Trump shakes hands with the Chief Justice John Roberts (Photo: Reuters)
Legal analyst Lisa Rubin said on Friday that President Donald Trump's new move is taking a war directly to the U.S. Supreme Court after they already decided the issue.
This week, standing next to advisor Stephen Miller, Trump announced that two new executive orders would make a second attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court ruled at the end of June that Trump's previous order violated the Constitution.
After spending a month attacking the high court and bashing them for the ruling, Trump is trying again. According to MS NOW host Ali Vitali, it's as if the administration is "trying to force the courts to decide on things, even if they know they're going to lose it. They want to be caught trying. They want to be caught trying to test the limitations of the office."
Former litigator and MS NOW legal correspondent Lisa Rubin agreed, saying that the Trump administration's attitude has always "been act first and ask for permission later."
The second executive order "seeks to curb what Trump called ‘birth tourism’ by increasing restrictions on visitors to the U.S. who want to obtain visas to give birth while in the country."
While that provision will be easily challenged, she urged folks not to "sleep on some of the other things."
"One of the exceptions to birthright citizenship is that we don't confer citizenship on the children of foreign sovereigns," Rubin said. "Technically, that means like kings and queens and heads of state. What they've done through this executive order is enlarge it to any child born of a foreign government employee or a foreign governmental organization."
She explained that the U.S. doesn't give citizenship to the children of enemies of the country who might be here in an effort to occupy the U.S.
Trump "will stretch that to mean anyone born to a parent who, supposedly, is a member of a foreign terrorist organization like Tren de Aragua," Rubin said. "That is an attack on immigrants, particularly from Latino countries in South America. And I don't think that will stand either.
Brown University Prof. Corey Brettschneider said that sometimes courts will leave room to rewrite a policy to make it legal, but he doesn't think that's what the Supreme Court did in its June ruling.
"What's going on here is that they lost because they tried essentially to revoke the 14th Amendment to do something that they knew was contrary to the meaning of the Constitution," said Brettschneider. "And so they're trying to do it again. And I think actually with this administration, what really makes it different than previous administrations is that they head on with challenge, not just the courts, but the Constitution itself."
He doesn't believe that Trump's administration even believes in the American Constitution.
"They believe in something that is more aligned to a populist, soil-based idea that, you know, our nation is based in the ground or in place. But our nation is based in an idea," said Brettschneider. "And that's what the idea of everyone being equal, born in the United States. You are a citizen. That's what our Constitution says."