Trump’s HUMILIATION： Supreme Court deals LOSS in citizenship case

Final day for the Supreme Court term. We got several major rulings, including on money in politics. That's coming up. But we begin with the clear and final loss for Trump on a key issue, the justices flatly rejecting his infamous bid to try to rewrite the Constitution and change the very definition of citizenship in this country. Now, to remind you, Trump had launched a hail Mary on this issue in his second term, the kind of thing that he didn't even try in the first term, and that was not going to work if the law were applied, because he wanted to see if he could get away with just writing his own executive order and canceling part of the Constitution to ban birthright citizenship. Now, this was dead on arrival by any legal logic, because presidents can't just override the Constitution. Otherwise, it would be a meaningless document. Trump critics noting that he had wasted a lot of time and legal capital leading up to this loser of a case and this loss today with a court rebuke that made waves. The Supreme Court has just handed down a second major decision this morning, this one on birthright citizenship. Emphatically rejecting the president's attempt with an executive order to redefine what it means to be a citizen in this country. For more than 100 years, the rule has been simple. If you're born in America, you are an American, and it looks like that won't change. So as we celebrate today's ruling, I have a message for President Trump. You may try to redefine what it means to be an American, and you will fail. Today the Constitution won. The American people won. A major loss. So what are we doing here? Well, I'm going to walk you through it. This is not one of those cases that's super complicated or requires a lot of legal intrigue. This loss for Trump means that current citizenship rights hold. So there's actually no change. He was trying to change things in a manner that was flatly unlawful, and he failed. So if someone's born in this country, they are a citizen. And that's, by the way, the core promise of America, a citizenship which is not bound by a test of, say, heritage or race or religion, which we've seen historically in some parts of the world, but rather that American promise, that thing that we talk about that wasn't always perfectly executed, but was the promise and the Statue of Liberty talk and the Nation of Immigrants talk. All of that being built on the idea that if you're born here, you're a citizen here, period. Republican-appointed chief justice writing today, citizenship was the right to have rights, freely participate in our political community. The framers extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today. That was always going to be the only logical legal outcome for this case. If the court did its job just to apply, first, the plain language and meaning of the Constitution, and second, past precedents, because if you're wondering as you watch the news, is this a new thing? Have we ever looked into this? We have in many different details. Other cases were somewhat more nuanced because we didn't have a president trying to just cancel the Constitution this way. But if the courts do what I'm telling you is their job, look at the plain meaning of the law and prior precedents, this was never close. In fact, it's kind of striking that this court even took the case. In a different era, it might have simply let stand lower courts ruling against a blatantly unlawful executive order. How did we get here? If you're doing the count here on the last day of the term, the majority was six. So even though there's a majority of Republican appointees on the court, they're going against a Republican president. As you see there, three Republicans and three Democratic appointees in the majority ruling against Trump. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, as you see, went so far as to dissent and make what are basically legally fantastical claims that they would actually support a president being able to unilaterally change the Constitution. They would allow Trump, they say, by executive fiat to essentially end birthright citizenship. And if you're wondering, gosh, would they let a President Obama or a future President AOC slash out parts of the Constitution that they don't like for their ideological reasons? Well, that's why so many members of this court face a consistency, credibility, and sometimes self-dealing corruption crisis. They're not credible. Some of them. Now if you dive into the details, there was also some debate about whether this citizenship right is actually rooted in the Constitution. And I will read you that passage in a moment to remind you. But a debate over whether it's there or is it rooted in some other branch of government. Kavanaugh said, well, maybe Congress could enact new legislation establishing exceptions to this very citizenship that the court upheld. Now on the one hand, that could be a kind of music. Maybe Congress can do something. But in what's going on today, and that coming from a Trump appointee, it also could be read as kind of the court upholding a law, a rule, while also brainstorming how a MAGA Congress could help undo the very thing they're upholding. And judges aren't really supposed to do that. Again, as I'm saying, to be as fair as possible, it kind of depends on how you interpret what Kavanaugh wrote. But I can tell you that the president who appointed him, Donald Trump, today saw it that way, posting about that very idea, which is also probably dead on arrival in this Congress, which is now adjourned. But Trump has been invested in this case from the start. He even attended oral arguments, which he can choose to do, but it's a rarity for presidents. We can now report today for the first time that he was sitting in and watching his own loss, because he badly lost this case with Trump appointees voting against him, something we know he seems to take personally, even though the whole point is it's not supposed to go by just party or appointment. So the court is upholding the Constitution on this issue tonight. Now, I told you this one's pretty clear. I'll remind you the words. You might have seen them in school or in the news. All persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens of the U.S. Doesn't leave a lot of room for miscommunication. If you are born or naturalized here, you're a citizen here. Jurisdiction thereof is the legalese about the fact that you are under the jurisdiction of the place that you are. The Chief Justice, and this is kind of as close as you'll get as shade or a kind of a diss from judges who are notoriously pretty careful, even when they're sparring with each other, the Chief Justice, in a sign of basically shading how off the Trump argument was, said, well, if you want to know what that means, just read it. And he quoted it verbatim in the ruling today. Children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the U.S. are under the Constitution citizens at birth. In other words, sometimes I've told you politics can feel like a lot of people debating a book that they haven't read. It's like a book club. We haven't done the reading. Internet politics can certainly feel like that sometimes, but also if you go to a dinner or a barbecue, you're like, wait, what do they know? What do they think? And sometimes that problem reaches all the way up to the Supreme Court, where what I'm telling you, not my view, not some critics view, but the majority of the courts sign onto that opinion, including the Republican Chief Justice, and they're basically shading Trump and his three would-be enablers in dissent to say, if you read the Constitution, we wouldn't even be here today.