STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The Supreme Court's term is over, and its final ruling was a loss for President Trump.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The ruling says almost all children born in the U.S. are citizens, according to the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The majority of justices rejected Trump's executive order seeking to change that.
INSKEEP: NPR's Carrie Johnson covers the Supreme Court and is on the line. Carrie, good morning.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: What was the justices' reason to block the president?
JOHNSON: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority ruling here. He said it was not a close call. He talked about birthright citizenship being part of American law for generations. Roberts said the framers who drafted the 14th Amendment extended a promise of citizenship to every free person in this land, and, Roberts wrote, we keep that promise today. The chief was joined by the court's three liberals and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately to say he would have struck down the president's executive order based on a federal law. Kavanaugh left open the possibility Congress could change it to put limits on babies born to people here illegally or on temporary visas. And if there was a surprise, it was that we had so many dissents on this birthright issue, which has been well understood for more than 150 years.
INSKEEP: Yeah, a much closer case than people anticipated. What did the dissenters say?
JOHNSON: Justice Clarence Thomas filed a dissent of 91 pages - what experts tell me is one of his longest dissents.
INSKEEP: Wow.
JOHNSON: He says the court majority misunderstood the 14th Amendment. He wanted to add a new requirement that parents be domiciled in the U.S. And Justice Sam Alito wrote to say he worries about birth tourism - the idea that wealthy people from overseas will come to have children here on American soil. President Trump echoed that view in a post on social media. He actually congratulated China and its leader for what he called a massive birthright win.
Remember, Trump took the rare step of going to the Supreme Court to hear arguments in this case - a sign of how important it was to him. But the justices never acknowledged his presence, and it may have backfired.
INSKEEP: And again, a majority of the justices went with what would seem to be the literal meaning of the words of the 14th Amendment. What are some of the other cases we learned about yesterday?
JOHNSON: The court says states can ban transgender girls and women from high school and college sports programs. They said those bans in about half the states do not violate the Constitution or a federal law that bars discrimination by schools that get federal funding. And for campaign finance, the court overturned a post-Watergate law that tried to limit coordination between political parties and candidates. This case emerged during the Senate run of JD Vance, who's now the vice president. The Supreme Court says this is a free-speech issue - that money is speech.
INSKEEP: OK, so we've gotten to the end of the term. What does all this leave you thinking, as someone who covers the court?
JOHNSON: Well, the Supreme Court has handed President Trump and future presidents a lot of power to fire people in the federal government and reshape agencies we thought were independent, but Trump lost big in a few of the cases that mattered most to him - in the birthright case and with his tariffs. Longtime appellate lawyer Kannon Shanmugam put it this way in a talk sponsored by the conservative Federalist Society yesterday.
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KANNON SHANMUGAM: One emerging theme in some of these cases is that on issues of sort of broader significance, the, quote-unquote, "conservative" side is typically winning. On issues that are more specific to this administration, the outcomes are sometimes different.
JOHNSON: And we're going to find out whether that pattern holds when the court returns for a new term in October.
INSKEEP: NPR's Carrie Johnson will be there covering the court when they return. Carrie, thanks for your reporting. Really appreciate it.
JOHNSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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