"I would like to congratulate President Xi, and the Great Country of China, on their massive Birthright Citizenship WIN!"

Signed, "President DONALD J. TRUMP."

On Truth Social.

The Supreme Court is about to hand down its last decisions of the term.

Here's the live blog at SCOTUSblog.

And here's where to get the text of the opinions immediately, starting in a few minutes, at the Supreme Court's website.

UPDATE: West Virginia v. B.P.J.: "Title IX allows schools to provide separate women’s and men’s sports teams defined by biological sex, and West Virginia has permissibly maintained female sports for biological females consistent with Title IX." Kavanaugh has the opinion joined by Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Barrett. Thomas and Gorsuch have concurring opinions. There's an opinion concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part, by Sotomayor that is joined by Kagan and Jackson, and then Jackson has an opinion concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part. To what extent is this unanimous? 

From the Kavanaugh opinion: "In short, States are not required to conduct an individual-by-individual comparison of the physical and athletic capabilities of all biological males in order to satisfy intermediate scrutiny. Intermediate scrutiny permits a sex-based classification that, as here, is 'not invidious, but rather realistically reflects the fact that the sexes are not similarly situated in certain circumstances.”

UPDATE 2: "FECA’s political-party coordinated-expenditure limits violate the First Amendment." The case is National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Committee. Another Kavanaugh opinion. It's joined by the 5 you'd expect to join, and the 3 dissenters are then, as you'd know, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson. 

UPDATE 3: Birthright citizenship survives. Here's the opinion, Trump v. Barbara. Roberts writes the majority opinion and is joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson. Kavanaugh writes an opinion concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch all write their own dissenting opinions, with Gorsuch also joining the Thomas opinion. 

From the Roberts opinion: "If Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design. Words appearing frequently in the Executive Order—'mother,' 'father,' 'lawful,' 'temporary'—are absent from the Clause. For a simple reason: they did not matter. And while the Clause does ensure state citizenship attaches for U. S. citizens in 'the State wherein they reside,” Amdt. 14, §1, the explicit invocation of residence for state citizenship only highlights its absence from the criteria for U. S. citizenship. See Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 74 (1873) (a person can 'be a citizen of the United States without being a citizen of a State'). When the principal dissent does grapple with the operative legal text—'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States—it has little to say...."

Also from Roberts: "Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to 'every free-born person in this land.”' Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., at 600 (Sen. Trumbull). We keep that promise today."

UPDATE 4: From SCOTUSblog: NPR is announcing that Alito is retiring -- but still has not been confirmed... "Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Supreme Court's opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, is retiring, the court announced Tuesday."

"Key Justices Skeptical of Limiting Birthright Citizenship."

The NYT opines.

A majority of the Supreme Court appeared skeptical of President Trump’s efforts to limit birthright citizenship during arguments on Wednesday. Key conservative justices raised doubts about the constitutionality of the president’s executive order that would end automatic citizenship for children born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrants and some temporary foreign visitors.

But in an argument that lasted more than two hours, several of the court’s conservative justices also asked tough questions of a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the legal challenge, making the outcome of the legally complicated and hugely consequential case not fully clear....

Here's the live chat that happened on SCOTUSblog. Excerpt from the end:

"President Donald Trump plans to sit in on Wednesday’s Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship, making him the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the nation’s highest court."

AP reports.

It’s not the first time Trump has considered showing up for a high court hearing. Last year, Trump said that he badly wanted to attend a hearing on whether he overstepped federal law with his sweeping tariffs, but he decided against it, saying it would have been a distraction....

“I’m going,” Trump said, when the upcoming arguments in the birthright citizenship case were mentioned. To a follow-up question clarifying that he planned to go in person, Trump said, “I think so, I do believe.”

He sat in court when they were trying him for those crimes they convicted him of. He knows how to sit in court.

From the transcript of the press conference:

"Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship."

That was the title of a post last February.

You might want to revisit that today, because "Supreme Court agrees to hear Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship" (SCOTUSblog).

Moments away — we'll be getting the last cases of this Supreme Court term.

The cases will be posted on the Court's website, here. And here's the live-blogging at SCOTUSblog.

Here's Grok's summary of the remaining cases — birthright citizenship, racial gerrymandering, the nondelegation doctrine, Obamacare, access to on-line porn, and parents opting their kids out of woke school lessons.

UPDATE 1: "Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts. The Court grants the Government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue" — Trump v. CASA. This is the "birthright citizenship" case, but it did not address the issue "whether the Executive Order violates the Citizenship Clause or Nationality Act. Instead, the issue the Court decides is whether, under the Judiciary Act of 1789, federal courts have equitable authority to issue universal injunctions." Decided 6-3 (in the usual 6-3 breakdown).

