Expert warns Supreme Court to say goodbye to vacation: 'About to get inundated'

Slate legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern recalled an era in which the U.S. Supreme Court could take a few months off and have a kind of summer vacation. That is probably over, he cautioned when speaking to MSNBC.

The high court issued a ruling Friday that eliminated nationwide injunctions by courts. It's in the birthright citizenship case before a federal court. While the conservative justices didn't bar birthright citizenship, they made it impossible to put the law on hold while it plays out in the courts.

And Stern said the ruling will affect their free time.

"That's not going to happen anymore. Those days are over. The Supreme Court is about to get inundated with emergency applications for relief and emergency appeals, because there will be many, many, many litigants who need nationwide relief who can no longer get it, who are going to have to go to the Supreme Court and ask them for help, because lower court judges just had this power stripped from them," said Stern.

During the White House news briefing on the matter, a reporter asked whether doctors and nurses will have to decide whether a newborn baby is a citizen.

Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that a pending case before the Supreme Court regarding the law was scheduled to be adjudicated in October. There's nothing on the public docket for such a case. Bondi may have inside information about a case on the shadow docket on the matter.

When the reporter followed up, asking whether the administration would deport newborn babies, Bondi swore they were only after "violent criminals." President Donald Trump has similarly said that his administration would only target criminals. That has not been the case, however. ICE has arrested many people with no criminal record, such as a 6-year-old child battling leukemia. They've also arrested individuals with decades-long ties to their community, such as a woman who was living in the United States legally for 47 years until the Trump administration changed their citizenship status.

Stern mentioned Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent in the case, which specifically criticized the high court for granting the executive branch far more power than the U.S. Constitution intended.

"There's a lot here that revives arguments that they made in the immunity decision last term, which they also dissented from, where they argued that the conservative supermajority on this court just keeps handing Trump more and more power, giving Trump special treatment and ceding the powers of the judiciary and Congress to limit executive authority," said Stern.

"Justice Jackson warned that the Supreme Court is creating a 'zone of lawlessness' for the executive branch, where it can just declare and start to implement all kinds of unconstitutional policies, and lower courts will be powerless to stop those on a nationwide basis. Birthright citizenship is Exhibit A, right? It may be that once the administration starts enforcing this policy, your citizenship will depend on what state you're born in. If you're born in one of the states that sued in this case, like New Jersey, then you can still get birthright citizenship because the injunction will apply to you. But if you're born across the river in Philadelphia, then you might not get birthright citizenship because Pennsylvania didn't sue. And it's not a party to this case."

He said that the whole point of having nationwide injunctions was to prevent patchwork laws where each state is its own stand-alone regulation that doesn't translate across state lines. In the case of birthright citizenship, it means that some people born in the U.S. will be considered citizens, while others will not, solely based on the state in which they're born.

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