LEILA FADEL, HOST:
On Thursday, the Supreme Court announced it will hear a case about President Trump's claim that there's no such thing as birthright citizenship guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. NPR's legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg joins us now. Good morning, Nina.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Good morning.
FADEL: OK, so before we get into this, just explain birthright citizenship and where that right comes from.
TOTENBERG: The 14th Amendment of the Constitution, enacted after the Civil War, was aimed at overturning the infamous Dred Scott decision, which said basically that enslaved people brought to the United States and their children were not citizens of the United States and therefore essentially had no rights. After the Civil War, Congress passed a constitutional amendment to fix that. It said, quote, "all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States."
Trump, however, has long argued that there is no such thing as automatic citizenship, at least not for babies born in the United States, if their parents were not born here. So on his first day in office, he issued an executive order banning birthright citizenship, which was promptly challenged in court by a bunch of states. Three separate judges just as promptly ruled that Trump is wrong and that there is a birthright citizenship guaranteed in the Constitution. The president appealed to the Supreme Court, and yesterday, the justices said they would hear arguments next month.
FADEL: So, Nina, we've seen lots of orders issued by the court dealing with various challenges to other Trump executive orders. But this one is different, right? Why?
TOTENBERG: It's different because the court is asking for full briefing and oral argument. Undoubtedly, it thought it just couldn't poke Trump in the eye or, for that matter, poke the lower courts in the eye and just kiss this off with a single paragraph and no full briefing or oral argument in court.
FADEL: And explain why that matters.
TOTENBERG: So if you think about the court's activity in the last few weeks, issuing orders without full briefing and oral arguments, the court's liberal justices have just skewered the conservative majority for being willing to issue short, sometimes impenetrable orders without having full briefing and argument that would allow the justices more time to consider all the various aspects of these cases. And they're difficult. Basically, the liberals were saying to the conservatives, you can't just pop off the minute the Trump administration comes running to us for help. You got to really hear the arguments and think about it.
FADEL: And do we know what specific questions the court is asking?
TOTENBERG: No, we don't. So far, we just have to presume that the main question is whether Trump is right and there is no automatic right to citizenship. There was nothing in the court's order and hasn't been so far that would suggest it would take up the administration's complaints about single district court judges issuing nationwide court orders on this or other matters. To date, every court to have considered his executive order banning birthright citizenship has blocked it. But Trump hasn't given up, despite the fact that his anti-birthright citizenship view is widely considered a fringe view.
FADEL: And explain why it's fringe.
TOTENBERG: I don't use that term lightly.
FADEL: Yeah.
TOTENBERG: It is because, as the states challenging Trump's executive order put it in their Supreme Court brief, for over a century, it's been the settled view of this court, Congress, the executive branch and legal scholars that the 14th Amendment citizenship clause guarantees citizenship to babies born in the United States regardless of their parents' citizenship, allegiance, domicile, immigration status or nationality.
FADEL: That's NPR's legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg. Thank you, as always, for this reporting.
TOTENBERG: My pleasure.
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