A long-serving federal judge in Seattle, Washington has issued a nationwide ruling temporarily blocking Donald Trump’s attack on the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship, calling the executive order seeking to gut 150 years of settled law “blatantly unconstitutional,” The Seattle Times reports.
In his ruling, Senior U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, was unequivocal about the scope of the Trump administration’s attempted lawlessness in seeking to deny the rightful citizenship of certain infants born on U.S. soil. “I’ve been on the bench for over four decades,” the judge said. “I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”
Coughener, speaking to the Trump Department of Justice lawyer, said, “There are other times in world history where we look back and people of goodwill can say where were the judges, where were the lawyers?”
Reflecting on those powerful words, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick said on the Amicus podcast, “I’ll say again: Go back and read the Nuremberg Judges’ Trial of German jurists and lawyers who were complicit in Nazi crimes. It is important to understand that if judges and lawyers are willing to accede to everything, they will accede to anything. Now we have an 84-year-old Reagan appointee saying that throughout history, there have been moments when we’ve asked: ‘Are you really judges? Are you really lawyers?’ And I think that is profound.”
The ruling in the lawsuit, which was launched by Washington, Oregon, Arizona and Illinois, marks the second Trump administration’s first major court defeat. Several other lawsuits over the unconstitutional executive order are also pending. Washington Attorney General Nick Brown celebrated Thursday’s ruling and noted that the Trump administration is blocked from denying the protections of U.S. citizenship, such as citizenship-affirming documents like birth certificates and Social Security cards, to certain U.S.-born infants while litigation continues.
“This unconstitutional and un-American executive order will hopefully never take effect thanks to the actions states are taking on behalf of their residents,” he said. “Birthright citizenship makes clear that citizenship cannot be conditioned on one’s race, ethnicity or where their parents came from. It’s the law of our nation, recognized by generations of jurists, lawmakers, and presidents, until President Trump’s illegal action. That’s why we’ve stepped in to protect Washingtonians from harm.”
Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order – part of a slew of day one edicts advancing disorder, nativist divisions, and scapegoating immigrants over lowering living costs for working families – attacks the Constitution by targeting the 14th Amendment, which first granted citizenship to freed slaves and has defined citizenship in the United States.
As legal experts and now a federal court have affirmed, the order further defies more than a century of Supreme Court precedent. 1898’s U.S. v Wong Kim Ark, launched by a Chinese American man who had been denied entry into the U.S. despite being born in San Francisco, affirmed that birthright citizenship was guaranteed in the 14th Amendment. Back in Seattle, Judge Coughenour was seemingly astonished at the Trump Justice Department’s gall in denying this precedent. The Seattle Times continues:
Coughenour, speaking to a standing-room-only courtroom in downtown Seattle, interrupted before Brett Shumate, a Justice Department attorney, could even complete his first sentence.
“In your opinion is this executive order constitutional?” he asked.
Said Shumate, “It absolutely is.”
“Frankly, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order,” Coughenour said. “It just boggles my mind.”
“When I clerked on the Ninth Circuit, I worked on some notable cases over which Judge Coughenour presided,” Sam Bagenstos, former General Counsel of HHS and OMB, wrote at Bluesky. “He was very solidly conservative. This just isn’t a close question by any mainstream constitutional analysis.” And while this fight over birthright citizenship certainly isn’t over – we should expect Trump and Stephen Miller to fight this all the way to the Supreme Court – it’s a good indication that the second Trump administration’s actions are being based on nativist impulses and authoritarianism over rule of law and what’s beneficial to our nation.