Major Challenges Await Supreme Court This Term

WASHINGTON, D.C. (WJON News) -- What could be one of the most significant cases of this year's Supreme Court term will be heard in the coming weeks.

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The Justices will hear oral arguments on April 1st on the challenge to President Trump's executive order regarding birthright citizenship. The 14th Amendment says that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States. However, early in his second term, Trump issued an executive order redefining citizenship, requiring the child's parents to be either citizens or lawful residents.

College of St. Benedict and St. John's University Political Science Professor Phil Kronebusch says the Supreme Court has already ruled on this issue long ago.

There is a very old Supreme Court precedent from 1898, which offers a broad interpretation saying that if the baby is born in the United States, that baby has access to a claim of U.S. citizenship. So the Trump administration is really fundamentally trying to narrow that earlier court decision.

Kronebusch says the Trump Administration is also trying to reinterpret what the 14th Amendment says. Multiple federal judges have already suspended the enforcement of the executive order.

The United States Supreme Court also has oral arguments coming up on an election case. The lawsuit is about what is defined as Election Day. The Republican National Committee is suing the state of Mississippi because the state allows ballots that are postmarked on election day to be counted as long as they are received within five days of election day.

So the Republican National Committee's argument is that the Mississippi law violates the federal law defining Election Day.  There's a lot of focus on exactly what election day is, and the argument is that a five-day period for ballots to arrive is not election day.

Kronebusch says a majority of states allow this flexibility. He says the case is ultimately about the 2020 election and the counting of ballots that continued for five days after election day, even though all the ballots were postmarked by election day.