SCOTUStoday for Thursday, April 2

Yesterday, the court heard argument in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case. We live blogged during the argument, and the Advisory Opinions podcast went live after it concluded. For more on Wednesday’s argument, see Amy’s argument analysis in the On Site section below.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday became “the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the high court … listening as the justices across the ideological spectrum questioned his efforts to strictly limit birthright citizenship,” according to The New York Times. “Many other presidents, including John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Richard Nixon, have made appearances in the courtroom. But they all did so as lawyers arguing cases, before or after serving in the White House, according to Clare Cushman, a historian with the Supreme Court Historical Society.” The Times reported that “[m]any people outside the court expressed strong opposition to the president’s presence,” describing attendance as a “strong-arming tactic.”

After spending about 90 minutes in the courtroom on Wednesday, Trump left midway through the argument to return to the White House. Soon after departing, the president posted on Truth Social about birthright citizenship. “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!,” Trump wrote.

After the Supreme Court on Tuesday sided with a therapist challenging Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy on free speech grounds, states across the country with similar laws on the books are considering next steps. Brett Nolan, senior attorney at the Institute for Free Speech, told USA Today that much “depends on the language of other states’ laws as it relates to speech-based conversion therapy,” since one of the key issues raised in the ruling was that Colorado’s law “censors speech based on viewpoint” by, for example, barring therapy conversations that discourage same-sex attraction but allowing conversations that support it. Ronnie London, general counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said the decision “doesn’t call into question bans on conversion therapy methods that are not speech-based, such as electric shocks and the use of nausea-inducing chemicals.”

In a column for Fox News, Kaley Chiles, the licensed counselor who challenged Colorado’s conversion therapy ban, reflected on the significance of the Supreme Court’s 8-1 ruling in her favor. “It’s reassuring to have the court protect freedom of speech,” Chiles wrote. “While Colorado officials may honestly think that a boy can become a girl, our country was founded on the right to engage in healthy debate – even when the government disagrees with us.”