The Supreme Court seemed poised Wednesday to reject President Donald Trump’s restrictions on birthright citizenship in a momentous case that was magnified by his unparalleled presence in the courtroom.I don't want to give this Court credit for good faith. I think it's possible that Jamelle Bouie is right: the Court looks at mass protests against Trump -- or, more likely, his increasingly dreadful polling -- and doesn't feel inclined to treat him as the embodiment of the nation's beliefs, at a time when a significant percentage of the big brains in the right-wing legal community still support birthright citizenship.
Conservative and liberal justices questioned whether Trump’s order declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens comports with either the Constitution or federal law.
It's also possible that the Court's Republicans believe that a ruling against birthright citizenship could drive Hispanic and Asian voters into the arms of the Democratic Party, possibly for a generation or more. The right-wing billionaires whose interests the Court serves certainly don't want that to happen.
So we dodged a bullet, at least for now. But unless Democrats in the future find a way to rebalance this court, I assume we'll be right back here in twenty or thirty years, and the next time we may not get so lucky.
No comments:
Post a Comment