- 7/15/2025
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that federal courts exceeded their authority by issuing a nationwide injunction on President Trump's birthright citizenship order. We look at what that means for the future of birthright citizenship and other Trump policies that have been challenged by the courts. And of course, Can't Let It Go.
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00:00Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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00:15Hi, this is Kristen in Washington, D.C.
00:19I'm enjoying a quiet night at home with my dog.
00:21After spending some time in Wisconsin celebrating my parents' 50th anniversary with all of our family and many of their close friends.
00:30This podcast was recorded at 1.24 p.m. on Friday, June 27th.
00:36Things may have changed by the time you listen to this podcast, but my parents will still be in love.
00:41Enjoy the show.
00:45That is very sweet.
00:47Dogs, Wisconsin, amazing.
00:50I don't know how many couples can say that they're still in love after 50 years, but my parents are at 49 just yesterday.
00:58Well, you'd better start planning a party.
00:59My brother and I were talking about what are we going to do for the next year, and my dad's already cranky about it.
01:03And he's like, I don't want to do anything.
01:04Maybe a dinner.
01:07Like, too bad.
01:08Hey there.
01:09It's the NPR Politics Podcast.
01:11I'm Tamara Keith.
01:11I cover the White House.
01:13I'm Carrie Johnson.
01:14I cover the Justice Department.
01:15And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
01:18Today, the conservative 6-3 majority on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal courts likely exceeded their authority by issuing nationwide injunctions.
01:28The decision came in a case challenging President Trump's executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship.
01:35And in a press conference this morning, Trump called the ruling a monumental victory.
01:39I was elected on a historic mandate, but in recent months, we've seen a handful of radical left judges effectively try to overrule the rightful powers of the president to stop the American people from getting the policies that they voted for in record numbers.
01:56We're going to break down what that means for the future of this particular case and for other Trump administration policies that are currently tied up in court injunctions.
02:06Carrie, let's start with the basics.
02:07What did the court ruling say?
02:10A conservative supermajority of the court, all six conservative justices, ruled that these kinds of nationwide injunctions, which have served as a check on President Trump's executive orders and agenda this year, that they likely exceed the power that Congress has given to federal courts.
02:28And the immediate impact is going to be that the Justice Department is very likely to go back into court and seek to lift or change the terms of a lot of these injunctions that have been in place since January or February on a bunch of different kinds of Trump policies.
02:45Now, the Supreme Court majority, led by Amy Coney Barrett, said that the analysis could be slightly different when it comes to state power and state action, in part because this underlying issue of birthright citizenship is so important to people and so important to states.
03:03States have all these entitlement programs and systems and processes for registering people's birth certificates and acknowledging birth.
03:11And to the extent to which somebody could be born in one state and be a citizen and then travel to another state and not be a citizen, that's kind of a no-go.
03:21And so it's possible that with respect to this birthright citizenship executive order, states could come back into court and get some kind of relief that would help a whole bunch more people.
03:33But in a lot of other cases involving these universal or nationwide injunctions, the Supreme Court has said they're really, really heavily disfavored now.
03:41Now, we should say that President Trump is not the first president to be stymied by these universal injunctions.
03:48Many presidents have been frustrated by them as they've tried to exercise their executive authority.
03:53Yes. And we've heard a lot from President Obama and President Biden and President Trump in his first term about how frustrated they were when a single judge somewhere around the country could try to set policy or at least temporarily block the president from doing something he wanted to do.
04:11The difference in this case is that while a lot of presidents have complained about it, this is the first time the Supreme Court has decided to take up the issue.
04:20And they did it relatively early in President Trump's term on the emergency docket.
04:26And now they have ruled very, very strongly in his favor.
04:30Yeah. And there were a host of things, as Kerry mentions, that, you know, Obama and Biden were upset about.
04:35Clearly, there's been a thing that's increased over the years, having these nationwide injunctions.
04:39Biden was stymied on things like immigration, equal protection, health care, student loans, financial regulation and on.
04:46Now, there weren't as many nationwide injunctions against Biden.
04:48The left would argue that that's because there were more objectionable things and more broad sweeping actions that Trump had taken.
04:55But this certainly clears the way and opens a floodgate somewhat for Trump, who's been really trying to test the limits in this second term to figure out how far he can go.
05:05And he's had such sweeping executive orders, more executive orders than past presidents.
05:09And that's why so many of these ended up in court.
05:12And now the president is going to feel like he can do basically as much as he wants, whatever he wants on any subject he wants.
