Trump's SCOTUS Win On Birthright Citizenship Enrages Liberal Supreme Court Justice

WASHINGTON, D.C.—While the dissent of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson has garnered much of the attention given to the Supreme Court vindication of President Donald Trump that struck down the practice of U.S. District Court Judges enacting “universal injunctions,” the vehement dissent of Justice Sonia Sotomayor was soundly dismantled by Justice Clarence Thomas.

The left-leaning SCOTUS Judge characterized the ruling as an erosion of a judicial power which patently never existed in the law to start with as Thomas asserted, claiming “The Court’s decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution…. [Federal courts] will be hamstrung to stop its actions fully.”

In the text of her dissent, Sotomayor wrote in part:

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates. Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship."

Sotomayer continued to write that, "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."

"That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit. Because I will not be complicit in so grave an attack on our system of law, I dissent.”

Sotomayor’s hyperbolic, and wildly speculative 43-page tirade seeks to invalidate the majority’s accurate assessment that “Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts,” by attacking President Trump’s Executive Order .

That order correctly interprets the 14^th Amendment as granting citizenship solely to those “born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” before setting the Executive branch’s Constitutional power to enforce the law as the President understands it at odds with the limitations that Congress has placed on the individual Federal District Judges of the Judiciary system.

The SCOTUS leftist’s argument rests entirely on a flawed, hyper-inflated concept of “equitable authority,” the court's purported power to provide remedies beyond those traditionally available under the law.

Justice Clarence Thomas dismantled the argument in the majority ruling when he wrote, "Many plaintiffs argue that only sweeping relief can redress their injuries. And, I do not dispute that there will be cases requiring an 'indivisible remedy' that incidentally benefits third parties, ... But, such cases are by far the exception."

He concludes: For good reason, the Court today puts an end to the 'increasingly common' practice of federal courts issuing universal injunctions. ... The Court also makes clear that the complete relief principle provides a ceiling on federal courts’ authority, which must be applied alongside other “principles of equity” and our holding that universal injunctions are impermissible."

He contrinues that write that, "lower courts should carefully heed this Court’s guidance and cabin their grants of injunctive relief in light of historical equitable limits. If they cannot do so, this Court will continue to be 'dutybound' to intervene."

Thomas has been critical of “equitable authority,” before, most recently in the 2023 concurrence in Alexander, President of the South Carolina Senate, et al. V. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, when he critiqued Brown v. Board of Education writing “The Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education took a boundless view of equitable remedies through extravagant uses of judicial power.”

In 1996, the late Justice Antonin Scalia was equally troubled by “equitable authority,” warning in his Board of County Commissioners v. Umbehr dissent, “The Court must be living in another world. Day by day, case by case, it is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.”

Friday’s SCOTUS opinion is viewed by many as finally reining in an out-of-control judiciary which Sotomayor considered so offensive to her inflated view of the Courts’ powers that she read her dissent aloud in court for 19 minutes claiming that such necessary reform to dial back judicial activism represents the Court abdicating “its vital role” in fighting for the survival of democracy.

Sotomayor concluded, “With the stroke of a pen, the President has made a “solemn mockery” of our Constitution,” but she seemingly held only one objection: it wasn’t her pen.