For most mortals, most of the time, the deliberations and periodic eructations of the Supreme Court can seem like so many bulletins from the Office of Circumlocution.

Every now and then, however, the Court’s declarations mesmerize the public’s attention.

So it was on Friday, June 27, the last day of the Court’s term. Four cases were up for its scrutiny. One case, a congressional redistricting case in Louisiana, was pushed off to the fall term. (Often described as a “voting rights case,” the real issue is whether redrawing the map to create black-majority districts is permissible.)

Many Americans were happy about the 6–3 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which held that parents in Maryland may opt to keep their children out of primary-school classes that feature “LGBTQ+” storybooks.

The same people who applauded that decision were happy about the 6–3 decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which upheld a Texas law requiring age verification to protect minors from accessing porn sites on the internet.

But the case that really galvanized the public was Trump v. Casa, in which the Court finally began to deal with the outrageous spectacle, unknown until the twentieth century, of district court judges issuing universal injunctions or restraining orders in order to stymie executive—i.e., presidential—actions that they dislike.

I last visited this topic in April when a judge appointed by Barack Obama ordered that Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien whom the Trump administration had deported, be returned to the United States “by no later than 11:59 p.m. on Monday, April 7, 2025.” Garcia was eventually returned and now sits in a Tennessee jail, awaiting trial and/or redeportation.

The fate of Kilmar Garcia, while dramatic, is incidental to the larger question, put crisply by Justice Samuel Alito in a dissenting opinion when SCOTUS, 5–4, agreed with a lower court judge that Donald Trump had to disburse $2 billion in foreign-aid reimbursements. “Does a single district court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars?” Alito asked. “The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.”

So were many of us. Can it be possible that each of the 670-odd district court judges across the nation could contravene the executive orders of the president of the United States?

Trump v. Casa basically says, “No, they cannot.” The Court tabled the big background question about so-called “birthright citizenship.” My own view about that, consonant with the view expressed by scholars such as John Eastman and Michael Anton, is that the Fourteenth Amendment does not automatically grant citizenship to (for example) children of illegal aliens who happen to be born inside the boundaries of the United States.

That, to be sure, is the common understanding of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States,” that bit of the Amendment reads, “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof [my emphasis], are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Two separate requirements for citizenship are articulated by that sentence: 1) birth or naturalization in a particular place, i.e., the United States, and 2) being subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

What does that mean? I think John Eastman is right: “As an original matter, mere birth on U.S. soil alone was insufficient to confer citizenship as a matter of constitutional right. Rather, birth, together with being a person subject to the complete and exclusive jurisdiction of the United States (i.e., not owing allegiance to another sovereign), was the constitutional mandate.”

In my amateur’s view, the Fourteenth Amendment is a good candidate for being the most wildly inflated and misused bit of the Constitution. Busy legal hermeneuts, eager to find support for various liberal causes, have seized on phrases like “due process” and “equal protection” and pumped them full of progressive aspiration. But the amendment cannot be properly understood apart from its historical context. Adopted in 1868 during the frothy and unsettled post-Civil War period, it was one of three amendments meant to address the afterlife of slavery, which officially ended in 1865 but whose legacy continued to fester.

Michael Anton is correct, I believe, in noting that “The purpose of the 14th Amendment was to settle forever the question of the citizenship status of freed slaves and of other free blacks then living in America.” It was not, he goes on to argue, a mandate for birthright citizenship. As a practical matter, Anton continues, birthright citizenship is “a magnet for illegal immigration, an ongoing problem that worsens many of our other problems. The longer we continue the practice, the more illegal immigration we will get, with all its ensuing effects.”

President Trump cut to the chase in his remarks following the Court’s decision Friday. “Some of the cases we’re talking about would be ending birthright citizenship,” Trump noted. “That was meant for the babies of slaves. It wasn’t meant for people trying to scam the system.”

As I say, the Court did not address this large issue. But it did, in a 6–3 decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, decide whether “federal courts have equitable authority to issue universal injunctions.” In brief, the answer (with various qualifications) is “No, they do not.”

These were the words that brought a smile to Stephen Miller’s face:

Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts. The Court grants the government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.

That is the crux of the Court’s decision. It is tantamount to clipping the wings and the hubris of district court judges. It amounts to a great victory for the Trump administration, which is why there was such ebullience in the joint press conference held by the president and attorney general on Friday.

But quite apart from the substance of the decision, there was also some entertaining rhetorical crosstalk. I noted above that all three decisions were decided 6–3. I did not mention that the split was in each case along party—or, if “party” is too low a word for the judiciary, along ideological lines. On one side were the conservatives—Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts. On the other hand were the progressive justices: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and—the latest addition to the Court—Ketanji Brown Jackson.

In Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton famously said that the judiciary was “the least dangerous” branch because, lacking the power of the sword (which belongs to the executive) and Congress’s power of the purse, it wielded “merely judgment.”

Thomas Jefferson, early on, worried that Hamilton underestimated the encroaching, power-seeking ambition concealed within that judicial prerogative. “The opinion,” he wrote in 1804, “which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.”

Justice Jackson, in her dissent, furnished a vivid example of the sort of thing Jefferson had in mind. Usually, judicial dissents are temperate affairs. They can be strongly worded, as is Justice Alito’s dissent, quoted above. But they generally seek to preserve the formality and decorum of the Court.

Justice Jackson’s dissent is an exception. She begins by decrying what she calls “the Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law.” She then says that “the Executive’s bid to vanquish so-called ‘universal injunctions’ is, at bottom, a request for this Court’s permission to engage in unlawful behavior.” Really? Hasn’t she gotten things exactly backwards? Isn’t it the preening district court judges, seeking to intrude upon the authority of the executive, who are acting unlawfully? Justice Jackson concludes by lamenting that “the majority is so caught up in the minutiae of the government’s self-serving, finger-pointing arguments” that they have lost the plot.

This was not Justice Jackson’s first unusual constitutional exposition. Last year, she expressed her concern that the First Amendment might be “hamstringing the government.” Since “hamstringing” the government by protecting free speech is precisely what the First Amendment was intended to accomplish, there was abundant ridicule that greeted her pronouncement.

In the present case, Justice Barrett’s acerbic response to her more impassioned colleague is as rhetorically sharp as it is persuasive. Jackson, writes Barrett,

…chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources [e.g., the Judiciary Act of 1789, which established the jurisdiction of federal courts] nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever. Waving away attention to the limits on judicial power as a ‘mind-numbingly technical query,’ … she offers a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush.

Justice Barrett’s response is full of such intellectually precise remonstrances. Perhaps my favorite is this: “We will not dwell on JUSTICE JACKSON’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

There you have it. You see what Thomas Jefferson was worried about.