05:19And that's part of what these liberal justices who were dissenting were so concerned about.
05:24So Justice Sonia Sotomayor basically said no right is going to be safe under the system the majority creates.
05:30And Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson actually set up this idea that if you if you have to go to court to make sure the executive branch doesn't tamper with your fundamental rights, that's a fundamental threat to the rule of law, an existential threat to the rule of law, because not everybody is going to be able to get to court quickly or find lawyers.
05:51And in the meantime, the executive branch can largely get its way.
05:56And it's expensive for normal people.
05:57I mean, most normal people don't want to end up in court having to say, oh, God, I got to hire a lawyer is super expensive.
06:03And Trump has gone after these law firms that were taking pro bono cases to do that stuff for free for people whose rights might have been affected.
06:11Kerry, it may be too soon to know the answer to it, but I need to ask, what does this mean in practice?
06:16What does this mean if there is someone who is not in this country legally right now who is about to give birth to a child?
06:23The first thing to know is that the Supreme Court has stayed the effect of its ruling for 30 days.
06:28So that gives the lower courts and plaintiffs some time to regroup.
06:33The second thing to know is that state attorneys general from places like New Jersey and Massachusetts have ongoing litigation in the lower courts about this already.
06:42And every judge who's considered this question of the constitutionality of this birthright citizenship executive order has agreed with states and plaintiffs and ruled against the Trump administration.
06:56In other words, it's been basically settled law for 150 years that the vast majority of babies born on American soil are American citizens with only a few teeny tiny limited exceptions.
07:08And so the state attorneys general feel somewhat confident that they will win even with this ruling by the Supreme Court when the case gets back to the lower courts because it's such a fundamental issue and a rule otherwise would produce such chaos for parents and for states.
07:27As we've said, birthright citizenship is not the only Trump executive action that has been caught up in the courts with these broad injunctions.
07:35So what other issues will be affected by this ruling?
07:39There are a number of other cases to which this might apply involving Trump's efforts to shrink the federal workforce, some of his actions on immigration and his ability to fire folks at agencies in the government.
07:54We talked with Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
07:59Here's what she had to say.
08:00I think this is fairly momentous, not because it addresses the substance of the birthright citizenship executive order, it doesn't do that, but because it addresses this question of universal or nationwide injunctions, which are an essential tool for those challenging lawless executive action or executive action, I think exceeds executive power.
08:19And as a result of this decision, now, while individual plaintiffs could win relief, each and every person affected would have to sue in order to get relief.
08:29And in other words, an administration that's violating the law could lose a case and yet nonetheless apply the policy across the nation.
08:37Yeah, and I think it really just highlights the fact that, you know, so much of what the people who oppose Trump, whether it's the left or other sort of more traditional mainstream Republicans, have tried to do is to try to stop Trump through the courts.
08:48And it just looks like now that's just not going to be the case.
08:52All right, we're going to take a quick break and we will have more on this in a moment.
08:55Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
09:02RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege, but a right.
09:08Learn more at rwjf.org.
09:13And we're back.
09:15And this is clearly a very big win for President Trump.
09:19A question I have for you is what avenues are left for people who want to challenge Trump's executive actions?
09:28There are a bunch of things that people could do.
09:31One is that every old buddy who's affected by something would have to find a lawyer and go to court.
09:37And groups like Democracy Forward, who have been very active in suing the Trump administration this year, say they're going to do just that.
09:45And the other thing that people could do is seek to file class action lawsuits.
09:50The problem with that or the challenge with that is that sometimes it's hard to get everybody to sign into the class.
09:56And it can take some time before courts recognize that group of plaintiffs.
10:00And in the meantime, some people's rights could be violated.
10:04And in the medium term, there's political activism.
10:06I mean, you know, the courts are something that the left and others who oppose Trump have tried to use to be able to stop what he's doing in the short term, certainly, and they hope in the long term.
10:17But, you know, there's the 2026 midterm elections.
10:20This becomes sort of another notch up in the power of the executive at a time when Congress has continually sort of taken a step back from trying to assert its power in the balance of power.
10:34I mean, I think that it just depends on, you know, the types of things that people in Congress have priorities over.
10:41And we've seen, I think, more, you could argue, Republicans in the second Trump term are more Trumpy.
10:49There are far fewer people who are willing to stand up to this president.
10:53I continue to look back at the 10 Republicans who voted for Trump's impeachment.
10:58And only two of them are left in Congress because the others were targeted.
11:02There's no incentive for these folks to take a stand against the president when they disagree or think he's gone too far.
