MSNBC host erupts over SCOTUS ruling on Trump's birthright citizenship order

Fox News

13 hours ago

MSNBC host Symone Sanders Townsend unloaded on the Supreme Court's ruling on President Donald Trump's birthright citizenship executive order, calling it "insane" during a discussion on Friday.
"I just don't, I can't believe that we are asking the question, 'is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution constitutional?' That is what, it is crazy. And I am sorry, but people need to call, 'this is crazy.' They are asking us… They're asking us not to believe our own eyes and our own ears. They're asking us to go against everything that we know to be true. This is insane," Sanders Townsend said.
The Supreme Court delivered a major victory in Trump's effort to block lower courts from issuing universal injunctions that had upended many of his administration's executive orders and actions on Friday. The Justices ruled 6-3 to allow the lower courts to issue injunctions only in limited instances, though the ruling leaves open the question of how the ruling will apply to the birthright citizenship order at the heart of the case.
The Supreme Court agreed this year to take up a trio of consolidated cases involving so-called universal injunctions handed down by federal district judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state.
Judges in those districts had blocked Trump's ban on birthright citizenship from taking force nationwide — which the Trump administration argued in their appeal to the Supreme Court was overly broad.
"The applications do not raise – and thus we do not address – the question whether the Executive Order violates the Citizenship Clause or Nationality Act," Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, writing for the majority. "The issue before us is one of remedy: whether, under the Judiciary Act of 1789, federal courts have equitable authority to issue universal injunctions."
MSNBC host Michael Steele responded, "this is the landscape we find ourselves on now."
"I mean, the reality is that they have been very effective. Trump and his minions inside the government have been very effective at setting the stairsteps to the various narratives that they want to get accomplished," he said.
Slate's Mark Joseph Stern also criticized the ruling, and insisted that no one could explain how Trump's order would work in practice.
"When a child is born in America, the doctor doesn't demand the papers of their parents to ensure that they're a citizen or a green card holder. All they need is a birth certificate showing that they were born here. You, me, most people we know, we are citizens because of our birth. And once the government takes that away, once it introduces this wild, chaotic new system where it depends on your parents, and you get punished if your parents didn't have the right papers, then everyone's citizenship is thrown into disarray, and advocates need to present that very clearly to the Supreme Court because, frankly, this conservative majority is very selective in its empathy," Stern argued.