Issues once thought long settled are now up for grabs again. But “they’re not going to get what they want,” says Omar Jadwat of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project.
Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) speaks with reporters as she boards the Senate subway after a vote in the US Capitol on May 14, 2025.
(Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Hours after the Supreme Court issued its ruling that narrowed lower courts’ usage of nationwide injunctions—in response to the Trump administration’s requesting it take up the issue in the wake of federal judges halting his unconstitutional executive order on birthright citizenship—the ACLU and several other organizations filed a series of class-action lawsuits designed to stop the order from taking effect.
The ACLU’s case was filed in New Hampshire, and oral arguments on the motion to issue a preliminary injunction will be heard next Wednesday. Another case, led by Georgetown University Law School’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, has been filed in Maryland. Both are seeking nationwide relief for the class of plaintiffs represented in the suits. The state of New Jersey has also filed a lawsuit arguing that it stands to lose if people born in the United States but without access to the rights of US citizens move into the state and cannot secure benefits they would otherwise be entitled to. The state is arguing that it, too, needs nationwide relief to protect its interests.
Although Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, believes that the ruling narrowing the use of nationwide injunctions will be destructive in the long term, regarding the specifics of the birthright citizenship case he is of the opinion that the Supreme Court left enough wiggle room for significant pushback. When push comes to shove, he says, he thinks that children born in the US to undocumented immigrants or those on temporary visas won’t ultimately be denied citizenship and ordered deported soon after being born.
There is the class-action route. But he also noted that there is the provision under the Administrative Procedures Act that allows a court to set aside—under the concept of vacatur—agency actions that violate the Constitution or otherwise break the law. Those challenging Trump’s executive orders on birthright citizenship argue that the Social Security Administration and other agencies would be breaking multiple rules and constitutional provisions by denying Social Security numbers, passports, and birth certificates to the children of undocumented residents. Trump is, Jadwat argues, “taking a real run to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment, [but] at the end of the day, they’re not going to get what they want.”
That the president and his team could, however, even make a serious go of flouting one of the most consequential of constitutional amendments speaks volumes to where the country is, six months into the second Trump administration. Issues once thought long settled are now up for grabs again.
And it isn’t just about bad executive orders and unprecedented court rulings. At every level of the three branches of government, there’s rot working its way through the system and eroding protections previously guaranteed by the Constitution. This week’s shameful passage of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill in the Senate says it all. The bill will strip millions of people of access to Medicaid and millions more of access to other health insurance policies via the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, and will take nutritional assistance away from millions of Americans. If you thought the safety-net systems fought for, and secured, during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society, werea mainstay of modern society, think again. If you thought that after a decade-plus of sparring, the increased healthcare coverage generated by the Affordable Care Act was now an generally accepted part of the social fabric, you were, it appears, sorely mistaken.
It turns out that, under Trump, the GOP is gunning for pretty much every social program, no matter how much popular support those programs have, nor even how many voters in GOP states are affected.
I’m far too cynical at this point to think that the Grand Old Party will ever take the morally right route when presented with a choice between decency and depravity. Even so, let’s pause a moment and at least name-check Senator Lisa Murkowski for her truly craven display this week.
Every so often, Murkowski gets props for saying she is horrified or appalled by one authoritarian action or another; yet, when it came to voting on what may be the most consequential and destructive piece of legislation in Trump’s second term, she held out for a few carve-outs to protect Alaskans from the ravages being inflicted on residents of every other state before voting in favor of the legislation. Contrast her miserable behavior with that of late Senator John McCain, when he refused to be the deciding vote to topple the Affordable Care Act with no replacement program ready to catch those who would lose their health care.
Media outlets reported the vote as being decided by Vice President JD Vance, who stepped in to break the tie. That is technically true. But since everyone knew that Vance was a “yes” on this, it’s more accurate to say that Murkowski, the supposed grown-up in a room full of MAGA nutcases, was the tiebreaker here.
The Alaskan knew, as soon as she had done it, that she had done a very bad thing. Like a wayward child looking for a moral free pass from her parents, she promptly sought to exculpate herself by saying it was “agonizing” to vote for the bill. One assumes it wasn’t as agonizing for her as the consequences of this vote will be for the tens of millions of already low-income Americans whose lives are about to get a whole lot worse. One assumes her mental anguish won’t be as pronounced as will be that of the millions of immigrants, including refugees, suddenly blocked from accessing safety-net programs. One assumes, too, that her anguish at transferring tens of billions of dollars away from environmental, health, nutritional, and educational programs and into policing and incarcerating undocumented immigrants won’t quite match the experiences of hard-working men and women caught up in the accelerating ICE sweeps that this bill so copiously funds and sent to such places as Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz.” One assumes her anguish at hugely increasing the national debt so as to channel trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the super-wealthy won’t rise to the same levels of pain as will the pain of those students who can no longer access affordable loans for their graduate studies, or those renewable energy businesses that will now be destroyed because of the industry-killing taxes targeted against them by the authors of this malicious legislation.
In short, Murkowski’s faux anguish rings as hollow as did Susan Collins’s self-serving rationale for voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
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Collins said she had been promised Kavanaugh would respect precedent and wouldn’t rip up established rules of the road. That, of course, didn’t last long, as evidenced by the Dobbs ruling. Murkowski went one better than Collins: She didn’t even get fake promises from MAGA Republicans not to hurt poor people; all she got were a few minor carve-outs regarding precisely how many poor people in Alaska would be fed into the woodchipper and at what speed.
In short, if you are looking for GOP “moderates” to ride to the rescue, you are setting yourself up to be disappointed. Murkowski won’t save America, just like Susan Collins didn’t save abortion rights. This generation of GOP political figures has utterly dirtied itself in the Trumpian mud. You want change? Vote the bums out. Every single last one of them. Campaign against Murkowski just as hard as you would against any other MAGA enthusiast. Sure, Murkowski occasionally talks the talk. But when it comes to walking the walk, it turns out that, as with the Master of the House in Les Misérables, “there’s not much there.”
In this moment of crisis, we need a unified, progressive opposition to Donald Trump.
We’re starting to see one take shape in the streets and at ballot boxes across the country: from New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s campaign focused on affordability, to communities protecting their neighbors from ICE, to the senators opposing arms shipments to Israel.
The Democratic Party has an urgent choice to make: Will it embrace a politics that is principled and popular, or will it continue to insist on losing elections with the out-of-touch elites and consultants that got us here?
At The Nation, we know which side we’re on. Every day, we make the case for a more democratic and equal world by championing progressive leaders, lifting up movements fighting for justice, and exposing the oligarchs and corporations profiting at the expense of us all. Our independent journalism informs and empowers progressives across the country and helps bring this politics to new readers ready to join the fight.
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