11:09So they're more likely now than they were in the first term to roll out the red carpet for the president and allow him to do what he wants to do.
11:16And, Kerry, is the Supreme Court here, and I think arguably with some other rulings that we've seen in the past couple of years, are they putting the scales in favor of the executive?
11:27I think a number of these justices worked in the executive branch at different levels, from people like John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh to others of the justices.
11:38And it's certainly the case that they have a really strong view of executive power, and they've asserted that in their decisions.
11:47The other thing that this Supreme Court majority has done in the last few years is not only give more power to the executive branch, but also to give more power to itself.
11:58And it clarified here today in this opinion about nationwide injunctions that the executive branch needs to follow the judgments and opinions of the Supreme Court itself while limiting the ability of lower court judges to check the executive branch.
12:13You know, the Supreme Court has given Trump other kinds of powers before he even became president, you know, saying that he was essentially immune from any criminal prosecution as long as it was functioning within his official acts, which is basically everything that a president does or tries to do.
12:29So he's gotten much stronger, and we're only, you know, several months into this Trump presidency.
12:36A lot of this is laying the foundation for what's to come.
12:39We still have three and a half years left of the Trump presidency.
12:42He's trying to figure out what the guardrails are, and the guardrails are largely off the highway at this point.
12:46This isn't really a guardrail, but in terms of public opinion, President Trump talks about a mandate, an overwhelming mandate for these policies, that he is doing the work that he was elected to do by the American people.
13:02What does that mandate look like?
13:04And in particular, what does it look like on birthright citizenship and ending it?
13:07Yeah, I was going to say, I'll put a pause on the mandate question writ large for a second and look more specifically at birthright citizenship.
13:15There was an NPR-Ipsos poll last month that showed 53% of people supported continuing birthright citizenship for people born in the country.
13:24Only 28% said that they think that it should end.
13:2717% didn't know.
13:29Now, that could mean that there's a potential ability to gain, you know, through messaging some of those folks over.
13:36And that 53%, by the way, looks an awful lot like the president's disapproval rating writ large.
13:41So, you know, it's not as clean cut as saying, oh, it's a 15-point advantage or 25-point advantage for that side of things.
13:50There was a similar poll by YouGov in February that showed a 51-39 split on this with 9% of people not sure on whether or not they think that birthright citizenship should continue.
14:06So, in general, you might say tip of the scale goes to those who believe that birthright citizenship should continue.
14:13So, he doesn't exactly have a huge mandate on this issue.
14:16We've also seen his immigration policies get more unpopular.
14:21You know, he started off where it was relatively popular because people were frustrated with the record number of people coming across the border during the Biden administration.
14:29But with what Trump's tried to do in saying that his focus was going to be on criminals, which has big support, to then now moving into places like Los Angeles where you're scooping up landscapers, that has a lot less support in the polls.
14:42As far as this idea that Trump continues to say, and he's said repeatedly since his election, that he has a mandate because he won the election.
14:50He had this sweeping, you know, electoral college victory.
14:52Well, I mean, he only won the popular vote by one and a half percentage points.
14:57That is not exactly a sweeping mandate.
14:59It was not even 50% of the vote.
15:01And when you look more deeply into this, and there was a Pew Validated Voters study that came out this week that showed that when you take all of the people who voted, 64% of eligible voters voted.
15:13But if you were to take everyone, that means that Trump only won 32% of all of the eligible voters in this country.
15:20Harris only won 31%.
15:21So, not much of a mandate for anybody for exactly what everyone wants in this country.
15:26I think we're going to have to talk about that more another time.
15:29We're going to take a quick break, and then it's time for Can't Let It Go.
15:36And we're back, and it's time for Can't Let It Go, the part of the show where we talk about the things from the week that we just can't stop thinking about, politics or otherwise.
15:45And after this week of news, we have earned it.
15:48Domenico, what can't you let go of?
15:50We go on air pretty early sometimes, all three of us.
15:54Yes.
15:54We get wake-up calls sometimes, right?
15:57We also get wake-up calls, you might remember them, when you're in hotels, and you might be in a different place.
16:03And you say, I want to start out my vacation early.
16:06I want to make sure I get up so that you have the front desk give you a wake-up call.
16:09Usually, that's on the phone.
16:11There's a hotel in China that's doing a very different kind of wake-up call.
16:15And this involves red pandas, where people are able to say that they want a wake-up call, where red pandas are unleashed into your room and are allowed to get onto your bed.
16:29I mean, that'll wake you up, right?
