House Speaker Mike Johnson rolled his eyes and shook his head momentarily as reporters broke the news to him on Tuesday that the Supreme Court had upheld birthright citizenship, striking down President Donald Trump’s executive order.
Johnson was in the middle of giving his weekly press conference while answering a question about the previous two High Court rulings and talking prospectively about birthright citizenship when the ruling was announced, going against Trump.
“As a constitutional lawyer, I’ve got lots of opinions on this,” Johnson told reporters while explaining what he interpreted the Framers of the U.S. Constitution, as well as the authors of the 14th Amendment that established birthright citizenship, meant.
“Understand what the Framers did and when we added this to our constitutional order, understand what the intent was” Johnson said as a reporter interrupted to let him know of the decision.
“Oh dear,” Johnson said and rolled his eyes up toward the heavens and shook his head repeatedly at the fast and furious pace of the decisions coming down at the tail end of his weekly briefing. The reaction drew chuckles from his fellow House Republican leaders and even reporters in attendance. He then closed his eyes and groaned before responding to the decision itself.
“Well, uh, I need to read the opinion,” he then demurred, before sayoing of the decision: “I think you could say that’s a textualist, originalist view.”
“However, I do think this has been grossly abused in recent years, OK? And that is the case taht was being made by the plaintiffs in teh case, aand we’re very sympathetic to that because it is a serious problem,” Johnson said.
The president signed an executive order on his first day back in office last year to curtail the birthright provision, enshrined at the end of the Civil War and ratified in 1868 to guarantee citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their descendants. It’s part of the president’s larger efforts to increase the number of people eligible for deportation.
Johnson would then go on to speak about “birthing tourism” he said is caused by birthright citizenship, a common talking point among conservatives on the matter, and something that has been reported to actually happen although it is not clear how prevalent that trend is.
“We have, it's become a tourism, birthing tourism,” he said. “A trend where people will just come and you just come onto the soil and have your child, and then they're able to avail themselves of the welfare state and everything else.”
The speaker’s team later joked about it, with Johnson’s press secretary Griffin Neal comparing it to how Trump learned about the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
But contrast, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries praised the decision by the Supreme Court.
“The Supreme Court finally affirmed, by applying the law and being guided by the Constitution, that all persons born in the United States are American citizens,” he said. “Donald Trump’s disgraceful actions as it relates to the Birthright Citizenship Clause are clearly unlawful and are an assault on our way of life.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer echoed the sentiment.
“Despite Trump’s best efforts to bully them, the Supreme Court just reaffirmed that if you are born in America, you belong in America,” he said in a statement.
The announcement is the latest announcement that did not go the presidet’s way on the high court. On Monday, the court ruled that mail-in votes could still be counted after Election Day if they were postmarked before then. That led to the president accusing Democrats of supporting “cheating” and said Democrats cannot win without “because their policy is so bad.”
The court also rejected his attempts to throw out the $5 million verdict in the E. Jean Carrol defamation case related to sex abuse allegations. A 2022 verdict found the president liable for sexual abuse against Carroll and was also found liable for defaming her in a separate case.
But the court ruled on Monday that the president can remove heads of independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, but prohibited him from removing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. The court also ruled on Tuesday that states can ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.
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