University of Michigan Law Professor Barbara McQuade issued a stark warning on MSNBC Friday following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that delivered a victory to President Donald Trump’s effort to eliminate birthright citizenship, implying that all constitutional rights may now be in danger.
“We are going to have people who are immigrants giving birth to children without knowing what their status is,” McQuade said on MSNBC Reports. “One of the things that is also so important about this opinion is it’s not going to end with birthright citizenship; as Justice (Sonia) Sotomayor writes in her dissent, this means every constitutional right is an issue.”
Despite the U.S. Constitution explicitly granting citizenship to any person born within the country’s borders, the court ruled 6-3 in favor of narrowing the scope of injunctions challenging Trump’s executive order, stripping the ability of federal judges to block the effort nationwide.
Beyond the decision’s immediate impact on the ability of the judicial branch to hold the executive in check as it relates to birthright citizenship, McQuade said the ruling opens the door for the Trump administration to target any and all constitutional rights.
“I imagine that the executive order machine at the White House is going into overdrive right now because they know that they can issue executive orders, and the court has now checked its own power as an ability to act as a co-equal branch of government,” she said.
Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Elana Kagan and Ketanju Jackson, that the ruling was a “grave attack on our system of law,” and that “no right is safe in the new legal regime the court creates.”
The most reasonable action, McQuade argued, would be for the court to pause the proceedings, lest chaos erupt across the country, with the constitutionally protected right of birthright citizenship varying from municipality to municipality.
“We are going to see the kind of chaos that the plaintiffs in this case argued about, and the kind of chaos we see described in the dissenting opinions,” she said. “This of all cases seems like the kind of case for which a nationwide injunction is necessary so that you don’t have different rules in different states.”
