Supreme Court Limits Nation-wide Injunctions
A correct but disturbing ruling.
Nina Totenberg, NPR (“Supreme Court limits nationwide injunctions in birthright citizenship order“):
The Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines on Friday sided with the Trump administration’s request to limit universal injunctions issued by federal courts. The opinion in the birthright citizenship case was highly anticipated.
At issue was how the lower courts should handle President Trump’s executive order, which declared that the children of parents who enter the U.S. illegally or on a temporary visa are not entitled to automatic citizenship.
The majority opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, didn’t rule on whether Trump’s executive order violates the 14th Amendment or the Nationality Act. Instead, it focused on whether federal courts have the power to issue nationwide blocks.
“Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts,” the conservative majority said. “The Court grants the Government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.”
Friday’s opinion asked the lower courts to reconsider their broad rulings in light of the Supreme Court’s opinion and otherwise “with principles of equity.” However, the opinion also said Trump’s birthright citizenship order can’t take effect for 30 days from Friday’s opinion, giving more time for legal challenges.
In and of itself, the ruling is not only what I expected but seems reasonable. Nationwide injunctions are a relatively recent phenomenon, and they’ve grown in scale tremendously in very recent years. It’s incredibly easy to forum shop, targeting jurisdictions where a ruling is almost guaranteed to go in one’s desired direction—in some cases, down to knowing which individual district court judge will hear the case because there’s only one.
At the same time, there needs to be a way to halt egregiously unlawful presidential orders like this one without each individual impacted being forced to file a lawsuit. I’ve offered several solutions to this, ranging from having appellate courts automatically hear such cases regardless of whether the administration appeals to requiring such cases to be filed in the DC Circuit to (my personal favorite) creating a special Constitutional Court for such matters. Eliminating the power of lower court judges to issue nationwide injunctions—which I agree with—without some alternative mechanism, though, is madness.
The NYT’s Charlie Savage warns, “With Supreme Court Ruling, Another Check on Trump’s Power Fades.”
[T]he diminishing of judicial authority as a potential counterweight to exercises of presidential power carries implications far beyond the issue of citizenship. The Supreme Court is effectively tying the hands of lower-court judges at a time when they are trying to respond to a steady geyser of aggressive executive branch orders and policies.
The ability of district courts to swiftly block Trump administration actions from being enforced in the first place has acted as a rare effective check on his second-term presidency. But generally, the pace of the judicial process is slow and has struggled to keep up. Actions that already took place by the time a court rules them illegal, like shutting down an agency or sending migrants to a foreign prison without due process, can be difficult to unwind.
[…]
Mr. Trump, rejecting norms of self-restraint, has pushed to eliminate checks on his authority and stamp out pockets of independence within the government while only rarely encountering resistance from a Supreme Court he reshaped and a Congress controlled by a party in his thrall.
The decision by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority comes as other constraints on Mr. Trump’s power have also eroded. The administration has steamrolled internal executive branch checks, including firing inspectors general and sidelining the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which traditionally set guardrails for proposed policies and executive orders.
Mr. Trump, rejecting norms of self-restraint, has pushed to eliminate checks on his authority and stamp out pockets of independence within the government while only rarely encountering resistance from a Supreme Court he reshaped and a Congress controlled by a party in his thrall.
The decision by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority comes as other constraints on Mr. Trump’s power have also eroded. The administration has steamrolled internal executive branch checks, including firing inspectors general and sidelining the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which traditionally set guardrails for proposed policies and executive orders.
[…]
But while the immediate beneficiary of the Supreme Court’s ruling is Mr. Trump, the decision also promises to free his successors from what has been a growing trend of district court intervention into presidential policymaking.
In the citizenship case, the justices stripped district court judges of the authority to issue so-called universal injunctions, a tool that lower courts have used to block government actions they deem most likely illegal from taking effect nationwide as legal challenges to them play out.
The frequency of such orders has sharply increased in recent years, bedeviling presidents of both parties. Going forward, the justices said, lower courts may only grant injunctive relief to the specific plaintiffs who have filed lawsuits.
That means the Trump administration may start enforcing Mr. Trump’s birthright citizenship order in the 28 states that have not challenged it, unless individual parents have the wherewithal and gumption to bring their own lawsuits.
