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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm good. We've tried to end this season now a couple, three times, but I think this is actually our ending point for the season because coming soon is a SCOTUS near you. Actually, a SCOTUS is near us when you think about it, Richmond, not that far.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm confused, which is my permanent state of condition, but I'm confused as to how we should label the episode, because on one hand, we could call this the news or we could go ahead and label this, can he do this?
N. Rodgers: Or we could do it birthright citizenship Part 1 because we know that there's going to be a decision later in the spring or the early summer that will fall into summer of SCOTUS. I think it's a bridge episode.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, it's a bridge episode.
N. Rodgers: But I think you're right. In the news it could be can he do that. It actually encompasses pretty much all of our types of episodes except the stories behind the name. Although we are going to get to that in this episode as well.
J. Aughenbaugh: Enough of the wind-up. This is an episode about a Supreme Court case that was heard a few weeks ago at the time of our recording. The name of the case is Trump versus Barbara. This is the current Supreme Court case. They've not issued the decision yet about executive order 14,160.
N. Rodgers: It's 14,160 for anybody counting at home.
J. Aughenbaugh: Issued by the Trump administration the first day of his second term in office. This is the infamous citizenship birthright citizenship executive order. Does the order comply with the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, but also statutory code, which codifies the clause into federal law.
N. Rodgers: By the way, executive orders they're just numbered, aren't they, but consecutively. This is not Donald Trump's 14,000. This is from George Washington forward. I was just checking on that because it feels like it could be 14,000 executive orders from Donald Trump. But then it seems like even for Donald Trump, that might be a little extreme.
J. Aughenbaugh: A little excessive. Nia, to your point. The executive order, which placed Japanese-Americans into interment camps during World War II was Executive Order 9066. Since 1942, we have had about 5,000 executive orders issued by presidents.
N. Rodgers: In what we think of as the modern presidential era, which is, generally speaking, Roosevelt forward. That issue here is Donald Trump says, I am saying there is no such thing as birthright citizenship for. He's not saying for everybody, he's saying for specific two categories of people. People who are born of parents who are here on a visas, but are not permanent citizens or people who are born here of parents who are not here legally at all.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: It does not affect like, God forbid this should ever happen. But you and I have a baby, which at this point would be a miracle because we're both old. But because we are citizens, that would not be in question for our child.
J. Aughenbaugh: They would not be subject to this executive order.
N. Rodgers: This is basically if your parents have crossed the border illegally, are you a citizen or if they are here on a visa temporarily, are you a citizen of the United States?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: He was saying, no, you're not. Then a whole bunch of people went, what? No, we have the 14th Amendment. We have laws. What are you doing? It immediately became a court case, did it not?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It's in ours.
J. Aughenbaugh: It was one of the first executive orders he did issue after he was sworn in for a second term. Almost immediately, as you pointed out, there were challenges filed across the country. All the lower courts that have heard these challenges have said that the executive order is unconstitutional. But the Trump administration's claim is those rulings and the longstanding view that the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment grants legal citizenship to anybody born in the United States is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitution.
N. Rodgers: Everybody has gotten it wrong since 1860?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, this was 1866 when the amendment was ratified. No, that's right.
N. Rodgers: You got the decade right 1860.
J. Aughenbaugh: You drifted off there. I was just right.
N. Rodgers: I did at the end.
J. Aughenbaugh: I can't let my partner hang here.
N. Rodgers: Thank you. For the last approximately 100 and some years, you have been misreading the intent of the Constitution and constitutional amendment.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, I just misspoke. It was finally ratified by the states in 1868. Congress approved the 14th Amendment in 1866.
N. Rodgers: Then it had to go out and get it. Because it does take a while. Amendments are not quick a zippy thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: No. Now, the clause itself according to the members of Congress who wrote it was explicitly added to the 14th Amendment to overrule the Supreme Court's ruling in Dred Scott versus Sanford. Because in that decision all slaves, so people of color, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as enslaved persons were not entitled to any protection in the federal courts. Why? Because of the court's logic in Dred Scott, which is they weren't US citizens. The logic was, well, let's make sure that post Civil War, we correct that logic.
