitution by exceeding its power—a pretty rare charge for a justice to levy at the majority. So that choice—whether to decide a procedural issue or reach for the merits—is all totally discretionary. But we should always pay attention to how the court is tweaking its docket and the questions that it takes up to reach the outcome that it wants to. The first part of your question was about the major-questions doctrine, however. Dahlia and I always put this “doctrine” in air quotes. It’s not a real thing. It’s totally malleable. It’s total BS, resting on what five or six justices see as a major question, and when they think they’ve spotted a major question, then they apply super close scrutiny to what the executive branch has tried to do, and will usually strike it down. They did this with the student loan relief program under Biden. They did it with climate regulation under Biden. I doubt that they will do this to anything that Donald Trump tries to enact. I still think it’s likely they’ll strike down the birthright citizenship order on the merits, though I’m less certain of that than I was a couple of weeks ago. I still think it’s more likely than not, but I doubt they’ll invoke the major-questions doctrine. I think that that doctrine will lie dormant throughout four years of Trump, and if you had any doubt about that, I’ll note that Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence at the end of June in which he strongly implied that the major-questions doctrine wouldn’t apply to Trump’s tariffs. Remember, one of the grounds that the lower court used to strike down the tariffs was essentially invoking the major-questions doctrine to say that Congress hadn’t given Trump this power clearly enough. So it was a major question about a power that Trump couldn’t exercise, and here is Kavanaugh, one of the key creators of the doctrine, who wielded it so ferociously under Biden, giving up in advance and strongly suggesting that his pet doctrine just doesn’t apply to tariffs, because that’s foreign trade and that’s beyond the remit of the federal judiciary. This is why I fundamentally object to this doctrine in the first place. It is so malleable that all it really does is help courts pick the outcome that they want to reach, then guide themselves along the way, acting as though they have an actual legal basis for doing so. https://slate.com/news-and-politics...urt-principle-democratic-presidents-only.html
The conservatives on SCOTUS are now showing their true colors....................a few of them are just as corrupt as trump.......looking at you Alito and Thomas. They dont care, they can't be fired or held accountable, there are a few things I don't agree with in the Constitution but nothing more than a lifetime appointment to some of these grifters with no penalty for there actions
Like Trump, some Supreme Court justices are frustrated with lower courts https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/25/politics/supreme-court-justices-trump-lower-court excerpt: In Donald Trump’s long-running feud with federal judges, the president has found some support in an unlikely place: the nation’s highest court. A growing sense of frustration with some lower courts — articulated in terms that at times sound similar to Trump’s own rhetoric — has crept into a series of opinions this summer from the Supreme Court’s conservative justices as they juggle a flood of emergency cases dealing with Trump’s second term. “Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” Justice Neil Gorsuch admonished in an opinion last week tied to the court’s decision to allow Trump to cancel nearly $800 million in research grants. The rebuke, which was joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, flipped the narrative that it is Trump who has pushed legal boundaries with his flurry of executive orders and support for impeaching judges who rule against him. A wave of legal conservatives took to social media to tout Gorsuch’s warning. “This is now the third time in a matter of weeks this court has had to intercede in a case ‘squarely controlled’ by one of its precedents,” wrote Gorsuch, who was Trump’s first nominee to the high court. (Kavanaugh was Trump’s second.) “When this court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts.” Other conservatives have been just as harsh this year. Justice Samuel Alito in March accused a federal judge in another case involving a Trump policy as committing an “act of judicial hubris” and “self-aggrandizement of its jurisdiction.” The Supreme Court has been consistently siding with Trump on the emergency docket for months, including in high-profile cases dealing with immigration, spending and the leadership of independent agencies. And Trump has won even in cases in which there are serious arguments that his administration defied a lower court, said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center. “Gorsuch’s opinion in the NIH funding case is perhaps the most direct articulation yet of why — because the justices seem more concerned with lower courts correctly reading the tea leaves in their (often unexplained) rulings than with the executive branch behaving properly before the rest of the federal judiciary,” Vladeck said. In a biting dissent in the research grant decision on Thursday, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described the result as “Calvinball jurisprudence,” in reference to the popular “Calvin and Hobbes” comic. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules,” Jackson wrote. “We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.” Trump’s attacks on federal courts have subsided somewhat since the spring, when he repeatedly took to social media to rail against lower court judges and also privately complained about some members of the Supreme Court whom he appointed during his first term. But many of the president’s allies continue to work the refs and misstate the judiciary’s role — reflexively chalking losses in court up to politics. “We will not fall to rogue judges,” Trump’s former personal lawyer Alina Habba told Fox News last week after a federal judge ruled that she was not legally serving as the acting US attorney for New Jersey. “We will not fall to people trying to be political when they should just be doing their job — respecting the president.” more at the link