[…]
In a rare move that signaled unusually intense opposition, Justice Sonia Sotomayor read aloud a summary of her dissenting opinion from the bench on Friday. Calling the ruling a grave attack on the American system of law, she said it endangered constitutional rights for everyone who is not a party to lawsuits defending them.
“Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship,” she wrote. “Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship. The majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief.”
Justice Sotomayor also said the administration did not ask to entirely halt the multiple injunctions against its order because it knew they were patently illegal, and accused the majority of playing along with that open gamesmanship. She, like the other two justices who joined her dissent, is a Democratic appointee.
All six of the justices who voted to end universal injunctions were Republican appointees, including three Mr. Trump installed on the bench in his first term. The same supermajority has ruled in ways that have enhanced his power in other avenues.
[…]
In a separate concurrence, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson offered a realpolitik take. The majority’s exegesis of what powers Congress understood itself to be granting lower courts when it created them in 1789 was a smoke screen of mind-numbing “legalese,” she wrote, obscuring the question of whether a court can order the executive branch to follow the law.
“In a constitutional republic such as ours, a federal court has the power to order the executive to follow the law — and it must,” she wrote before striking a cautionary note.
“Everyone, from the president on down, is bound by law,” she added. “By duty and nature, federal courts say what the law is (if there is a genuine dispute), and require those who are subject to the law to conform their behavior to what the law requires. This is the essence of the rule of law.”
But Justice Barrett accused her of forgetting that courts, too, must obey legal limits.
“Justice Jackson decries an imperial executive while embracing an imperial judiciary,” Justice Barrett wrote. “No one disputes that the executive has a duty to follow the law. But the judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation — in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the judiciary from doing so.”
In the particular matter of nationwide injunctions, I’m with Barrett. We’ve seen judicial overreach again and again and again. It’s simply absurd that a district court judge should be able to stop presidential action for months at a time as cases wind their way through the appellate process.
But, as Savage notes, this ruling is part of a larger pattern that has greatly expanded Trump’s power while he is brazenly flouting not only norms, as he did in his first administration, but the law and even the Constitution itself. Combined with a flaccid Congress, this stands our entire system of government on its head.
Sotomayor’s warning that, “Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship” seems absurd. Even though one can imagine Democrats who would wish to do these things—especially the first—it’s hard to conceive of one who could get the nomination and win the presidency who actually would. But I guarantee you that this court would not sit idly by and let that happen.
Yet, they nonetheless let a blatantly unconstitutional order ending birthright citizenship stand on the absurdly thin pretext that only the issue of nationwide injunctions, not the matter on which the injunctions were issued, was at stake. Would these six justices have gone along with that charade if gun seizures were at stake? Of course not.
Yes, from 5-6 members of the Supreme Court. But from more than one or two usual suspect lower court judges? Appellate Court judges didn’t incite a terror attack on Congress, steal sensitive govt property, or ship people to a foreign prison camp without due process in defiance of law. Trump did that.
The response from Barrett et al has been to slow walk relief, hang lower court judges out to dry, and unilaterally rewrite the Constitution to make it legal for Trump to crime pursuant to his job duties.
We saw no ominous warnings from Barrett about the horrors of nationwide injunctions when rightwingers were using them to block vaccine mandates, student debt relief, predatory lending rules, abortion pill access, etc.
That the Court will now suddenly require extra steps for this…okay, sure, whatever. But why now? Seems like a stalemate ruling — another example of the MAGA justices buying time, kicking the can down the road while Trump runs amock.
So for Barrett
a) to equate her newfound, conveniently-timed fear of judicial overreach with the Trump overreach she has abetted, and,
b) to lecture Jackson that “No one disputes that the executive has a duty to follow the law,” is typically ludicrous. Barrett, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh dispute Trump has a duty to follow the law. Y’all think we forgot? The ruling was issued a year ago this week lol
Because you assume Sotomayor’s warning is just about Democrats? Would SCOUTS stand by as Trump’s masked ICE goons confiscated guns from East L.A. residents or shutdown Muslim mosques in NYC? Well, the Trump admin has already illegally deported multiple people, deployed US troops against US citizens, and detained American citizens in error.