N. Rodgers: Which, if a person was brought here from somewhere else to be enslaved, they wouldn't be a citizen because they're an adult person. But what this is basically saying is their children are citizens because their children were born here.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Now the first part of this litigation was the lower court rulings that suspended in legal terms, stayed the implementation of the executive order. The Trump administration went to the Supreme Court to get all of those stays overturned. The Supreme Court agreed in the case of Trump versus Casa. The court held that all of those universal injunctions issued by the lower courts, were not appropriate decisions by the lower courts.
N. Rodgers: That the lower courts courts are not allowed to view universal.
J. Aughenbaugh: Injunctions. That's right.
N. Rodgers: That's the whole point of having sets of lower courts and not one set of lower courts.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. The majority opinion was written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who said that in no history of courts, either in the United States or in British common law, could lower courts issue universal injunctions.
N. Rodgers: Which didn't deal, by the way, with the substance of the case.
J. Aughenbaugh: Case. That's right.
N. Rodgers: It dealt with basically, does the court have standing to give a universal decree. The Supreme's found no, they do not.
J. Aughenbaugh: On the Trump administration side, as we've already mentioned, the administration's basically arguing that basically the lower courts, the US Supreme Court, the United States Congress all have misinterpreted the original meaning of the citizenship clause.
N. Rodgers: Can I just mention this case was heard on April 1st. Part of me wants to say, was that a joke that you're telling them that everybody before you got it wrong? Yes. But the other thing is, so Aughie and I live in Richmond. Richmond is approximately three hours south drive, well, two hour, it depends on how fast you drive. South of DC. We are south of DC 100 and some miles. The I could feel the side eye of the Supremes on that day here in Richmond, because they were not having it. They were not having an argument that says, you guys have been wrong for 160 years, whatever it is. You've been reading it wrong this whole time. They were not having it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now, what was interesting was the difficulty for the Trump administration. Well, there's a lot of difficulties in making this argument. But one of the biggest difficulties was that there is actually a Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. In 1898, in the case of Wong Kim Ark, he was born in San Francisco to parents of Chinese descent. He visited China in 1895 and returned to the United States, and immigration officials would not allow him to enter the country because they claimed he was not a US citizen. But the Supreme Court agreed with Wong Kim Ark. The court explained that the main purpose of the 14th Amendment had been to establish the citizenship of Black people, including former enslaved persons born in the United States. The amendment affirms, and here's a quote affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens.
N. Rodgers: His parents lived here?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: They had taken up residence here, and that doesn't make them citizens, but his birth in the United States in San Francisco makes him an American citizen.
J. Aughenbaugh: In the majority opinion in the Wong Kim Ark case, Justice Gray writing for the majority said, there are only three exceptions the court has acknowledged to this general rule. One, children born of hostile enemies of the United States. Two, children born of foreign diplomats, and then three, Native Americans. Native Americans got US citizenship in 1924 with a law passed by Congress.
N. Rodgers: Which is weird because they were the first Americans.
J. Aughenbaugh: They were the first Americans.
N. Rodgers: We could have that discussion some other time.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's difficult because the Indian tribes always said they were sovereign tribes.
N. Rodgers: If they're sovereign, they don't bear allegiance to the United States. The theory is that your citizenship is based on your allegiances.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: But for instance, if you're the child of foreign diplomats, one would assume that your parents have allegiance to the country that they are coming from, but they're being diplomats from, and therefore, your allegiance would be to that country. You're the kid of I don't know, the Haitian diplomats to the United States. They're assuming that both your parents and you are considered Haitian because you're coming here representing Haiti, not the US. That makes sense. Of course, hostile territory. If you just take over places and then have children and that gives them citizenship, that does seem like that would be contrary to what most people consider citizenship to be.
J. Aughenbaugh: The Trump administration to counter this precedent and the fact that the United States Congress in 1952, basically enshrined birthright citizenship into federal law, the Trump administration basically makes two arguments. One, the United States among Western democracies, particularly Western democracies at the time the 14th Amendment was written, is unusual. They point to the fact that even today, most Western European democracies do not grant citizenship based on where you were born. It's based on blood.
