SCOTUS Says Laws Don't Count Until You Sue

They're not saying Trump can break the law. They're just saying no one can stop him.

On Friday the Supreme Court blew up birthright citizenship, a right guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment and confirmed 127 years ago by the Supreme Court.

Well, to be fair, they had to do it. The alternative was forcing President Trump to obey the law, and these conservative justices are not about that!

On the last day of the term, the Court dropped six (mostly-terrible) opinions, including Trump v. CASA, a challenge to Executive Order 14160, euphemistically titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship. The order instructs every government agency to deny social security numbers and passports to the children of non-citizens born in America.

That is flagrantly unconstitutional, and district court judges in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Washington immediately issued nationwide injunctions blocking it from going into effect. Appellate courts for the First, Fourth, and Ninth Circuits uniformly declined to stay those lower court orders, reasoning that the government can’t suffer an injury — let alone an “irreparable” one necessary to justify staying a court order — from being unable to break the law.

And so the Trump administration used another of the Supreme Court’s priorities as a sort of Trojan Horse to smuggle in its illegal executive order. Instead of requesting a ruling on the legality of birthright citizenship, it couched its motion to stay as a challenge to nationwide executive orders, a target of conservatives since they cemented their stranglehold on the Supreme Court.

“The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett tut-tutted sanctimoniously, expressing her dismay at a judicial tool in wide use since 1913.

This is a bit much coming after four years in which conservatives filed dozens of lawsuits in Texas, securing nationwide injunctions blocking everything from medication abortion drugs to student loan relief, with nary a peep of protest from the Court’s conservatives. But when you’ve jettisoned stare decisis, consistency is hardly a concern.