Yet SCOTUS stands by — stalling, dissembling, enabling — just like they did when Trump faced accountability for attempting a violent coup. Sotomayor’s warning is sensible: it’s already happening. Just under a president from my old party, not Democrats.
I was so upset about this ruling and the LGBT ruling yesterday that I literally decided to drink to try to not think about it, with some success. So I wake up and come to this site, among others of course, and I see this post, and frankly I’m just shocked and even more dishearted. This is just blatant right wing judicial activism of the worst sort, and to try to explain away how there is some legalistic cover or explanation that makes it legitimate is just being purposefully obtuse, and frankly dumb. How many times do we have to thru this exercise with this contempable court and not see it for what it is. Really sad day for otb. So dissappionted.
@DK:
In fairness, the administration appealed this ruling on that particular grounds. I don’t know that the issue has previously been litigated.
@clarkontheweekend: If you look back at previous OTB posts on the matter of nationwide injunctions, three of which are linked above, you’ll see that I’ve been pretty consistent on the issue. Further, it’s one that has pretty strong bipartisan concern. Biden and the Dems were pretty frustrated when forum shopping derailed some of their programs, too.
Or to put it another way, the attempt by the courts to prevent lawlessness, or uphold the the law, is somehow more lawless then the governments prerogative to do lawless things. It’s mind boggling. So ya, go ahead and deport people without due process, deny tem medical care, strip them of their entitled citizenship – all illegal – but go ahead because you’re the executive branch and you should be able to do whatever the f you want. I mean, cmon, what are we talking about here.
@James Joyner:
The response to those frustrations from Barrett and her ilk was to tell Biden to get bent.
But of course now they need to stall, to buy time for themselves and for Trump, so new hoops and obstacles are suddenly needed. Okay, that does not seem unreasonable — but why now? As opposed to the silence that met Biden’s frustrations?
It’s all very convenient from those who swear they are just calling impartial balls and nonpartisan strikes. If the Republican appointees want to be living Constitution activist judges, they should just say that, admit liberal judicial theory was right all along, and stop patronizing us.
@clarkontheweekend:
If you’re a Republican. Biden did not have this luxury.
The Crow & Leo Fixer “Court” should come right out and say all actions are legal that meet the threshold of unnecessary, gratuitous cruelty meant to be inflicted on minorities.
And so it begins.
Groups File Nationwide Class-Action Lawsuit Over Trump Birthright Citizenship Order
I think it’s a case of imperial courts trying to constrain a tyrannical executive. Empires are traditionally, at best and in their own way, fair and consistent, and from Trump down, the Republican party can’t handle the fairness and consistency of empires.
Look at the SC majority. Roberts is a southern neo-Confederate who hates the empire of civil rights. In no way was that man bred for fairness or consistency. Barrett grew up a freaking cult. Her entire life is based on tyranny. Down the line it’s the same with Thomas and Alito, both of them want to crush any cultural dissent. They’re type of people who get really hung up on how tolerant people don’t tolerant intolerance. And Kavanaugh and Goresuch are prep-school lackeys. They’d serve empire, but the empire has 1000s of them, so they went to the other side.
What are the chances the S. Ct. will carve an exception to this ruling next time a Dem. becomes president, perhaps a judicial “major questions.” The point is they could have done this while Biden was president and opted not to. More to the point, if they ever was a shadow docket decision to be issued, this was it, considering the clear language of the constitution.
@James Joyner:
Tis true that your opposition to nationwide injunctions is not new. But the point you make above is the issue. The timing and circumstances of this ruling cannot be separated from this discussion, especially with a king wannabe with a penchant for ”egregiously unlawful presidential orders” right now in the WH. It’s like the Rules Committee for MLB debating tweaks that might make baseball games more fair and interesting to watch, while there’s a team playing six outfielders and sending their DH out to attack baserunners with a bat.
Institutionalists and those who respect norms are being played by an administration that doesn’t give a shit about norms and sees institutions only as obstacles to dominance. The liberal jurists who dissented in this case were correct to anchor their opinions on the real world implications in the here and now, while Justice Barrett spouted platitudes. “No one disputes that the executive has a duty to follow the law“ writes Barrett. What the hell? RIGHT NOW the current executive is disputing his duty to follow the law.
