The court didn’t actually rule that Trump’s changes to birthright citizenship are legal, they only ruled that the lower courts couldn’t issue nationwide injunctions to stop him.
Is that functionally different in your mind? Perhaps it is slightly different if we assume they’re going to stop here and not take it any further but that seems obviously untrue so I’m not sure why the distinction matters.
It’s different because the court is still likely to have to rule on the actual problem eventually. They might get around to ruling that Trump’s changes are unconstitutional, but they have this weird idea that the “harm” Trump would suffer by having his probably-unconstitutional plans put on hold while courts sort out their legality is somehow greater than the harm suffered by all the people who will be affected if the plans go ahead.
This is like that time when the supreme court had to hold deliberations on whether the local police in an active shooter situation could take the gun away from the shooter, and potentially violate the shooter’s second amendment rights. They didn’t rule on it right away, but issued a ruling that lower courts could not rule on the constitutionality of disarming the active shooter, and had to allow the shooter to continue shooting until the second amendment implications could be considered by the supreme court. Then they went into recess.
The court didn’t actually rule that Trump’s changes to birthright citizenship are legal, they only ruled that the lower courts couldn’t issue nationwide injunctions to stop him.
Is that functionally different in your mind? Perhaps it is slightly different if we assume they’re going to stop here and not take it any further but that seems obviously untrue so I’m not sure why the distinction matters.
It’s different because the court is still likely to have to rule on the actual problem eventually. They might get around to ruling that Trump’s changes are unconstitutional, but they have this weird idea that the “harm” Trump would suffer by having his probably-unconstitutional plans put on hold while courts sort out their legality is somehow greater than the harm suffered by all the people who will be affected if the plans go ahead.
This is like that time when the supreme court had to hold deliberations on whether the local police in an active shooter situation could take the gun away from the shooter, and potentially violate the shooter’s second amendment rights. They didn’t rule on it right away, but issued a ruling that lower courts could not rule on the constitutionality of disarming the active shooter, and had to allow the shooter to continue shooting until the second amendment implications could be considered by the supreme court. Then they went into recess.
Edit: None of this happened
That’s like the difference between banning abortion nationwide and just allowing states to ban it