16:33I have a lot of questions.
16:34I don't know.
16:35Are red pandas friendly?
16:36I have no idea.
16:37All I know is there was one in D.C. that escaped and was stealing stuff from people.
16:41Remember that?
16:41Yeah, but it didn't hurt anybody.
16:43It didn't hurt anybody.
16:43It was cute.
16:44It had a really bushy tail.
16:45They are really cute.
16:45They're red also.
16:46These are not the big black pandas that everyone sees that could destroy you.
16:51These are like little tiny, not tiny, but they're, you know.
16:54They're like a dog size.
16:56Like a raccoon size.
16:56Yeah, like a raccoon size.
16:57Now, this hotel was actually ordered to halt its wake-up call service by their local forestry bureau that said that they could no longer do this.
17:08But I guess it seemed fun for a while.
17:11Yeah, and probably also maybe good sanitation would tell you not to let wild animals lose in people's hotel rooms, but whatever.
17:21So, Tam, what can't you let go of?
17:23So, we haven't actually covered this on the podcast yet this week because there has been so much other news.
17:28But President Trump went to the NATO summit and something unusual happened.
17:36NATO Secretary General Mark Ruta seemed to refer maybe to President Trump as daddy.
17:45They're not going to be fighting each other.
17:46They've had it.
17:48They've had a big fight, like two kids in a schoolyard.
17:50You know, they fight like hell.
17:52You can't stop them.
17:53Let them fight for about two or three minutes.
17:55Then it's easier to stop them.
17:56And then daddy has to sometimes use strong language.
17:59You have to use strong language.
18:00Every once in a while, you have to use a certain word.
18:02And the context is that earlier in the week, President Trump dropped an F-bomb while talking about Iran and Israel.
18:09Okay, so that happened.
18:10A little awkward.
18:12Then President Trump has a press conference and a reporter asks him about it, which then makes this news cycle continue going.
18:20And he says, like, oh, yeah, he's very affectionate.
18:24He likes me very much.
18:25So, press conference ends.
18:28President Trump gets on the plane, flies home.
18:31Ten o'clock at night, the White House drops this video into its Instagram feed, which is like slow motion video of President Trump at the NATO summit to this song.
18:45The graphic says daddy's home.
18:52It was weird.
18:53Well, you know, social media teams have to social media, I suppose.
18:58I feel like there's a lot more the internet could do with that.
19:00And I was, I think probably has.
19:03The internet has done a lot.
19:05Yeah.
19:05I was just going to say.
19:07I'm still stuck on the F-bomb and I can't get over that.
19:10So, yeah.
19:11Yeah.
19:11Well, it was quite the couple days with presidential language.
19:16Yeah.
19:17Carrie, what can't you let go of?
19:19I, too, have an animal.
19:21Can't let it go.
19:22I'm sorry.
19:23I'm sorry.
19:24But I really, you'll understand why this is so relevant to our interests.
19:28Okay.
19:29So, in the United Kingdom, two young bears named Mish and Lucy escaped from their enclosure, found the honey supply for an entire week, scarfed down the entire honey supply for an entire week, and then basically passed out sleeping.
19:51Because why wouldn't you after you ate all the sugar to your heart's content?
19:57Well, did they get stuck?
19:59Like Pooh Bear?
20:00No.
20:01No, they did not get stuck.
20:02They were corralled back into their enclosure, and they promptly went to bed.
20:07And I'm telling you right now that after the Newsweek we have had, this is my plan for the weekend.
20:13I am going to find the chocolate ice cream and put on the bear and fall asleep.
20:20The bear, the television show.
20:21The bear, the TV show.
20:21Not the Chicago-based television show.
20:25Thank you for clarifying.
20:26That is a show that makes me want to eat and cook because it's amazing to see the dishes they make.
20:33I did make that omelet, by the way.
20:35Potato chips on soft things really works well.
20:40It's a texture thing.
20:41Yeah, it's a texture thing.
20:41It's a good thing.
20:42Absolutely.
20:43All right.
20:43We are going to leave it there for today.
20:46Our executive producer is Mathani Maturi.
20:48Casey Murrell edits the podcast.
20:50Our producer is Bria Suggs.
20:51Special thanks to Krishnadev Kallamer and Lexi Shepiddle.
20:55I'm Tamara Keith.
20:55I cover the White House.
20:57I'm Carrie Johnson.
20:58I cover the Justice Department.
20:59And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
21:02And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.
21:05Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
21:18RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege,
21:23but a right.
21:24Learn more at rwjf.org.
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