J. Aughenbaugh: If your parents are US citizens, then no matter where you were born, you are a US citizen. They're not wrong. I mean, because western European nations base immigration on blood, not by birth.
N. Rodgers: If your parents are German and they're happen to be visiting the Grand Canyon and you're born, Germany would say, you're a German citizen.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Cause your parents are German.
J. Aughenbaugh: They're German. That's right. Their second part of the Trump administration's argument was about the phrase in the clause, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
N. Rodgers: How Native Americans not counting?
J. Aughenbaugh: Or if your parents are in the United States illegally, they legally, are subject to the jurisdiction of another country because.
N. Rodgers: Which is why we get people being sent to when they're found in a country, they are usually sent home. Like if I slipped over the Canadian border, the Canadians would boot me back to the United States. They would send me home because they would say, you're not a Canadian. You didn't do this the right way. You're an American. Go home.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Or like a bar. You don't have to go there, but you can't stay here because you're not Canadians.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, you don't have to go home. You just got to get out of here. But the basic logic is if you're here illegally, you don't.
N. Rodgers: You don't have rights.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. You don't have rights, and you certainly are under no obligation to comply with the jurisdictional rules and behaviors of a country that you're not here legally in.
N. Rodgers: I can see that argument. I could see that argument as, why would you obey any other law if you're not obeying the law of coming here legally?
J. Aughenbaugh: This is why during the oral arguments, the justices spend so much time on a phrase that you may have seen on legal forms, Nia, but most of us never know what the hell it means. Which is, what is your permanent domicile. I mean, in United States a lot in regards to when you register to vote. What is your permanent domicile?
N. Rodgers: Because that determines which precinct you vote in?
J. Aughenbaugh: Vote in. That's right and whether or not you vote for House of Representative elections in Virginia versus Maryland or some other state. That's their argument. The challengers counter, that the drafters of the 14th Amendment had intended to give citizenship to anybody born in the United States because technically, enslaved persons were not US citizens. Remember, in Dred Scott, they were not considered US citizens, which meant they had no legal and political rights in the country.
N. Rodgers: Even though by that point, many of them had been born here, there were generations that had passed between enslavement and between being brought over and being born, so they were trying to clear that up.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's a very. It's a very powerful argument. I mean, the challengers are like, even if the Supreme Court got it wrong in Wong Kim Ark case, we still have, what was the original purpose of the Framers who wrote the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. They were explicitly trying to correct a problem that was caused by the Supreme Court ruling in Dred Scott.
N. Rodgers: A wrong that had been done to people.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then the Trump administration during oral arguments, Nia, pivoted to focus on the policy implications. The Trump administration points to a practice known as birthright tourism, where you have an incentive of mothers. Who are pregnant
N. Rodgers: To go to the Grand Canyon and have their baby while they're on vacation.
N. Rodgers: Vacation or wherever.
N. Rodgers: I know. We hearkening back to our earlier.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes and this has become known as, birth tourism or birth right tourism.
N. Rodgers: Anchor babies. Once I have a baby in the United States, then I should be able to stay here and take care of it because it's an American citizen, and you can't just turn it loose because babies.
J. Aughenbaugh: According to the current immigration law passed during the Reagan administration. Immigration officials are supposed to emphasize keeping families.
N. Rodgers: Families together.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, intact. But the challengers pushed back and said, the statistics supporting this claim of birth tourism are marginal at best, and that there are other less dramatic solutions than eliminating birthright citizenship altogether. We could emphasize with immigration officials that tourism visas are only supposed to be for tourism purposes, not giving birth in the United States.
N. Rodgers: One of the ways that you can do that side note is you can say to people, if you are more than this many weeks pregnant, you may not travel to the United States. I know that that's doable because every cruise line has paperwork that says, if you're past this many weeks pregnant, you cannot get on our cruise because we cannot support a birth at sea. Because most cruise lines have medical staff, but they don't have O-B-G-Y-N, they don't have a lot of that. They don't have that specialty stuff because that would mean they'd have to have a much bigger boat, so it is possible to do that. It's possible to say to women, if you are not you know, if you're within X number of weeks of giving birth, you cannot travel to the United States even on a tourist .
