Constitutional lawyer Jeff Lewis joined "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss when the Supreme Court could rule on the case about birthright citizenship and the power of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions.
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00:00So what happens after today?
00:03Do we know when the Supreme Court will decide and do we know how they might decide?
00:09There's no time limit for them to issue relief, but everybody thinks they'll issue relief within the next 30 days because of how fast and the unprecedented nature in which this argument reached the Supreme Court.
00:19Recall it was on the shadow docket and reached the oral argument stage without a lot of the traditional briefing you see.
00:27And I was counting votes.
00:30It is my prediction that the court will not reach the actual merits of whether or not someone born in the United States is a citizen and instead will keep their analysis limited to whether or not a federal judge has the power to issue an injunction nationwide.
00:45And then the big question will be, will it be limited to the facts of this case or go broader in terms of all the executive orders?
00:51And I predict it'll be a 3-6 vote, perhaps a 4-5 vote, restricting the ability of federal judges to issue injunctions.
01:00You heard the three liberal justices, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, all asking very difficult questions of the Solicitor General, suggesting those three are supportive of national injunctions.
01:11And Justice Barrett also asked some difficult questions.
01:15I didn't see any other justices asking questions that suggested to me that they're ready to expand this power of national injunctions.
01:24So if the ruling were to come down in the way that you predict, what would then happen?
01:31Can you give us a sample use case?
01:33Yeah, it would mean that only the parties to this specific case, or actually there's three cases in front of the Supreme Court that were consolidated, only they would benefit from the injunction.
01:43And therefore, anybody else who perhaps is pregnant and about to have a baby, and they want to have some assurance about whether or not their baby citizenship is assured, or state regulators who are concerned about the administrative headache of having to determine whether patients coming into hospitals are actual citizens and have the right to receive services.
02:03All of those people who are aggrieved by the executive order would each have to file a separate lawsuit, or an enterprising plaintiff's lawyer might be able to craft a class action.
02:14The Supreme Court did leave open the door today to possibility of filing a class action for all the people harmed by this executive order.
02:22So effectively, litigation action would increase what sounds like almost more than tenfold.
02:28The courts are going to be buried, absolutely buried in challenges, and in addition to the quantity of decisions, you're going to have conflicting decisions.
02:37Judges in California, where I am, might issue decisions that conflict with decisions issued in Kentucky or Texas, and so it's going to create a mess.