@clarkontheweekend: Yeah, but look at the bright side–the Democratic Left has another “governance lite” issue to run with. Candidates can now decry the damage done to “our concept of citizenship itself” while doing nothing to correct the damage because they need to consider the racist swing voters cohort in order to win.
Now seems like a good time for states to enact gun control legislation, along with a whole host of other laws. Unlike birthright citizenship, gun ownership has very much a single-person impact. If people want to own a machine gun, or any gun, for that matter, they can come to the court one-by-one to argue their case.
@DK:
Well yeah, but they’re not going to. And it wouldn’t help even if they did. Y’all like Star Trek memes here; try “It’s dead Jim; let it go” on for size.
ETA: (re: Scott F.) “No one disputes that the executive has a duty to follow the law“ writes Barrett. What the hell?” Yeah. I laughed out loud when I read that.
Absent another mechanism to deal with things like Trump’s birthright citizenship EO, I strenuously disagree. Barrett would have a point if the actions of a district court judge was the end of it, but it isn’t.
Moreover, if the Court itself wanted to expedite and deal with these issues, it could, but it chooses not to.
Indeed, unless we create a different remedy, and I agree with several in the OP, the system we have at least allows for equal protection under the law for the country if rights are violated. Now the President can do whatever the hell he wants, and then citizens can only get equal relief after possibly years of litigation.
It seems worth noting that these nationwide injunctions were temporary and subject to appeal, which undercuts Barrett’s assertion.
There are some fine points about how this should work in a better-designed system, but Barrett and her colleagues have not made a correction that balances off the power of the courts as much as they have further empowered the executive.
And like with the immunity case, they did so knowing full well that they are empowering a man with clear authoritarian leanings. Maybe some of them are naive, but they are also quite intelligent, making it hard to think that they don’t know what they are doing.
I would note that the underlying issue, the 14th Amendment, could not be clearer in its language, and so Sotomayor is right: this enhances the chances that a president could violate very significant plain-text provisions and maybe get away with it for an extended period, if not indefinitely.
@James, to be clear, we agree on especially the second half of this:
I am persuadable that there are better ways to deal with these issues than nationwide injunctions, but I am less put off by them than you are. But I find the madness you refer to to overwhelm any notion that this is a justified ruling. Context matters, and the conservatives are either blinkered by their abstractions or are onboard with the authoritarian project that is the Trump administration’s theory of the executive.
@Kathy:
That’s really the root problem here, isn’t it.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Can one be naively corrupt? I suppose it’s possible, for instance, that Roberts believes his wife really is worth millions as a legal recruiter on her own merits. I suppose it’s easy for a conservative to want a strong daddy and not understand that emotional slant is coloring one’s decisions. I suppose it’s really easy to see oneself in the meritocratic elite needing to keep the mob in line, for their own good, of course.
At issue before the Court was the nationwide injunction issued by the lower court. The case regarding birthright citizenship will continue through the normal process of trial and appeal. And the decision does not impact the district court’s power to issue an injunction affecting the plaintiffs in the case.
We wouldn’t even be here if activist judges hadn’t wanted to play unelected dictator and make national policy by dictate.
@gVOR10: There is definitely some corruption going on as well, but I think the degree to which something like Robert’s wife’s job does not necessarily influence decision-making the way Thomas’ “friendship” does.
I honestly do think that some of these decisions are the result of long-standing legal theories that may or may not have some intellectual validity, but that are often made in such abstraction from real-world consequences as to equate to dorm-room philosophizing. In my view/experience, conlaw types can often get waaay too immersed in pretzel logic and not see the clear implications of their thinking, such as determining that a given system is imperfect and taking it away without really taking seriously what taking that system away will do.
I have argued before that while it is well and good for the Court to say, as it often does, “Congress should fix this,” without any consideration as to whether Congress will actually fix it. It doesn’t make the Court wrong so much as it makes it irresponsible.
