SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The Supreme Court gave President Trump several big wins yesterday, but the dissenting justices did not accept the rulings quietly. And groups opposed to several of Trump's executive orders have already filed lawsuits seeking workarounds. Amy Howe, co-founder of the SCOTUSblog, which covers all the cases before the Supreme Court, joins us. Amy, so good to have you with us in our studios. Thanks very much.
AMY HOWE: It's good to be here. Thanks for having me.
SIMON: Let's begin with a decision to limit the powers of lower court justices from handing down nationwide injunctions because there's several that had blocked several of President Trump's executive orders recently. Has the president suddenly been granted new executive powers?
HOWE: He hasn't been granted new executive powers, but it will be much harder for federal district judges to block his agenda. And this is - these nationwide injunctions - or universal injunctions, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett called it in her opinion for the Supreme Court yesterday - have been a thorn in the side for the president, both in this administration and in his prior one. And in between, they were a thorn in the side of the Biden administration because with these universal injunctions, it meant that a plaintiff who was opposed to a law or in particular to an executive order - which the current President Donald Trump has issued many of since he was inaugurated on January 20 - could go to a federal district judge, and in many cases, you could select which federal court you wanted...
SIMON: Yeah.
HOWE: ...To go to and pick one that you thought might be sympathetic and get a ruling that would block the administration from enforcing the order anywhere in the United States. And so it had kept the Trump administration from really implementing some of its agenda until the issue could make its way up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court could step in.
SIMON: I have to ask, there's typically a sense of difference among justices and mutual respect for one another - even as they may strongly disagree - but the exchanges that you could read in this decision were notably sharp, weren't they?
HOWE: They were. The decision was by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which was itself really sort of interesting because she is the second most junior justice on the court, and she's the most junior of the conservative justices. Many of us thought that because this was such a major opinion, that it would be one that Chief Justice John Roberts would keep for himself. But she was very critical, in particular, of the solo dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. And it's not unusual for the justices to criticize each other in their written opinions. Famously, a couple of years ago, Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan - who are both liberal justices on the court - sort of exchanged barbs in a copyright case, of all things, involving an Andy Warhol print. But this one seemed particularly pointed...
SIMON: Andy Warhol makes a lot of people exchange barbs.
HOWE: (Laughter).
SIMON: But go ahead, yeah.
HOWE: They were - this one seemed particularly pointed...
SIMON: Yeah.
HOWE: ...And personal, in no small part, because she mentioned Justice Jackson by name.
SIMON: Yeah.
HOWE: You know, it - to a certain extent, she had to do that because there were two dissents. There was a main dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which Justice Jackson also joined. And then Justice Jackson had her own dissent, but, you know, it seemed - she devoted a lot of ink to it, and it seemed particularly stinging.
SIMON: We should note and come back to the fact nothing in that decision gets at the underlying issue of ending birthright citizenship. Did anything in yesterday's ruling give you a sense of how the Supreme Court would vote when presented with that issue?
HOWE: The Supreme Court was very clear that it was not deciding anything about the legality of the president's order ending birthright citizenship itself. You know, there were some questions about birthright citizenship at the oral argument back in May. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of the conservative justices, really pressed John Sauer, who is the solicitor general representing the Trump administration, asking the court to end these kinds of universal injunctions about how it would work to have this executive order go into effect if the birthright citizenship order were to go into effect. But the court was very clear that it was not actually deciding this issue because the Trump administration hadn't asked it to.
SIMON: You've been following the Supreme Court for two decades now.
HOWE: Thanks, make me feel old (laughter).
SIMON: Oh, my gosh. Some of us have been doing stuff longer than that, so don't - no.
HOWE: Yes, OK.
SIMON: You're welcome here. Well, let us tap your expertise. How interesting a term has this last one been, or is that an understatement?
HOWE: It's an understatement. You know, this court didn't have the kind of over-and-over-again blockbuster rulings on the merits cases in which the court heard oral arguments and then issued written opinions. But this was really an extraordinary term, and we could continue to get rulings from the court on its so-called emergency docket or shadow docket...
SIMON: Yeah.
HOWE: ...These emergency appeals asking the justices to intervene and block lower courts' orders, like the kind of orders that we had in the birthright citizenship cases at the Supreme Court.
SIMON: Amy Howe of the SCOTUSblog. Thanks so much for joining us.
HOWE: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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