From Justice Barrett's opinion: "The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history. Its absence from 18th- and 19th-century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority. That the absence continued into the 20th century renders any claim of historical pedigree still more implausible. Even during the “deluge of constitutional litigation that occurred in the wake of Ex parte Young, throughout the Lochner Era, and at the dawn of the New Deal,” universal injunctions were nowhere to be found....Had federal courts believed themselves to possess the tool, surely they would not have let it lay idle."

Addressing Justice Jackson's dissent, Barrett writes: "JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary. 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. See, e.g., Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137 (1803) (concluding that James Madison had violated the law but holding that the Court lacked jurisdiction to issue a writ of mandamus ordering him to follow it). But see post, at 15 (JACKSON, J., dissenting) ('If courts do not have the authority to require the Executive to adhere to law universally, . . . compliance with law some-times becomes a matter of Executive prerogative'). Observing the limits on judicial authority—including, as relevant here, the boundaries of the Judiciary Act of 1789—is required by a judge’s oath to follow the law. JUSTICE JACKSON skips over that part. Because analyzing the governing statute involves boring 'legalese,' post, at 3, she seeks to answer 'a far more basic question of enormous practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?' Ibid. In other words, it is unnecessary to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. JUSTICE JACKSON would do well to heed her own admonition: '[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.' Ibid. That goes for judges too."

UPDATE 2: Kennedy v. Braidwood rejects the Appointments Clause challenge to the U. S. Preventive Services Task Force. The members of the task force are deemed "inferior officers," thus not needing appointment by the President and Senate confirmation. This one is 6-3 in an unusual way. Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson join the majority opinion written by Kavanaugh (and also joined by Roberts and Barrett). The dissenters are Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch.

UPDATE 3: FCC v. Consumers' Research — "The universal-service contribution scheme does not violate the nondelegation doctrine." Another 6-3 the unusual way — with a dissent from Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch.

UPDATE 4: Mahmoud v. Taylor, 6-3, the usual way. "Parents challenging the Board’s introduction of the 'LGBTQ+-inclusive' storybooks, along with its decision to withhold opt outs, are entitled to a preliminary injunction." Justice Alito writes for the majority:

The Board of Education of Montgomery County, Maryland (Board), has introduced a variety of “LGBTQ+-inclusive” storybooks into the elementary school curriculum. These books—and associated educational instructions provided to teachers—are designed to “disrupt” children’s thinking about sexuality and gender. The Board has told parents that it will not give them notice when the books are going to be used and that their children’s attendance during those periods is mandatory. A group of parents from diverse religious backgrounds sued to enjoin those policies. They assert that the new curriculum, combined with the Board’s decision to deny opt outs, impermissibly burdens their religious exercise. 

Today, we hold that the parents have shown that they are entitled to a preliminary injunction. A government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses “a very real threat of undermining” the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill. Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U. S. 205, 218 (1972). And a government cannot condition the benefit of free public education on parents’ acceptance of such instruction. Based on these principles, we conclude that the parents are likely to succeed in their challenge to the Board’s policies....

I added the boldface. The school was so out front in its desire to reprogram children. They must have been pious believers... or at least people who felt called to pose as pious believers. 

UPDATE 5: Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, 6-3, the usual way, upholding the Texas law that restricts access to on-line porn. How do you exclude minors without burdening access for everyone? Here, the state required age verification. "But adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification. Any burden on adults is therefore incidental to regulating activity not protected by the First Amendment. This makes intermediate scrutiny the appropriate standard under the Court’s precedents." And the law "advances important governmental interests unrelated to the suppression of free speech and does not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further those interests." 

Kagan writes in dissent: "[I]f a scheme other than H. B. 1181 can just as well accomplish that objective and better protect adults’ First Amendment freedoms, then Texas should have to adopt it (or at least demonstrate some good reason not to). A State may not care much about safeguarding adults’ access to sexually explicit speech; a State may even prefer to curtail those materials for everyone. Many reasonable people, after all, view the speech at issue here as ugly and harmful for any audience. But the First Amendment protects those sexually explicit materials, for every adult. So a State cannot target that expression, as Texas has here, any more than is necessary to prevent it from reaching children."

UPDATE 6: The racial gerrymandering case — Louisiana v. Callais — will be reargued. Justice Thomas, alone, dissents: "These cases also warrant immediate resolution because, due to our Janus-like election-law jurisprudence, States do not know how to draw maps that 'survive both constitutional and VRA review.'"

