SCOTUStoday for Tuesday, March 31

On Monday, the court announced that it will hear argument in Younge v. Fulton Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office, Georgia, on whether defendants may raise unpled affirmative defenses in a summary judgment motion. For more on Monday’s order list, see the On Site section below.

After the possible announcement of opinions this morning, the court will hear argument in Pitchford v. Cain, on a Mississippi man’s claim that he was sentenced to death in violation of the Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination in jury selection.

On Monday morning, two days before the Supreme Court is set to hear argument on his executive order limiting access to birthright citizenship, President Donald Trump complained about the legal system’s treatment of his order in a Truth Social post. “Birthright Citizenship is not about rich people from China, and the rest of the World, who want their children, and hundreds of thousands more, FOR PAY, to ridiculously become citizens of the United States of America. It is about the BABIES OF SLAVES!,” the president wrote. “Dumb Judges and Justices will not a great Country make!”

Ahead of Wednesday’s argument on birthright citizenship, the Associated Press compiled a list of quotes about the issue from judges and justices who have heard related cases. The list included an excerpt from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in Trump v. CASA, last term’s case on the universal injunctions putting Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship on hold. In the dissent, Sotomayor weighed in on the constitutionality of the order even though that wasn’t the question in front of the court. “Few constitutional questions can be answered by resort to the text of the Constitution alone, but this is one. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship,” she wrote.

The Supreme Court on Monday denied a petition for review from Joseph Maldonado-Passage, better known to Netflix viewers as Joe Exotic from “Tiger King,” Maldonado-Passage is challenging “his conviction for a murder-for-hire plot,” for which he “is currently serving a 21-year prison sentence,” according to Fox News. “Maldonado-Passage was convicted in 2019 of hiring two men to kill Carole Baskin, another prominent character in the viral [Netflix] documentary who had criticized his big cat zoo for years. He sought a retrial in 2023, claiming new evidence had come forward and that witnesses had recanted their testimonies.” A district judge denied this effort in a decision that was later affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.

In an essay for The Atlantic, Amanda L. Tyler compared this term’s birthright citizenship battle to a case from the 1940s challenging the citizenship of Japanese Americans. In Regan v. King, a group called the Native Sons of the Golden West contended that the 14th Amendment “gave citizenship exclusively to people born in the United States whose parents were also eligible for citizenship.” Lower courts sided against the Native Sons and the Supreme Court denied review without comment in May 1943. “Had the Native Sons prevailed in Regan v. King, the outcome would have stripped citizenship from tens of thousands of Japanese Americans born on U.S. soil—as well as countless others who could trace their lineage to ancestors who had immigrated and were not eligible for citizenship themselves,” Tyler wrote. Similarly, the Trump administration’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment would deny citizenship “not only [to] those categories of people it targets but also, on its broadest reading, potentially the child of every noncitizen immigrant and dual citizen.”