N. Rodgers: Nia, I remember when a bunch of us when the Political Science Department was still part of the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at VCU, a bunch of us went to an academic conference in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2009. My female colleagues, to get visas to attend this conference had to swear under penalty of law that they were not pregnant because Russia would not let us in if they were so many weeks pregnant.
N. Rodgers: We're not going to let you steal Russian citizenship, although I'm not sure why you'd want to, that's neither here nor there. I'm sure Russia's very lovely. Actually, Russia is lovely. I've been to but, and the people are nice. The stuff is nice. It's just their leadership that's.
J. Aughenbaugh: I love my time.
N. Rodgers: I'm not so fond of.
J. Aughenbaugh: I love the people, but that's neither here nor there. The last argument.
N. Rodgers: Also we are not really, we're also not talking about a huge number of people here. Even if you're talking about birth tourism, even if you were talking about 10 % of all babies born, but you are not. You're not even close to 10%. It's still rather Draconian to try to get those people.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Again, on this podcast, we try to be balanced, given the Trump administration arguments, I've mentioned some of the responses by the challengers. But one of the last points made by the challengers, and I'm going to talk about this a little bit further when we get to the actual oral arguments is the challengers went ahead and said, "Well, apparently, not only was the US Supreme Court wrong in the Wong Kim Ark case, apparently, the United States Congress was wrong because Congress two different times in 1940, and most recently, 1952, went ahead and interpreted birthright citizenship, in a very broad sense." They basically adopted what the Supreme Court said in the Wong Kim Ark case. The Trump administration's response was, and this is a butte, I'm sorry. I try to be objective. The court should look at what it actually means, not what Congress thought it meant in 1940 or 1952. I'm like, Ouch.
N. Rodgers: You want to talk about they should ignore Congress.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, you want to be dismissed.
N. Rodgers: I'm not sure that's the argument you want to make. I think the strongest argument here on this side is the if you are not obeying the laws about how to come here. Then there is no reason to believe that you would consider yourself to be held to the jurisdictional law of any other part of the law of the United States. Undocumented immigrants, I can actually see as a stronger argument than temporary visitors, which people sometimes accidentally give birth early or whatever when that's not the intent at all, but it is like it's a thing that happens. But I can understand that argument being made on the side of if you're already going to flagrantly violate the law, there's no reason to believe that you would uphold any other law. Now, the contra to that is we do know that illegal immigrants tend to be very careful about the law. Once they once they are established because they don't want to end up in the court system.
J. Aughenbaugh: Where they could be deported.
N. Rodgers: They'll be deported. It is a weird, there's a lot of complication. The whole thing is very nuanced, which is odd coming from Donald Trump because he doesn't tend to be this nuanced.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. I mean, his lawyers have to go ahead and filter his brash statements into legally palatable, nuanced arguments. But for the Trump administration, this was particularly nuanced. Now, those are the written briefs. Again, listeners, this is Part 1. The court has heard oral arguments. As Nia pointed out, they heard oral arguments on April 1 of 2026.
N. Rodgers: The court beat the snot out of the Trump administration Mr. Sauer?
J. Aughenbaugh: Attorney the solicitor general for the United States, who typically argues cases at the Supreme Court where the federal government is a party to the litigation. He got a lot of difficult questions. Now, let's be fair. The justices were particularly engaged during this or argument because they fired some.
N. Rodgers: They were in. They were leaning forward on the bench. They had they wanted to talk about. Mr. Wong of the ACLU didn't get nearly the yes. Because and in fairness to the court and in fairness to Mr. Sauer, the reason Mr. Wong did not get much as many as much questioning is because he's asking for the status quo, the way. He doesn't have to defend the change. Mr. Sauer had to defend the change. That's why he gets more beaten up by the justices because they want to say, if you want to change something that has held since what is it? 1868? Or even the 40s 50s when you're talking about the congressional laws.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, the Wong Kim Ark case was decided in 1898. You're looking at a century and a quarter.
