Supreme Court to review WA challenge to Trump birthright citizenship order

The U.S. Supreme Court announced Thursday it will hold oral arguments to review a case in which Washington has successfully blocked President Donald Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship.

The court, in scheduling the oral arguments for May 15, allowed the nationwide hold on Trump’s executive order — initially issued by a federal judge in Seattle — to remain in effect.

Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office, Jan. 20, attempting to revoke birthright citizenship — the idea, spelled out in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, that every person born in the United States is an American citizen.

Washington, represented by Attorney General Nick Brown and joined by three other states, sued the next day, attempting to block the order.

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown speaks to the media outside federal court in Seattle after a Feb. 6 hearing to fight President Trump’s executive order rescinding birthright citizenship. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)

Brown, through a spokesperson, declined to comment Thursday morning, saying he was still reviewing the court’s order.

On Jan. 23, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, blocked Trump’s order from taking effect, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”

In a later hearing, in which he extended his block on the order, Coughenour was even more blistering in his criticism of the administration’s actions.

“To our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals, the rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore,” Coughenour said in February, reading from the bench. “The Constitution is not something with which the government may pIay policy games. If the government wants to change the exceptional American grant of birthright citizenship, it needs to amend the Constitution itself.”

Every other court that has heard a related case — as other states, individuals and organizations have sued — has reached a similar conclusion. Four federal courts have all independently blocked Trump’s order from going into effect. The administration has appealed most of those rulings. All three appellate courts that have been asked to weigh in have declined to change the lower courts’ rulings.

The Supreme Court’s brief order Thursday consolidates three separate legal challenges to Trump’s executive order and schedules an hour of oral arguments for May 15. It’s unclear if lawyers from Brown’s office — or from the other cases — would participate in oral arguments. In arguments in lower courts, Brown’s office has been represented by Lane Polozola, an assistant attorney general.

The Trump administration, in its appeal, has asked the Supreme Court to weigh in not on the constitutionality of its effort to end birthright citizenship, but on whether the lower courts’ rulings should apply nationwide.

The administration has asked the Supreme Court to narrow the lower courts’ rulings so that they apply only to the individual plaintiffs in the cases. This would allow the administration to rescind birthright citizenship from babies who are born here but aren’t named parties in the litigation.

“These injunctions exceed the district courts’ authority under Article III and gravely encroach on the President’s executive power,” Trump’s solicitor general wrote of the lower court orders. “This Court’s intervention is urgently needed to restore the constitutional balance of separated powers.”

Brown, in a brief to the Supreme Court, wrote that, for more than a century, “it has been the settled view of this Court, Congress, the Executive Branch and legal scholars that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause guarantees citizenship to babies born in the United States regardless of their parents’ citizenship.”

If the administration prevails in this interim fight, Brown wrote, thousands of children would be stripped of citizenship while the cases play out in court.

The court, he wrote, should preserve “the guarantee of birthright citizenship as it has long existed: A uniform right that applies nationwide and is beyond the President’s power to destroy.”

David Gutman, The Seattle Times