It is like saying that a barrier on a mountain road was erected outside of a given theory of delegated authority to the department of transportation and that it should be immediately removed, and that the town council needs to fix it without acknolwedging that the council is unlikely to do so and people will die as a result but hey! the abstract theory of delegated authority has been served!
Another problem is that a lot of them worked for the executive branch and are predisposed to favor it.
And some of them are clearly authoritarians.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I find this baffling myself, if the ultimate objective of these jurists is to advance their agenda for a President with more concentrated power and not subject to significant limitations from Congress or the judiciary.
I think Bill Barr, a prolific supporter of the Unitary Executive Theory, saw (too late) that Trump was a horrific exemplar of this long time cause of his. Barr wanted to promote the idea that, in the right hands, a more unbound President would lead to better outcomes in governance, while Trump is proving to be the worst case scenario for such an approach.
When are liberals going to learn that hypocrisy is not a slur to these people. They have the power so they will use it in a way they want. They only constrain themselves with things they feel can be used against them. Revealing that they think Dems to be weak and incapable of playing power politics.
Instead of whining about unfairness and hypocrisy—find ways to exploit their overreach.
Life will always ask you to temporarily be what you aren’t to get to the place you want to be. Democrats should remember who they are—but for the next 5 year be calculating assholes who don’t give a fuck about comity, norms, and only follow the letter of the law.
The old system is gone, it was going anyway because an old system in a new world cannot sustain. It’s why we have constitutional amendments, and frankly, have been using SC decisions as Quasi constitutional amendments—that adopt our system to a changing world.
Think about the new world and the improvements needed to make it possible for the American system to dispense those values to the lowest level of society. Thinking this way will put you ahead of these fools because they are drunk with nostalgia and cynicism. They are crabs, trying to move forward but looking backward. The only good nature did for crabs is making them pretty tasty to eat. Anyone driving a system drunk on nostalgia and cynicism will certainly crash into a ditch.
Again, the old system is gone. It would die one way or the other. The future belongs to to people that have the vision of what the next version of it looks like. Other than harassing activities to make Trump and Co think and react—focus on the one thing that stems the tide: win the mid term elections. Then find that charismatic, youthful “outsider” who will win the Presidency and rip the scab off the RW media ecosystem and the legal and Academic feeder systems that are nothing but Billionaires cloaking devices. And finally, pack the god damn SCOTUS.
That should get us right for another 70-80 years.
So does this mean that a person born to Vietnam boat people in 1980 in North Dakota might be a US citizen while a cousin born in similar circumstances in South Dakota is not? Maybe we should adopt Heinlein criteria; everyone must earn citizenship no matter their birth circumstances.
@Scott F.: This gets complicated. Bill Barr signed on with Trump to further his own agenda. He found that Trump was a poor vehicle. It struck me in Trump 1.0 that Putin found Trump easy to manipulate, but too flighty to stay manipulated. Barr found the same thing.
The agenda of the SCOTUS majority is the agenda of the Federalist Society and the Crows, Singers, Welters, Seids, Kochs, Olin Society, and gawd knows who in the dark money universe. Their agenda is mostly to eliminate anything that discommodes billionaires, mostly taxes and regulation. That partly overlaps Trump’s agenda. But mostly they’ll support any R that can get elected. Then they’ll plant a Mike Pence to oversee transition appointments or a Russell Vought as OMB Director. They probably hate the tariffs, but they can afford to assume they have the means and the patience to neuter them.
@Slugger:
Until SCOTUS settles this, which could be years, we’re going to need a new Green Book.
The Court majority seems to have ignored the consequences of their decision. But when these “originalists” find no support for presidential immunity or keeping an insurrectionist on the ballot, they’re quite happy to make consequentialist arguments. “OK there’s nothing in the Constitution to support legal immunity for a prez, but good god man, how can
my strong daddy fantasiesthe country survive if the prez could be charged with a crime just because he committed a crime (as has been the case for 200+ years)?” (I claim fair paraphrase.)If only there had been some sort of appeals process for when lower courts issued nationwide injunctions, then this never would have been a problem.
I think six members of the Supreme Court just don’t want to put in the work.
If Trump doesn’t drop dead of his own free will over the next few years, how do we think the Supreme Court will justify him running for a third term, despite the 22nd Amendment?
