President Donald Trump is probably correct when he predicts he will lose the birthright citizenship case. But his Supreme Court analysis could otherwise use some work.
In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, the president called the tariffs case he lost in February “an unnecessary and expensive slap in the face to the U.S.A., and a giant victory for its opponents. If they rule against our Country on Birthright Citizenship, which they probably will, it will be even worse, if that’s possible.”
In a sign of his fixation, Trump attended the birthright citizenship hearing earlier this month, an apparent first for a sitting president. When he sat before the justices, he seemed to pick up on the same takeaway as other observers: The high court seems poised to strike down his executive order, which purports to redefine what it means to be an American citizen. The court’s decision is expected later in the spring or early summer.
Even before the April 1 hearing, the president discussed the case negatively in the same breath as the tariffs case, further suggesting that he has long known the citizenship appeal will likely join the tariffs dispute as another rare, but significant, defeat for his administration at the court.
Yet the president continues to marvel at how he lost the tariffs case, and will likely lose the citizenship case, at a court where six of the nine justices were appointed by Republicans, three of whom were appointed by him.
It’s in that marveling that his analysis starts to unravel.
“How can the Democrats not like how the U.S. Supreme Court votes,” he wrote in the same post, adding, “The Democrat Justices stick together like glue, NEVER failing to wander from the warped and perverse policies, ideas, and cases put before them. They ALWAYS vote as a group, or BLOCK, even that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench (Sleepy Joe!). The Republican Justices don’t stick together, they give the Democrats win after win.”
As for how Democrats could not like how the Supreme Court votes, where to start?
The Dobbs case that overturned Roe v. Wade comes to mind. The case that granted Trump broad criminal immunity is another. There are the court’s serial pro-Trump interventions on the shadow docket. The list goes on, making the question not “how can Democrats not like this court?” but “how can a man who’s been so lucky at the court overall be so ungrateful?”
Nor is it true that the three Democratic-appointed justices always vote together. There have been several intra-Democratic splits of late, many of them coming from solo outings by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Biden appointee whom the president called “Low IQ” without naming her, continuing a pattern of lobbing that attempted insult at Black women and others.
As it happens, Jackson “found her way to the bench” after graduating from Harvard Law School, clerking on the Supreme Court and working at top law firms, as a federal public defender and on the U.S. sentencing commission. She was a federal district and appellate judge in Washington before she joined the high court.
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