Trump visits Supreme Court for birthright case

What happened

Donald Trump yesterday became the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court, sitting in the audience for an hour as Solicitor General John Sauer defended Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship. Justices across the board appeared skeptical of his efforts to unilaterally reinterpret the 14th Amendment and decades of federal law, and Trump left shortly after the ACLU’s Cecillia Wang began defending the citizenship rights of children born in the U.S.

Who said what

If a “president known for shattering norms and grabbing public attention intended to make the day about himself,” The Washington Post said, he wound up being “a silent observer, along with several hundred others” including Attorney General Pam Bondi and actor Robert De Niro. And “if, as some legal experts said, Trump was trying to intimidate the justices, the tactic is unlikely to work,” The Associated Press said.

The justices, “even among the conservative supermajority, seemed inclined to strike down his policy,” Quinta Jurecic said at The Atlantic. But “the fact that this case got as far as it did — and that the justices had to consider it seriously enough to spend their time rebuking it — is itself a scandal.”

What next?

The Supreme Court is expected to rule in the case, Trump v. Barbara, by early summer.

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