President Trump on Tuesday called the Supreme Court ruling upholding birthright citizenship “too bad for our country,” and falsely asserted that Congress could reverse the decision through legislation.
“No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!” he wrote in a social media post. “Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!”
The court on Tuesday rejected Mr. Trump’s executive order to stop babies born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrants and temporary residents from being given citizenship automatically as a violation of the 14th Amendment. Five justices found that birthright citizenship was guaranteed in the Constitution, and a sixth, Brett M. Kavanaugh, said he would strike down the executive order based on federal law, not the Constitution.
That means that the president would likely need a constitutional amendment to reverse the decision. The White House did not immediately comment on why the president believed he could achieve his goal without one.
Any measure, whether proposed as a bill or a constitutional amendment, would face long odds. And a demand by Mr. Trump that Congress attempt to pass one could be a political disaster for Republicans, who are not united on the issue.
There are Republican bills in the House and Senate seeking to curtail birthright, but they are cosponsored by only a fraction of members of the party, an indication that they are far short of majority support.
Legislation to end birthright citizenship would be all but certain to die in the Senate, where it would need support from at least seven Democrats to reach the 60-vote threshold required to overcome the filibuster. And a constitutional amendment would require a two-thirds majority of both chambers, a virtual impossibility given the stark partisanship in a closely divided Congress.
If Mr. Trump were to pressure Congress to take up the legislation anyway, it would be an exceedingly difficult vote ahead of the midterm elections, in which Republicans have an uphill fight to hang onto competitive districts that are home to large immigrant communities. The move would be particularly unpopular among vulnerable House Republicans in those battleground districts.
The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold birthright citizenship capped a more than decade-long effort by Mr. Trump to use the issue as a political tool. The president has long seized on the question of who gets to claim to be an American, dating back to 2011 when he promoted the racist lie that President Barack Obama had been born in Kenya and was ineligible for the White House.
More than a decade later, Mr. Trump entered his second term intent on overturning the guarantee to birthright citizenship.
The president, who attended the oral arguments for the case, had been railing for weeks against the possibility that the court would rule against his executive order. He cast the decision as critical to the country’s future.
“A negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not Economically sustainable for the United States of America!” he wrote in a social media post in May.
But on Tuesday, he reprised his strategy from the ruling against his tariffs, attempting to downplay his loss and divert attention to his wins.
Mr. Trump celebrated a ruling issued on Monday that expanded presidential power to fire officials from independent agencies. He also acknowledged that he could oust Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, simply because she did not align with his agenda.
“We had other good Victories, too, and we also had the Birthright Citizenship loss, which we will work to correct in Congress, but the big SLAUGHTER, was SLAUGHTER,” Mr. Trump wrote. “The Republican Party was treated very fairly by the United States Supreme Court. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
But Mr. Trump appeared to dwell on the decision. He returned to a theme from social media posts in the weeks leading up to the decision, when he argued that birthright citizenship had been abused by “Chinese billionaires” who were taking advantage of a rule that was created for the “babies of slaves.”
“I would like to congratulate President Xi, and the Great Country of China, on their massive Birthright Citizenship WIN!” he wrote Tuesday.
Abbie VanSickle and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.