"LISTEN LIVE: Supreme Court hears arguments on Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship."

Live-blogging at SCOTUSblog, here.

The failure to rip a child from its mother's arms.

I'm reading "2-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Deported 'With No Meaningful Process,' Judge Suspects/A federal judge in Louisiana said the deportation of the child to Honduras with her mother, even though her father had filed an emergency petition, appeared to be 'illegal and unconstitutional'" (NYT).

“The government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” wrote Judge Doughty, a conservative Trump appointee. “But the court doesn’t know that.”

Asserting that “it is illegal and unconstitutional to deport” a U.S. citizen, Judge Doughty set a hearing for May 16 to explore his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

"One of the more perplexing criticisms we have received is that under our account of the common law rule, the freed people would not be citizens...."

"If our understanding of the rule fails to account for that, then that understanding cannot be right. But our account of the rule does extend birthright citizenship to the newly freed people. To reiterate, by social compact, we do not mean the explicit consent from both parties to citizenship as would be required for a contract between private parties. We mean that allegiance of some kind has been exchanged for protection, remedying the defects of the state of nature. Any child born to someone who had entered into that kind of social compact with America would be a citizen. The newly freed people obviously qualify. In our view, enslaved persons brought here against their will were not afforded protection of the law. But obedience and ligeance were demanded of them nonetheless. It was a failure on America's part that it did not provide the protection that it owed in return for that allegiance...."

Write Randy Barnett and Ilan Wurman, at The Volokh Conspiracy, responding to critics of their NYT op-ed, "Don't Assume Trump is Wrong About Birthright Citizenship."

There's a lot more to the Barnett and Wurman response, and here's my post from 3 days ago linking to their original NYT piece.

"Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship."

So say lawprofs Randy E. Barnett and Ilan Wurman (in the NYT).

That's a free-access link so you can read the whole thing, which is very tightly written and hard to excerpt. A lot depends on the idea, expressed by Lincoln’s first attorney general, that "The Constitution uses the word ‘citizen’ only to express the political quality of the individual in his relations to the nation; to declare that he is a member of the body politic, and bound to it by the reciprocal obligation of allegiance on the one side and protection on the other."

Then Barnett and Wurman ask: "Has a citizen of another country who violated the laws of this country to gain entry and unlawfully remain here pledged obedience to the laws in exchange for the protection and benefit of those laws?"

ADDED: Ilya Somin responds with "Birthright Citizenship - A Response to Barnett and Wurman/Their argument for denying birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants born in the US has multiple weaknesses, including that it would also have denied it to former slaves" (Reason).

There are several flaws in Barnett and Wurman's "allegiance-for-protection" theory. The biggest is that, if consistently applied, it would undermine the central purpose the Citizenship Clause: extending citizenship to recently freed slaves and their descendants. Slaves born in the United States (and their parents, who were also usually slaves) obviously weren't part of any social compact under which they traded allegiance for protection. Far from protecting them, state and federal governments facilitated their brutal oppression at the hands of their masters....

Another problem with their analysis is that they rely almost exclusively on sources interpreting the nature of citizenship before enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment, such as the 1862 Bates opinion. But the whole point of the Citizenship Clause was to expand the range of people eligible for birthright citizenship....

"The Democrats... they're just yelling wolf... they're yelling wolf... they're screaming and yelling that there's a constitutional crisis..."

"Let me be very clear as a historian of the Constitution there has been one — one! — O-N-E — one! — count it:  one — one constitutional crisis in our history that our Constitution was incapable of solving and that, of course, was slavery...  The Constitution was not capable of resolving that issue without a war so we had indeed a constitutional crisis.... Compare that to what's going on today. If you listen to... Chuck Schumer you think we're going have a civil war. No! Listen to Donald Trump.... He said I will comply with every court order and then I will appeal it. And he didn't say this but obviously his lawyers... will seek a stay.... You can't allow hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of federal judges sitting in obscure parts of the country somewhere... in Rhode Island or somewhere in the south of  California to issue an injunction that covers everybody in the United States.... Democrats! Democrats! Don't yell wolf!... Don't tell us that there is no political recourse..... We have  three independent branches of the government — not a fourth. The bureaucracy is not in the Constitution.... It's very complicated. And president Trump for the first time has said let's look hard at these bureaucracies.... If you want to complain about what the administration is doing, that's your right...  but don't exaggerate...."

Says Alan Dershowitz in his excellent new podcast.

