Johnson’s reaction
House Speaker Mike Johnson rolled his eyes and had a brief reaction when reporters told him on Tuesday that the Supreme Court 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 prospective birthright citizenship.
“As a constitutional lawyer, I’ve got lots of opinions on this,” he told reporters while explaining what the Framers of the U.S. Constitution meant as well as the authors of the 14th amendment, which established birthright citizenship. “Understand what the Framers did.”
The president signed an executive order on his first day back in office to curtail the 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.
During Johnson’s explanation, reporters told him that the ruling had just come down.
“Oh dear,” Johnson said as he rolled his eyes. Johnson would then return to speaking about birthright citizenship.
“I mean, you could say that's a contextualist originalist view,” Johnson told reporters. “However, I do think that this has been grossly abused in recent years.”
Johnson would then go on to speak about “birthing tourism” caused by birthright citizenship, a common talking point among conservatives about birthright citizenship.
“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.”
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.
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