The Supreme Court has put a decisive end to one of President Donald Trump’s signature crusades after he missed the deadline to seek a rehearing.
When the court struck down Trump’s bid to end birthright citizenship for millions of Americans in a 6-3 ruling at the end of June, it started a 25-day clock for the president to seek a reversal of the decision, which he vowed to do.
“I will be asking for a Rehearing by the United States Supreme Court, IMMEDIATELY,” the 80-year-old president declared on Truth Social last month. “This miscarriage of justice will destroy America if they don’t change their absolutely insane decision.”
But that deadline came and went without the Trump administration submitting such a filing.
Now, the Supreme Court has put the final nail in the coffin, issuing a certified judgment and affirming a lower court ruling that had blocked the president’s executive order seeking to ban automatic citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to parents in the country temporarily or illegally.
Under the court’s standard procedures, the clerk issues a certified judgment about 32 days after the initial ruling, according to SCOTUSblog.
This means the cause Trump made one of the biggest priorities in his second term—one he personally carried into the Supreme Court chamber, making history as the first sitting president to attend oral arguments—has reached the end of the road.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A rehearing was always a long shot, requiring at least one of the justices who ruled against Trump to change their mind, and a majority of the court to agree to revisit the case. The Supreme Court has not reheard an argued case in over 50 years.
Still, the Supreme Court was not united in its opposition to Trump’s efforts to gut the citizenship protections guaranteed under the 14th Amendment, which states that all persons born or naturalized in the United States “are citizens of the United States.”
The court’s ultra-conservative wing of Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito dissented, signaling they would have overturned a century and a half of citizenship rights.
And while Kavanaugh voted with the majority, he took the unusual step of filing a partial dissent, saying Trump’s executive order did not violate the Constitution but that it did “contravene a federal statute.”
After the court issued its ruling in June, Trump suggested that Congress “can easily make it up” with legislation to end birthright citizenship, saying, “No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!”
He was wrong: the court’s majority decision rests on constitutional grounds, meaning that it would indeed take a constitutional amendment to undo it, according to the Associated Press.
