Look On The Sunny Side

Mark Stern:

Lots of reporting suggested that, this time around, Trump and his lawyers would avoid the sloppy legal work that plagued his first administration so they’d fare better in the courts. I see no evidence of that in this round of executive orders. This is poor, slipshod work obviously assisted by AI.

And:

Typos and formatting errors get repeated across EOs, revealing extensive use of copy-paste. The rhetoric sounds like a ChatGPT imitation of the 5th Circuit’s laziest rulings. And the legal arguments are frequently fringe in the extreme, in a way that will likely piss off Roberts and Barrett.

Finally:

Maybe the Trump administration’s legal output will improve when Bondi is confirmed as AG and she can staff with the DOJ with at least marginally competent MAGA lawyers. But the early signs here are not encouraging. Remember that CJ Roberts repeatedly DQed Trump policies based on bad lawyering.

Trump didn’t learn anything except how to be stupid earlier.

Professor Vladeck:

There’s a difference between being *realistic* about how the federal courts, including #SCOTUS, are going to respond to the abuses of the second Trump administration and being *nihilistic.* I certainly don’t think courts will block all that they should. But they’ll block more than you might expect.

This blizzard of EO’s is going to be the lawyer full employment act:

I don't think folks fully appreciate just how *quickly* some of the challenges to Trump's new executive orders are going to reach the Supreme Court—through emergency applications from DOJ after lower courts block them.

I can tell you for free this one doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell:

CATO Institute Director of Immigration Studies says Trump’s “monstrous” birthright citizenship EO includes a clause that seeks to deny the legitimacy of Kamala’s citizenship, and is about “a population purge”

Birthright citizenship is the first form of citizenship the United States recognized.  The 14th Amendment codified it to ensure citizenship of former slaves. Trump’s concern is clearly still the citizenship of non-white persons. Trump’s EO is aimed at Harris by denying citizenship to children of parents on temporary status. That was essentially the facts and the holding in Wong Kim Ark, and it won’t be overruled even by Thomas and Alito (well, they might want to, but they won’t get anyone else on their side). Besides, if you start unraveling birthright citizenship, the citizenship of everyone in the country who wasn’t given citizenship sus joli is in question. The Roberts Court may want to end the rights granted by Roe, but even they don’t want to be responsible for that mess.