Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. This Supreme Court week really started over the weekend. That’s when The New York Times published a bombshell report on the court’s internal deliberations from a 2016 case that sparked the modern “shadow docket.” There are multiple takeaways from the previously secret correspondence that led a 5-4 court to block then-President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. But one of them is that, a decade later, it’s hard to ignore the court’s serial interventions backing Donald Trump’s policies.
Yet the president remains displeased with his rare loss in the tariffs case and his likely impending loss in the birthright citizenship case. In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, he called the tariffs ruling from February “an unnecessary and expensive slap in the face to the U.S.A., and a giant victory for its opponents.” He went on to write that if the justices “rule against our Country on Birthright Citizenship, which they probably will, it will be even worse, if that’s possible.”
Trump is probably right that he’ll lose the birthright citizenship case.
But he was wrong when he wrote in that same post that the court’s three Democratic-appointed justices “stick together like glue.” Indeed, a couple of days prior, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued her latest solo dissent, in a Fourth Amendment case, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor only noted her disagreement with the majority without explaining it or joining Jackson, and Justice Elena Kagan didn’t dissent at all from the ruling siding with law enforcement.
The Fourth Amendment is also on the menu this coming week, with the justices slated to hear arguments Monday in Chatrie v. United States. That case involves the constitutionality of “geofence warrants,” which let the authorities get data from cellphone service providers to see who was in the vicinity of a certain place at a certain time. Okello Chatrie was convicted of armed robbery based on evidence from such a warrant. He argues that law enforcement illegally invaded his property interest and privacy expectations. The government counters that he chose to give Google his location data and that he lacks a constitutional interest in protecting it.
The term’s final hearing day is Wednesday, featuring arguments over the Trump administration’s quest to end humanitarian immigration protections for Haitians and Syrians, in a case that could affect immigrants from many countries.
The court is also set to issue opinions Wednesday, which it will continue to do sporadically as the term marches toward its unofficial end in late June. That’s when the justices typically hand down their final rulings before breaking for the summer. For now, Wednesday is the next chance to find out if the president is correct that he will likely lose the birthright citizenship case. But because that case was just argued earlier this month, coupled with its great importance, we might be waiting until closer to the end of the term to learn the answer in that one.
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