N. Rodgers: They're saying, you need to tell us why we want to change that as opposed to Mr. Wong from the ACLU who's going, We like it the way it is. Which is a pretty tight argument, really. Don't change anything.
J. Aughenbaugh: You guys got it right a century and a quarter ago, and by the way the political branches, they've been good to go for decades. Well done. Nothing here to see,
N. Rodgers: That's part of why Mr. Sauer took the beating that he took.
J. Aughenbaugh: But to me, and a lot of, Supreme Court follow watchers, we really took note of the fact that there was a wide swath of the court, liberals and conservatives that were openly skeptical of the Trump administration's argument that the original meeting of the citizenship clause, is one that nobody has really considered, for 160 years, they were openly skeptical.
N. Rodgers: Well, how many papers have been written on that?
J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, my goodness.
N. Rodgers: How high can you count?
J. Aughenbaugh: I mean then you could tell some of the justices who believe in precedenty, who are institutionalists. They, too, were skeptical of Mr. Sauers' argument that Wong Kim Ark ruling was bad, was poorly decided, I mean, some of the sarcasm was just dripping in the questions.
N. Rodgers: Anybody who starts with, do you mean to suggest is about to hit you with something ugly. You should just watch out when you hear that phrase.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's like my daughter says to me all the time, and she said it to people we encounter. If my dad starts off with, let me get this straight.
N. Rodgers: You should run for the hills. It's not going to end well for you. That's basically what they did to him for an hour. Let me get this straight.
J. Aughenbaugh: But Nia, what to me was also fascinating was at least three of the justices, including Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, indicated that the court could decide this case not on constitutional grounds, but on legislative grounds.
N. Rodgers: Congress made a law.
J. Aughenbaugh: They may punt the constitutional question and say, we've interpreted laws passed by Congress as enshrining birthright citizenship.
N. Rodgers: Which could push it back to Congress if they wanted.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Donald Trump could pursue that by saying, Congress, I want you to write a law that says, these people are not citizens, these people are citizens. Do we think that that's likely?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, I'll get to that in just a moment, but this is known as a justiciability rule of strict necessity. If the court can decide a case on legal instead of constitutional grounds, the court should decide it on legal grounds. Why? Because it is a democracy.
N. Rodgers: For people.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's easier to change a law than to change or amend the Constitution.
N. Rodgers: The theory is that the House and Senate represent the people and the will of the people.
J. Aughenbaugh: People in a democracy. If the people think that birthright citizenship should be interpreted this way, then let them speak through their representatives in Congress.
N. Rodgers: Got you. That makes sense. That's a bar that is closer to democracy than whether something is constitutional or not, which is decided by a group of people not elected.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, if I had to venture a prediction, and you usually force me to do this off recording, in part because you know that I am historically bad at making these predictions, but nevertheless.
N. Rodgers: Let's go on record.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm going to go on record. I think Trump loses eight to one or nine to zero.
N. Rodgers: Who's the one, Thomas?
J. Aughenbaugh: Maybe Alito. But the only question for me is, will the court rule against the administration on constitutional or legislative grounds? That's where I could see there being a divide among the justices. I think the three liberals would love to clearly say, this day we reaffirm Wong Kim Ark. The 14th Amendment citizenship clause says X. I just don't know if the chief can get all the conservatives to speak of one mind in this regard.
N. Rodgers: Especially if Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.
J. Aughenbaugh: They're the one. Yes.They're going to be key vote.
N. Rodgers: The thing is, in order to win, the liberals will probably sign on to a legislative ground rather than trying to fight for a constitutional ground. Just they win either way.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, my vote is based on how one sided the oral arguments were. Now, to be very clear, constitutional law scholars know this. You should not rely upon oral arguments as the basis of a prediction because the justices are frequently asking questions to try to persuade one another. Their minds have already been made up. They just haven't told us yet. Now, if the court does decide this on legislative grounds, Nia, think about how much pressure that puts on the midterm elections this fall.
N. Rodgers: Trump is going to have to retain GFP control in order to deal with this question if he really wants to pursue this question. There's an enormous amount of pressure on the midterm right now for a variety of reasons. There are a lot of things out there.
