The question of the legality of President Donald Trump declaring, by fiat, that children born in the United States are not automatically citizens — something that is clearly guaranteed by the 14th Amendment — was not answered by the Supreme Court. But in the final day of their term, they handed Trump a win nonetheless.

The Supreme Court on Friday issued a 6-3 ruling on the concept of nationwide injunctions, and whether such injunctions, issued by federal court judges against Trump's Day 1 executive order ending birthright citizenship, can remain in place. The Trump administration's lawyers in the case opted not to bring the question of the constitutionality of Trump's order to the court — which they would most surely have lost on — but instead they focused on the question of whether individual district court judges should have the power to issue nationwide injunctions.

Activists on both the left and the right have been agitating for years about what they see as the abuse of these injunctions, which have been used in the past against executive orders by presidents of both parties. And such injunctions can often be won by bringing cases before judges that plaintiffs believe will be sympathetic to their causes, rather than submitting to randomized judicial selection.

In one such case during the Obama years, a Texas judge issued a nationwide injunction blocking an order that forced government agencies to allow transgender people to use the bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett says, "On multiple occasions, and across administrations, the Solicitor General has asked the Court to consider the propriety of this expansive remedy [of nationwide injunctions]. As the number of universal injunctions has increased over the years, so too has the importance of the issue."

And, Barrett's opinion concludes, "When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too," arguing that Congress has not granted such sweeping powers to individual district court judges.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh writes that challengers to executive orders can still "ask a court to award preliminary classwide relief that may, for example, be statewide, regionwide or even nationwide."

The liberal trio on the court, in a dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor that she delivered from the bench on Friday, argues that such universal injunctions are necessary to prevent widespread harm, and that it is impractical and illogical to expect that every person experiencing that harm must individually sue to seek relief. Sotomayor called the ruling "a travesty for the rule of law."

"No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates," Sotomayor writes. "Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from lawabiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship. The majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief."

In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggests that the majority's discussion of judicial authority in the 18th Century is a "smokescreen" that will give Trump, and other presidents, "the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate."

The ruling is being denounced roundly by civil rights and immigrants' rights advocates, Democratic lawmakers, and many others who are saying it opens the door for Trump and his allies to continue to flout the Constitution with impunity.

As the New York Times' Adam Liptak notes, the birthright citizenship case and the way it was brought to the high court is "unusual," in part because it did not present a question to be answered by the court. Instead, it presented three emergency applications seeking partial stays of the nationwide injunctions issued by three federal judges against Trump's executive order.

The actual question of the constitutionality of the birthright citizenship order is then likely to be put before the Supreme Court in its next term. But the court's ruling today sets up several months of guaranteed chaos, with the Trump administration trying to play fast and loose and create political theater around the pregnancies of undocumented immigrants.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer issued a statement calling on his Republican colleagues to "stand up for core American democratic values and not for unchecked presidential power of the kind that our founders most deeply feared."

He called the Supreme Court's ruling and the limiting of federal judges' powers a "terrifying step towards authoritarianism."

Photo by Jesse Collins