President Donald Trump said he is going to personally attend the Supreme Court’s Wednesday oral arguments on the constitutionality of his attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship.
“I’m going to go to the Supreme Court tomorrow and just sit there and listen, because I have listened to this argument for so long,” Trump said Tuesday evening from the Oval Office.
Trump, who issued an executive order on his first day in office that would deny U.S. citizenship to children born of immigrant parents, said on Tuesday that the policy of birthright citizenship was being abused by “billionaires who all of a sudden have 75 children.”
“The reason was it had to do with the babies of slaves and the protection of the babies of slaves,” Trump said. “It didn’t have to do with the protection of multimillionaires and billionaires wanting to have their children get an American citizenship. It is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”
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Trump’s order targets the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and its Citizenship Clause, which was ratified in 1868, and cites legal analysis that many scholars and lower court judges have deemed inadequate.
“The ‘lessons of history’ . . . give us every reason to be wary of now blessing this most recent effort to break with our established tradition of recognizing birthright citizenship and to make citizenship depend on the actions of one’s parents rather than – in all but the rarest of circumstances – the simple fact of being born in the United States,” the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in October.
If he goes through with his plans, Trump would be the first sitting president to attend oral arguments. He previously visited the high court during his first term for an inauguration ceremony for his first appointee, Neil Gorsuch.
The Supreme Court is set to meet Wednesday at 10 a.m. to hear arguments on the constitutionality of Trump’s executive order.
Asked whether he has a preference for certain Supreme Court justices, Trump said on Tuesday, “I love a few of them, I don’t like some others.”
“And you say what you want, but you have the ones that were appointed by Barack Hussein Obama and Biden. I don’t care how good your case is, you could have the greatest case ever, they’re going to rule against you,” Trump went on. “They always do.”
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