J. Aughenbaugh: The war on Iran, tariffs, Trump's attack on the Federal Reserve.
N. Rodgers: The financial status of the United States right now.
J. Aughenbaugh: The gutting of the bureaucracy because of DOGE cuts back in 2025.
N. Rodgers: There's a lot of stuff. I don't know if Donald Trump remembers that he's fighting about this anymore because Donald Trump moves from fight to fight pretty quickly.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. He's like a dog in the backyard, and he sees squirrels and he sees birds. Yes.
N. Rodgers: I'm not entirely certain how invested he is in this now. He was invested in it when he signed it. But we haven't heard him mention it at all. We didn't hear him mention it the day they did the arguments. We didn't hear him mention the day after.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, he did actually attend the first part.
N. Rodgers: The first hour.
J. Aughenbaugh: We should note this.
N. Rodgers: That's unusual.
J. Aughenbaugh: For the first time in the history of the Supreme Court, a sitting president attended oral arguments. Now, he didn't last the full two hours and 40 minutes. He basically stayed until the ACLU went up to the lectern and did their presentation, and then he bolted.
N. Rodgers: I'm sorry, he did tweet one thing he called the justices stupid.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because I think he sees the writing on the wall.
J. Aughenbaugh: Wall, yes.
N. Rodgers: Donald Trump walks away from a losing cause. He's pretty savvy in that sense of, if we're going to lose this, let's just walk away and pretend it didn't happen, because then that way, we don't have to acknowledge the loss. I don't know. But, man, I would hate to be his attorney general. I would hate to have to go argue this stuff.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's why it puts even more pressure on the midterms, because if he does retain control of both houses of Congress, which would be historical if he did, because as you well know Nia, the party of the president typically gets just beat up in the midterms.
N. Rodgers: Yes. Obama has a term from this called shellacking.
J. Aughenbaugh: Wacking. Yes.
N. Rodgers: You take a shellacking.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, it has to be on one of the words on our next line of merch.
N. Rodgers: Don't make me shellack you.
J. Aughenbaugh: We got a shellacking in quotes. But let's say, hypothetically, the Republicans retain majority control of both houses of Congress.
N. Rodgers: They could fix this.
J. Aughenbaugh: They could go ahead and revise the 1952 law. Then that puts the ACLU and other challengers once again back in the position of having to take the law, not the executive order, the law to court.
N. Rodgers: See, to me, that would be kicking the can down the road a little bit. Then it would end up at the Supremes again. Then they would have to deal with it as a constitutional issue. But they may choose to do that because that's what they do sometimes in the hope that it won't become an issue again for a while.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's the reason why you have rules of justiciability, is to go ahead and take some issues and conflicts off the docket of the courts and leave it into the hands of the people and their elected representatives. But nevertheless, this is fascinating. Listeners, this is Part 1. When we return for our annual summer of SCOTUS, there is going to be time spent on this case in our review of the Supreme Court term because this is a big one, folks.
N. Rodgers: This is big.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is best of.
N. Rodgers: This may be its own episode in the summer of SCOTUS, because it will depend on what they say and how it goes and the responses. But we will get back to y'all this summer. In fact, for summer of SCOTUS this year, we will get back on a lot of big cases because we had several this year that we're waiting on.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. But thank you, Nia. This has just been utterly fascinating to go ahead and see this play out in the federal courts.
N. Rodgers: You know what? I will say this, and I'm not saying this grudgingly. I'm actually saying this with some level of admiration. Donald Trump is not afraid of the big questions.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: He's afraid of questions about Jeffrey Epstein, and he's afraid of questions about the rose garden. But he's not afraid of questions like this. This is a big thing, and he was willing to take it on. You have to have a certain level of admiration for a desire to take on the big questions and see where you go.
J. Aughenbaugh: You've heard me say this off recording, Nia. In many ways, President Trump has the hutzpah that we saw with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the willingness to go ahead and ask the big questions and to force the institutions and the American public to reckon with things that have many of us just have assumed for years it's already been decided. What is the meaning of birthright citizenship?
