'No right is safe': Sotomayor accuses SCOTUS greenlighting Trump’s 'solemn mockery' of law

27 June

Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 (K2 Images/Shutterstock.com)

Justice Sonia Sotomayor and dissenting judges took strong issue with the conservative majority’s 6-to-3 ruling against nationwide injunctions.

The decision stemmed from the even bigger question of whether President Donald Trump can legally deny automatic citizenship to babies born in the U.S. when neither parent is a citizen or a permanent legal resident.

Sotomayor was particularly moved by the majority’s decision to allow Trump's policies that temporarily derail birthright citizenship while litigation is underway, even if a judge deems the policy unconstitutional or believes implementing it would cause immediate harm. Sotomayor was stirred enough to recite a long summary of her dissent from the bench.

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” Sotomayor announced. “Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.”

Sotomayor argued that the majority “ignores entirely whether the President’s Executive Order is constitutional, instead focusing only on the question whether federal courts have the equitable authority to issue universal injunctions. … Yet the Order’s patent unlawfulness reveals the gravity of the majority’s error and underscores why equity supports universal injunctions as appropriate remedies in this kind of case. As every conceivable source of law confirms, birthright citizenship is the law of the land,” she said, speaking of a right entrenched in the Fourteenth Amendment, a Constitutional provision that Trump’s EO seeks to curtail.

The only other time SCOTUS attempted to derail birthright citizenship, she said, was during the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, when the pro-slavery Taney court delivered its much condemned ruling that the children of enslaved black Americans were not citizens.

“To remedy that grievous error, the States passed in 1866 and Congress ratified in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, which enshrined birthright citizenship in the Constitution,” Sotomayor said. “There it has remained, accepted and respected by Congress, by the Executive, and by this Court. Until today.”

She also slammed the spirit of Trump’s request for emergency relief, which insists “it will suffer irreparable harm unless it can deprive at least some children born in the United States of citizenship."

“With the stroke of a pen, the President has made a ‘solemn mockery’ of our Constitution,” Sotomayor scolded. “Rather than stand firm, the court gives way.”

Her dissent and that of the other liberal justices provided ample quotes for reporters to relay on social media. All Rise News Editor-in-Chief Adam Klasfield reported Sotomayor’s view that “Trump knew his birthright citizenship order was unconstitutional, so he went after the universal injunctions instead.”

"The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it. Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along," Klasfield cited Sotomayor on X.

Dissenting judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said she could already see where the future is taking the court and the nation after this landmark decision, writing “… It is not difficult to predict how this all ends. Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.”

Critics like StandUpAmerica Managing Director Brett Atkins also bashed the court on social media, saying SCOTUS “has ended nationwide acceptance of birthright citizenship.”

Read the full court decision at this link.

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