A protester flipped off President Donald Trump on his way into the Supreme Court.
The White House pool reporter said one protestor “saluted us with the double bird.”
The high court is hearing oral arguments on Wednesday on Trump’s attempt to end the constitutional guarantee to brighright citizenship, and Trump has taken the unprecedented move of attending the oral arguments before the Supreme Court.
Trump, wearing his signature red tie, was ushered into the court and “seated in the front row of the public section on a red-cushioned bench,” the New York Times reported.
If the Trump administration prevails in its effort to do away with birthright citizenship, it would upend the 14th Amendment, which automatically grants citizenship to nearly every individual born on U.S. soil, regardless of their parents’ citizenship or immigration status.
In a winding rant on Tuesday night, Trump claimed the 14th Amendment is “not about Chinese billionaires who are billionaires from other countries who all of a sudden have 75 children or 59 children in one case, or 10 children, becoming American citizens.”
“This was about slaves,” he declared.
Throughout Wednesday’s oral arguments, justices across the ideological spectrum have already been casting doubt about the government’s arguments on the matter.
Chief Justice John Roberts called the government’s argument “quirky,” and Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett said she was “puzzled.”
The president has additionally been accused of trying to intimidate the Supreme Court’s nine justices, three of whom he appointed, by attending the arguments.
One protestor outside the Supreme Court told the Times that he thought the move was a “kind of a strong-arming tactic,” meant to “intimidate them with his presence.”
“And, kind of a statement of: ‘make a decision while I’m here, looking you dead in your eye — and don’t make the wrong decision,’" the protestor said.
Just last month, he called Justices Neil Gorsuch and Barrett, both of whom he nominated to the high court during his first term, “an embarrassment to their families” after they slapped down the way in which he was implementing his signature economic policy: tariffs.