And Dershowitz thinks Trump is not necessarily wrong on the birthright citizenship question. He said "I'd love to argue it in front of the United States Supreme Court. I don't know how it would come out." That willingness has a limitation:

J.D. Vance on "Face the Nation."

Transcript here.

ADDED: Margaret Brennan seemed keyed up from the start. Her desire to get Vance was ludicrously obvious. Meanwhile, Vance was perfectly even-tempered and articulate, prepared for everything she had hoped to flummox him with. Brennan's style of constant interruption failed to throw him off. It backfired, making him look steady and rational and her look afraid of what he might have to say.

For example, here's the exchange on birthright citizenship:

"Immigrants’ rights advocates today sued the Trump administration over its executive order that seeks to strip certain babies born in the United States of their U.S. citizenship...."

"The lawsuit charges the Trump administration with flouting the Constitution’s dictates, congressional intent, and longstanding Supreme Court precedent."

The Legal Defense Fund announced last night.

“... This order seeks to repeat one of the gravest errors in American history, by creating a permanent subclass of people born in the U.S. who are denied full rights as Americans...” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. ...

The Constitution’s 14th Amendment... states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”... In 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that children born in the United States to immigrant parents were entitled to U.S. citizenship.... 

"Trump's attack on Ryan seen as advance scapegoating."

The Hill headlines, based on the Trump tweet, "Paul Ryan should be focusing on holding the Majority rather than giving his opinions on Birthright Citizenship, something he knows nothing about! Our new Republican Majority will work on this, Closing the Immigration Loopholes and Securing our Border!"

The Hill writes:

Now, as the House majority appears to be slipping away from Republicans, Trump is suddenly lashing out at the Speaker.

It's not as though the chance of winning has suddenly slipped away. We used to hear about the "Blue Wave," as if a big loss in the House were inevitable. The future is hazier now, the majority isn't "slipping away." The elections seem to be drifting toward something more like a tie, so I don't see the sense of saying Trump is "suddenly" reacting to a loss he sees coming. And Trump seems to be the last guy in the world to lurch into pessimism about an impending election.

Trump's political team has pointed to the high number of GOP retirements and poor fundraising totals among sleepy incumbents as the main source of the party’s troubles in the House. In the third quarter, 110 Democratic challengers outraised their Republican opponents.

GOP strategists said it was incredibly unhelpful to attack Ryan, which is further inflaming Republican tensions and knocking the party off message in the final stretch before the critical midterm elections.

They also maintain it will be impossible for the president to escape blame, given that he has urged his supporters to envision him on the ballot this fall.

I don't know which Republicans talk to The Hill, but it looks like these are people who don't want the immigration issue at the forefront, which used to be just about all Republicans, didn't it? So their pitch to The Hill is that losing the House — which they are resigned about — will be Trump's fault, and his effort to push a big, powerful issue is only designed to shift the blame. I think it's more that he's built a big beautiful win-win for himself: Either his campaign choices worked or they failed because Republicans didn't align themselves strongly enough with him. And Republicans will be stuck with Trump's choice of issues whichever way the House goes. And we're already well into the 2020 campaign.

Althouse's midterm exam is tough: It's about President Trump's executive order to end birthright citizenship.

The NYT reports.

President Trump said he was preparing an executive order to end birthright citizenship in the United States, his latest maneuver days before midterm congressional elections to activate his base by clamping down on immigrants and immigration....

At issue is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which states, 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.' But some conservatives have long made the argument that the amendment was meant to apply only to citizens and legal permanent residents, not immigrants who are present in the country without authorization....

"Now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order,': Mr. Trump said.

There are 3 questions on the midterm exam:

1. Do you know the constitutional argument that the President can end birthright citizenship with an executive order? The answer is not: I know there is one or I read what the argument is and I understood it at the time. The question is: Do you know the argument? Did you read or hear the argument, understand it, and retain it, such that you could articulate it without looking it up again and you could explain it to someone else?

2. Drawing on your present knowledge or researching the argument and boning up on it, can you explain it to someone who is looking at that 14th Amendment text and who will expect you to adhere to an approach to constitutional interpretation that you apply to all the other text in the Constitution?

3. Do you think the argument will be accepted in court, and do you need the answer to be yes before you will support Trump's plan to sign this executive order or do you think signing the order is a good thing for Trump to do even if it will ultimately be rejected in court? Does the fact that Trump is announcing this one week before the midterms show that Trump's decision is based on a desire to affect what we're talking about this week, to redirect us away from right-wing terrorism and anti-Semitism and back to the Caravan and illegal immigration?