President Donald Trump’s vows to reverse a pivotal Supreme Court ruling fizzled out in silence.
Tuesday marked the end of the 25-day window for the Trump administration to seek a reversal of the Supreme Court’s decision on birthright citizenship—a matter that Trump himself sought to end since his first day returning to office.
Despite Trump, 80, repeatedly railing against the right enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, the president’s administration failed to seek a rehearing after the case was decided late last month, as reported by the Associated Press and the Washington Post.
Trump had made quite a show as he attended oral arguments for the case at the U.S. Supreme Court in April, becoming the first sitting president to do so.
However, two of his own hand-picked justices—Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh—rebuked him to join the liberal minority in a 6-3 decision, striking down his executive order.
Only the court’s ultra-conservative wing of Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito dissented.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land,” Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed by George W. Bush, wrote in the majority opinion. “We keep that promise today.”
A week after the ruling, Trump promised on Truth Social that he would appeal the court’s ruling “IMMEDIATELY,” but no filing was ever made.
A petition for a rehearing now would be very unlikely.
Such a course of action would require at least one of the justices who ruled against Trump to change their mind, and a majority of the court would need to agree, Aaron-Andrew Bruhl, a law professor at William & Mary Law School, told the Associated Press. The Supreme Court has not reheard an argued case in over 50 years.
Trump’s executive order, issued on the first day of his second administration, sought to ban automatic citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to parents in the country temporarily or illegally. However, several lower courts had already blocked it before it reached the Supreme Court; it never actually took effect.
Trump had also falsely claimed on his social media platform that the U.S. was “the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship,” despite it also being enshrined in the constitutions of more than 30 other countries.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the Department of Justice for comment.