Looking back at the case for removing him from the ballot for insurrection, “Congress never wrote enabling language” has to be a serious contender. There’s a bit of precedent there.
I’m thinking “no one has standing” will be the winner though. It has the advantage of being particularly egregious.
@DK: “The response to those frustrations from Barrett and her ilk was to tell Biden to get bent.”
This is important:
SCOTUS didn’t have a problem with Federalist Society judges blocking a Dem President. They do with a GOP President.
SCOTUS didn’t have a problem with reining in a Dem President from ‘overreach’ such as waiving student load repayments.
SCOTUS allows a GOP President to try to overthrow the government.
James: “At the same time, there needs to be a way to halt egregiously unlawful presidential orders like this one without each individual impacted being forced to file a lawsuit. ”
This decision allows extremely egregiously unlawful presidential orders to take place, making it harder to defend *everybody’s* fundamental rights – as was noted in Alito’s decision on schools and religionin the same week.
James, you are looking more and more open mockery of the law, lying and openly two-sided partisan ‘judging’ and pretending that it’s not there.
@Barry:
For a brief moment, it looked like John Roberts might have his Judicial Conference implement a mandatory rule change forcing randomized case assignment and blocking judge shopping — Schumer’s preferred solution to injunction abuse.
This rule change would have reigned in the 5th Circuit’s unelected dictator MAGA activist judge who kept kneecapping Biden, to cheers from the hypocrites now aghast at “judicial overreach.” Of course Roberts caved the moment Republicans signaled they’d fight him, missing his John Marshall moment as usual. (He should’ve let Republicans sue against the Schumer rule and lose in court.)
Barrett’s stalling non-solution blocking nationwide injunctions is far more disruptive than Democrats’ desire to block judge shopping would’ve been. Barrett gives a rapist tyrant who gutted 5th Amdt. due process by dictate his constitutional crisis, where a child born in California may lose American citizenship if they cross a state border — pending litigation.
This is absurd, the inevitable endgame of conservatives’ fake originalist/textualist Calvinball judicial malarkey. Americans who lack wherewithal to seek legal redress apparently have no rights guaranteed temporally and across jurisdictions, if a president claims as much. Barrett and Co. have achieved what Davis, Lee and the other Confederate traitors could not.
@Jim X 32: I forgot to mention that this country has a long history of a Uber-wealthy class of people in a particular industry to drive it off a cliff. Starting with the Planter Class pre-Civil War.
The Tech Bros are an existential threat to America. After packing the court, they are the next campaign to bring them into balance as a tool for society rather that society being their tool.
They would make a very nice boogeyman to interest the American rube.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Exactly.
This is exactly what Judge Aileen Cannon was doing a few months ago – buying time for Trump and his people to do what they want, until further notice.
In this case The Court COULD HAVE said; (1) that legal challenges through lower courts is permissible, and (2) the 14th Amendment is clear on Birthright Citizenship, but did not. We know why: six (6) of the Justices are very sympathetic to the radical Republican agenda and they weren’t going to exercise their prerogatives to get in the way.
I reject the entire premise.
That premise being, that they are making a decision of what they believe is the correct Constitutional ruling in good faith.
It is preposterous to accept that premise, any more than it is to calmly debate if Germany needed “living room” in 1936.
There are six corrupt justices who have an allegiance to the Republican Party and Donald Trump, far above any allegiance to the Constitution.
That failure of imagination is what gave America Trump. I’m sure it’s correct that this Supreme Court would rapidly carve out exemptions to the no-national-injunctions rule to frustrate a future Democratic president. In fact I imagine it would simply refuse to take up appeals, allowing national injunctions to remain in force when it liked their effect. But the Court makes “rules for the ages”, as Gorsuch likes to say. It would be ironic in the exteme if a district court judge were to refuse a national injunction against enforcement of a President Buttigieg executive order directing the DoJ to confiscate all hand guns in private ownership.
@DK: “Barrett’s stalling non-solution …”
I suspect the delay has been caused by the MAGA judges’ inability to devise reasons for denying birthright citizenship that don’t invite spontaneous laughter from their friends and families. But I’m sure they’ll come up with something.