President Donald Trump appears to be taking his intimidation of the federal judiciary to a new level, telling reporters that he plans to attend Supreme Court arguments for a case on birthright citizenship on Wednesday.
“I’m going,” he said Tuesday. “I think so, I do believe.”
Trump’s attendance at oral arguments was also included in the schedule the White House Office of Communications sent reporters on Tuesday evening.
According to NBC News, the Supreme Court and the nonprofit Supreme Court Historical Society said there was no record of a sitting president ever attending such arguments before.
Trump also floated attending oral arguments at the Supreme Court in a case involving his tariffs, though he ultimately decided against going. When the justices ruled against him earlier this month and struck down his sweeping tariffs, Trump lashed out, accusing the conservative justices who signed the decision of disrespecting him.
“Our Country was unnecessarily RANSACKED by the United States Supreme Court, which has become little more than a weaponized and unjust Political Organization,” he wrote in a Truth Social post.
Trump’s proposed appearance in court would continue his onslaught against the federal judiciary, which he’s attacked in numerous instances for alleged biases against him. Last spring, he argued that rulings from judges with whom he disagrees could “very well lead to the destruction of our Country!”
Bloomberg via Getty Images
Trump has also frequently railed against birthright citizenship and sought to curtail it via an executive order that’s now being challenged in court. That order restricts birthright citizenship to people who have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident, stripping children born to undocumented and temporary resident parents of this right.
Attorneys defending birthright citizenship have stressed that the order was unconstitutional and a violation of long-settled law, while Trump has claimed that the policy was being misinterpreted and leading to the U.S. getting “scammed.”
His efforts to undo birthright citizenship are a major prong of his broader attacks on immigrants, whom he’s long accused of taking advantage of U.S. public benefits.
“Birthright Citizenship is not about rich people from China, and the rest of the World, who want their children, and hundreds of thousands more, FOR PAY, to ridiculously become citizens of the United States of America,” he wrote on Truth Social on Monday.
While “some foreigners do give birth in the U.S. because they want their babies to obtain U.S. citizenship…this amounts to a small portion of births annually, and there are policies in place to prevent that,” Politifact noted.
