MAGA ramping up plan to dodge key Supreme Court ruling: legal expert

In a ruling issued in Trump v. Barbara on June 30, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump's executive order declaring birthright citizenship illegal. The decision upheld the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment, which states that children born on U.S. soil are U.S. citizens regardless of their parents' immigration status. But according to legal expert Quinta Jurecic, Trump and his MAGA allies are aggressively looking for ways to dodge the Trump v. Barbara ruling.

"At the end of June, a year and a half after Trump issued the order," Jurecic explains in an article for The Atlantic, "the Supreme Court ruled, in Trump v. Barbara, that the policy violated the 14th Amendment. Civil-liberties groups and immigration advocates cheered the ruling ... But the Court made its decision by a far tighter margin than most observers had anticipated: Only five of the nine justices took the view that Trump's executive order was constitutionally prohibited."

Jurecic notes that political scientist Anna O. Law, who focuses on constitutional law and immigration at the City University of New York (CUNY), warned, "Trump v. Barbara was not a win; it was a reprieve." And the legal expert points out that after the ruling was handed down, Trump administration officials wasted no time talking about ways to get the decision reversed. Vice President JD Vance, for example, told Fox News' Laura Ingraham, "We have to keep fighting, because we actually have an opportunity to reverse this decision."

"A month later, the White House announced a second, narrower executive order purporting to restrict certain limited categories of people from birthright citizenship, such as children born to members of legally designated foreign terrorist groups," Jurecic explains. "The new order also appears largely unconstitutional, and is more a howl of frustration than a serious effort to pare back the Supreme Court's ruling in Barbara. But it signals that MAGA's assault on the 14th Amendment is far from over. And the right already has a proven model for how to overturn a Supreme Court ruling, one more careful and systematic than a single executive order: the campaign against Roe v. Wade."

Jurecic notes that the conservative legal movement, "never regarded Roe as the final word on abortion" — and similarly, the "MAGA movement does not regard Trump v. Barbara as the final word on birthright citizenship."

"The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment makes a simple guarantee: 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States,'" Jurecic writes. "The country ratified the amendment in 1868 as a response to the Dred Scott decision, which had barred Black Americans from citizenship ... The Supreme Court reaffirmed the 14th Amendment's meaning 30 years later in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in which it upheld the citizenship of a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents…. Despite this history of opposition, Trump lacked any real legal foothold for his executive order — a precarious position to be in as the Supreme Court prepared to hear the case."

Jurecic continues, "Fortunately for Trump, a small group of right-leaning law professors busied themselves with the work of casting doubt on the question that judges in the lower courts — and, for more than 150 years, nearly every other expert — had found so clear ... 'Conservatives should attack Barbara with 'the model that dismantled Roe,' the conservative strategist Rachel Bovard wrote in First Things, a right-leaning religious publication. 'Trump v. Barbara must act as a litmus test for every future conservative nominee.'"