The first weeks of Donald Trump’s return to the White House have been dizzying, to say the least. The president kicked off his second term with a furious flurry of presidential orders: imposing (and then postponing) tariffs on Canada and Mexico; launching a fierce campaign against DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) by barring transgender people from remaining in the service and enlisting in the armed forces; and canceling nearly all aid programs the United States provides abroad. He revealed plans to purge the State Department, Justice Department, FBI, and CIA of his phantom enemies and granted pardons to his insurrectionist supporters who took part in the assault on Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. He also launched the “largest deportation program for illegal immigrants in American history.”
With Democrats in the minority in both the House and the Senate, Trump runs the executive branch as he sees fit by relying on a compliant and complicit Congress and authorizing Elon Musk to fire tens of thousands of public employees, shut down entire federal agencies, block government funds that already voted on and approved, and generally sow terror in the federal workforce.
The country’s democratic system based on checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, which has largely held firm over more than two centuries, finds itself severely compromised.
The lunge launched by the executive branch has knocked out the legislative branch, which, besides protesting and condemning, does not know how to stop the president’s offensive. The last bastion in defense of democracy remains the judiciary power, which is supposed to be “blindfolded and fair.” However, even it sees Trump’s hidden finger tipping the scales in his favor after appointing his loyalists, including his former personal lawyer, to the top of the Department of Justice and launching a campaign of intimidation on federal prosecutors who, moreover, are resigning en masse. Then the Supreme Court, with the three conservative justices he chose, approved his partial immunity even when he was no longer in office.
The landscape, at least for the next two years, is steeped in fog for Trump’s opponents. For now, only the judicial branch is the one that can thwart this White House blitzkrieg.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected the Trump administration’s request to end birthright citizenship for children born in the country. The three magistrates of the federal 9th Circuit in San Francisco unanimously ruled that the presidential directive violates the Constitution, but added that a more thorough review, in which all nine appeals court judges will participate, will be conducted in June. Lawyers for the DOJ are now deciding whether to wait for the decision of the magistrates of the entire court of appeals or appeal immediately to the Supreme Court.
In the brief filed in court, the DOJ said the executive order on birthright citizenship was “an integral part of President Trump’s broader effort to repair the U.S. immigration system and to address the current crisis at the southern border.”
For decades, under an 1868 constitutional amendment and a predecessor law, citizenship has been extended to anyone born on U.S. soil, regardless of their parent’s immigration status. Trump is trying to ban birthright citizenship for children whose parents are undocumented migrants or are legally present in the United States on temporary visas.
But this birthright citizenship case is not the only one the Supreme Court will have to decide. First, there is President Trump’s firing of Hampton Dellinger. Seeking the intervention of the highest court was not the dismissed federal official, who already went to federal court and was granted temporary reinstatement, but the White House. The goal is to know whether the president has the authority to fire even the “undismissible” ones in the federal administration, who have been screened and approved by Congress to check that the government does not commit abuses. A test sought by Trump himself, in short, to test the limits of his presidential power.
