Trump issues thinly veiled threat to Supreme Court as birthright citizenship under scrutiny: ‘Playing the ref’

After his executive order targeting birthright citizenship fell flat in front of a mostly skeptical Supreme Court, Donald Trump accused his political opponents of “playing the ref” through the courts to overturn his threat to the 14th Amendment.

“The Radical Left SleazeBags, which has no cards remaining in its illegal bag of tricks, is, in a very coordinated manner, PLAYING THE REF with regard to the United States Supreme Court,” Trump wrote.

“They lost the Election in a landslide, and with it, have totally lost their confidence and reason. They are stone cold CRAZY! I hope the Supreme Court doesn’t fall for the games they play,” he added.

In a separate post, written in all-caps, he claimed the nation’s high court is “BEING PLAYED BY THE RADICAL LEFT LOSERS” whose “ONLY HOPE IS THE INTIMIDATION OF THE COURT, ITSELF.”

More than 20 states, immigrants’ advocacy groups and pregnant plaintiffs have sued the administration to block his executive order that attempts to unilaterally redefine the Constitution to determine who is eligible for citizenship.

Three federal judges and appellate court panels have argued it’s unconstitutional and blocked the measure from taking effect nationwide while legal challenges continue. On Thursday, the Supreme Court’s liberal justices appeared shocked at the president’s “unlawful” measure.

But the administration is asking the court to limit the authority of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions, which have imperiled the president’s aggressive agenda, issued largely through an avalanche of executive orders.

The president has repeatedly claimed it’s “illegal” to criticize both his policies that have been challenged in court as well as the judges who have ruled in his favor.

“You know what playing the ref is? Like the great Bobby Knight basketball coach,” Trump said during a speech to the Department of Justice earlier this year, referencing the former Indiana University basketball coach. “He’d scream and scream at the ref. He’d scream.”

Knight “wanted to scare the hell” out of the refs just like “they wanted to scare the hell out of judges,” Trump said.

“They” also treated the conservative Supreme Court justices “unbelievably badly,” he added. “They’re hoping that they can sway them to go along because, again, what do they do?”

In his speech, he told federal prosecutors and law enforcement assembled in front of him that press coverage criticizing judges is influencing their decisions and should be “illegal.”

“Remember the term,” he said in remarks at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania last year.

“Playing the ref with our judges and our justices should be punishable by very serious fines and beyond that,” he said.

In arguments to the Supreme Court, Trump’s personal attorney John Sauer, who was appointed by the president to serve as US solicitor general, said there have been 40 injunctions issued by judges since the beginning of Trump’s second term.

The “cascade of universal injunctions” against the administration is a “bipartisan problem” that exceeds judicial authority, he argued.

“The vision of the district courts that’s reflected in the issuance of these nationwide injunctions is a vision of them as a roving commission to correct every legal wrong that they can consider and to exercise general legal oversight over the executive branch,” he said.

Liberal justices argued that the government’s position would mean individual Americans would have to hire lawyers and file lawsuits to protect their constitutional rights in the face of unlawful actions.

In the birthright citizenship case, children could be citizens in one state and not in another, reflecting a “catch-me-if-you-can kind of regime” where court orders would protect only the individuals in a case, not the millions of Americans who could be impacted, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said.

Trump’s allies, however, have relied on nationwide injunctions to do the very same thing they are now commanding the Supreme Court to strike down. Critics have accused right-wing legal groups of “judge shopping” for ideologically like-minded venues where they can sue to strike down — through nationwide injunctions — policies with which they disagree.

In one prominent case, a lawsuit from an anti-abortion group challenged the government’s approval of a widely used abortion drug, which was filed in a Texas district where the only judge was a Trump-appointed anti-abortion advocate. In 2023, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk issued an injunction that caused chaos among abortion providers and pharmacists.

The injunctions against Trump’s executive order are “essential to ensure that babies born in this country receive their constitutionally guaranteed citizenship, regardless of their parents' immigration status,” according to a statement from the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection’s Kelsi Brown Corkran, who argued before the court on Thursday.

Trump’s executive order is “blatantly unconstitutional and should never be applied to anyone,” she added.