N. Rodgers: I just assumed I knew what that was.
J. Aughenbaugh: In the process, hopefully enough of us have also come to recognize that as the Trump administration claims, the United States does citizenship very differently than most modern Western democracies. That may be good and that may be bad. But if we're only going to make comparisons on the things that we like, well, that's not comparison shopping folks.
N. Rodgers: I guess what I'm getting at is he's willing to pick up the snow globe and shake it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Sometimes that makes me really irritated because I liked the snow globe the way it was.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Sometimes I think, well, at least he's got me thinking about something that I hadn't thought about before, even if what I come to is a conclusion that is not the conclusion he comes to, which is particularly for me in this case.
J. Aughenbaugh: No doubt about it.
N. Rodgers: I don't agree with their argument. I understand their argument, but I don't agree with it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Even if I like the outcome, I would still think that the logic for how they got to that outcome was wrong. By the way, I don't like the outcome.
N. Rodgers: The more, the better.
J. Aughenbaugh: I want more people coming in the United States, not fewer.
N. Rodgers: More people being born here. I don't care how they get born here, except I don't think you should steal people and then have them be born here. But other than that, human trafficking. But the more we can get more babies, the better off we are, I think, as a nation. I don't like to give a huge amount of credit to Donald Trump because a lot of what he does is self serving, but that's true of a lot of people who decide to run for president. You really don't run for president if you're not a bit self serving. You know what I mean?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: If you're not a bit wrapped up in the idea that you are, in fact, the smartest person in the room, because otherwise, I don't think you can take the beating that comes from being in a presidential race and being president.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because think about it, Nia. For most of us who readily acknowledge our flaws, if we ran for president and we were elected president, and then you have now a whole nation of critics, it would be impossible. I don't know about you. I think it would be for you. I know it would be for me. I would have a lot of difficulty getting to sleep.
N. Rodgers: I would never sleep. They will say, what is wrong with her? She hasn't slept in two years.
J. Aughenbaugh: I can already chronicle my flaws.
N. Rodgers: I don't have the level of hubris to assume that I'm the smartest person in any room. Unless I'm there by myself, then I might have a shot.
J. Aughenbaugh: But then you add an entire country of additional critics to point out even more flaws.
N. Rodgers: And the rest of the world, no.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm not sleeping for at least one term, and I could only last one term, because I would probably die from lack of sleep.
N. Rodgers: Why does Aughenbaugh look like a zombie all the time? He's not slept in three years, 3.5 years, and he just wants to be done. It's no wonder many of them and part of that aging comes from that knockdown of hubris, where all of a sudden, you're like, maybe I'm not the smartest person in the world whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: I remember one of my students said, what was up with Bush 43 turning to painting after he served as president? I'm like, if you just got done serving president after the 9/11 attacks, wouldn't you turn to something like painting just to go ahead and be sane, just to live out the rest of your life? Even if you're not a good painter, you'll be like, I'm just going to go this is just going to be me and my canvas for the rest of the afternoon.
N. Rodgers: A brush. I just need it to be quiet and still. If Aughie is president guys, what will happen after that is they'll be no book available in the United States because he will be reading all of them. He'd be laying on the couch reading books, and they'll say, Mr. President, would you like to go speak it? He will say, no, I'm reading a book.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm reading a book.
N. Rodgers: You hardly ever hear President Bush going and speaking. He's not on the tours, doing all the tours and stuff.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: He totally was ready to be done with proper service.
J. Aughenbaugh: He was ready to go back to his ranch in Crawford. What was it? Crawford, Texas.
N. Rodgers: Just never be heard from again. That's totally good for him.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm right there with you, President Bush. I got your back.
N. Rodgers: I'm more Bush than Clinton. Clinton was like, is there anybody I can talk to? Can I convince people to do things? I'm like no.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: I suspect that Jimmy Carter built houses because it let him use hammers against nails. It let him get out his emotional aggression on why can't the world be a better place?
J. Aughenbaugh: Place. Why can't we have free and fair elections around the world?
N. Rodgers: Elections. Why can't people get along? Pound pound.
J. Aughenbaugh: Anyway, Nia, thank you.
N. Rodgers: Thank you, Aughie.
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