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/chief-j...ears-supreme-court-bb977114?mod=hp_opin_pos_1 The Triumph of the Roberts Court What the Justices have wrought in his 20 years as Chief Justice. By The Editorial Board Oct. 3, 2025 5:43 pm ET As the Supreme Court opens its new term Monday, it marks 20 years since Chief Justice John Roberts took the center seat. It’s a good moment to consider the constitutional revitalization that the Roberts Court has wrought. Journalists naturally focus on the controversies of the moment. But looking back decades reveals how much progress the Roberts era has made toward restoring the founding vision of the Constitution. Conservatives were stymied in this quest for decades amid mistaken nominations (David Souter) and Senate obstruction (Robert Bork). But beginning with Antonin Scalia and then Clarence Thomas, originalist beachheads made it onto the Court. Then came Chief Justice Roberts and Samuel Alito, and the restoration accelerated. Historians might conclude there really have been two Roberts Courts. At first the ideological divide was roughly 4-1-4, with Anthony Kennedy as a free agent. The Court was nonetheless able to muster the votes for several landmark rulings that are now part of the legal firmament. Neil Gorsuch succeeded the Great Scalia, and Justice Kennedy’s retirement created the opening for Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 and a sturdier 5-4 conservative majority. The second Roberts Court, still young today, began with Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation in 2020 to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, creating a 6-3 majority able to withstand a single idiosyncratic swing vote. *** Think of how the law has changed. On gun rights, the Court said the Second Amendment includes an individual right to bear arms (D.C. v. Heller, 2008). It has since solidified that ruling and is likely to continue. Its First Amendment jurisprudence has been especially strong and significant. This includes protecting corporate and union political speech (Citizens United v. FEC, 2010); blocking coercive public union fees from workers (Janus v. Afscme, 2018); and overturning the cramped view of religious liberty that prevailed at the 20th-century Court. The Justices said states can’t exclude religious schools when providing for K-12 scholarship money (Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, 2020). They said religious business owners can’t be forced by ObamaCare to provide insurance coverage for what they view as abortifacients (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 2014). They ruled for the Little Sisters of the Poor and a Colorado cake baker against coercive secular governments. The Chief in particular has been a stalwart on the colorblind Constitution. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he wrote in 2007, a line that will long echo. The Chief also wrote the opinion saying colleges can’t use racial preferences (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 2023). In recent years the Justices have made an effort to restore the proper understanding of the separation of powers. This includes slapping down Joe Biden’s attempt to rule by diktat on student debt forgiveness and broad vaccine mandates. Its landmark “major questions doctrine” may produce limits on President Trump’s use (we’d say abuse) of tariffs. This would go far to contradicting criticism, mistaken in our view, that the Court is tolerating an Imperial Trump Presidency. The 2024 ruling on presidential immunity (Trump v. U.S.) will reduce the prospects of lawfare against Joe Biden and future leaders. The Loper Bright ruling the same year, allowing more judicial scrutiny of government rule-making, will limit the arbitrary power of the administrative state. Much of the Roberts Court’s task has been cleaning up the mistakes of the Court’s long progressive era, when Justices bought into the idea of the “living Constitution.” That includes the reversal of Roe v. Wade, letting states regulate abortion again. Yet as we predicted, this had been a political boon for Democrats, as voters rendered their verdict in place of judges, as the Founders intended. The Court still has cleanup work to do, and some of it is on this coming term’s docket. This includes racial gerrymanders, which offend the Equal Protection Clause, and overturning Humphrey’s Executor (1935) on the ability of a President to fire heads of “independent” agencies. *** There have naturally been disappointments. In this life, there always are. Twice Chief Justice Roberts rescued ObamaCare by rewriting it. In 2020 the Chief joined Justice Gorsuch to judicially rewrite the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to ban job discrimination by sexual orientation and gender identity (Bostock v. Clayton County), which has invited confusion in the law. There have been others, but the larger story over 20 years is how successful the conservative judicial restoration has been. It required patience and political victories over many elections. Yet the record validates the long hard slog of the Federalist Society and its members in restoring originalism to the center of American law. Originalism is a method, after all, not a policy agenda, so conservative judges won’t always agree. The left’s hostility to all this is understandable because the Court is no longer its fallback legislature. But harder to figure is criticism from those on the right who want the Court to validate all of their policy preferences. That isn’t what an originalist judge does, or what the Founders wanted. As for John Roberts, 20 years atop Article III is a good run. Chief Justice John Marshall made it to 34. Appeared in the October 4, 2025, print edition as 'The Triumph of the Roberts Court'.
