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Supreme Court Rejects Trump Birthright Citizenship Order; Supreme Court Removes Campaign Spending Caps. Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired June 30, 2026 - 10:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:30:00]

PAULA REID, CNN CHIEF LEGAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: This will help sort of a flood of money come into the GOP.

PAMELA BROWN, CNN HOST: All right. Wolf, legal and political implications here.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: Major decision, another major decision.

I want to bring back CNN anchor and chief legal analyst Laura Coates.

What's your reaction to this removing the restrictions on how much money can flow into political campaigns?

LAURA COATES, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: Political strategists are probably doing backflips as we speak, because the First Amendment argument here was, listen, we want to be able to coordinate with outside spending groups, with committees, to be able to spend as much as we want to have a singular message with our candidate.

We don't want to have the limitations of a little thing called money that says, I don't want to know who these sort of backroom donors are or the lack of transparency into who might be funding. They want the American public to be able to see what the candidates believe and their advertisement dollars to follow.

One of the arguments against it, however, has been the idea of so- called dark money, not unlike the conversations around Citizen United and the amount of money that could be spent at that time. That crux of that argument was about the American voters having the ultimate transparency into who was financing, who was providing money, and how much could be spent, and allowing for a fair election that would allow people to be able to, on their own accord, say their viewpoints.

This is not surprising the Supreme Court went this way, given their past stance on the role of money. But, politically speaking, strategically speaking, the idea of the infusion of money and wealth in a political system will remain top of mind.

We have seen just recently in different elections who is giving funding, which committees, which has been financing the actual elections become sometimes the litmus test for either the endorsement of candidates or the undermining fatally of a campaign as recently as last week.

And so today being another Election Day, you can be prepared to know that we're going to see the impact of money, not only today, but also down the line in the midterm election.

BLITZER: We're going to see a lot more money in these campaigns now, right, Mark?

MARK PRESTON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, for sure.

And, as Laura said, we shouldn't be surprised by this at all, because we all need to go back to McCain-Feingold, right, when they were trying in Congress to try to put limits to try to tamp down the influence that very wealthy individuals and corporations have on the political process.

Now, clearly, that didn't work, and we've been going down this really slippery slope. So, at some point, I think you had to expect something like this to happen. I do think we're going to see an incredible amount of advertising that is going to come forward.

You're not going to know who is actually paying for the advertising, because the way that they cloak these groups, they use these very bland names, these very broad names when they say that they're endorsing a candidate.

But what they will use this for is not necessarily to talk about how much they support a candidate. It's going to be about how much their opponent is a bad person and how that person shouldn't be in office. This is really opening the floodgate to negative advertising that we're going to see over the next few months.

BLITZER: As they say in politics, money talks.

PRESTON: Sure.

BLITZER: It certainly does.

I want to bring back our experts. Our senior legal analyst, Elie Honig, is still with me, and Cully Stimson is with us as well, the acting director for the Institute for Constitutional Government over at The Heritage Foundation here in Washington.

What's your reaction?

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: So, let me try to break down exactly what this decision does. This decision says now that the political parties, primarily the RNC and DNC, but also state, county, Republican, Democratic, or third parties, so political parties can now give unlimited coordinated expenditures for candidates.

Now, coordinated, to Mark's point, is the really key thing here, because, before today, there were limits on how much the RNC or DNC could spend in coordination with the candidate. So if the RNC wanted to do an ad for Ted Cruz, DNC wants to do an ad for Elizabeth Warren, for the most part, they can't call up Ted Cruz or Elizabeth Warren and say, hey, let's work together on this.

They just have to sort of guess. Now that guardrail is down. Now the RNC can say, hey, Ted Cruz, we want to pay for a commercial for you. Come on in. How do you want to do this? Let's coordinate. They can do that now with no financial limits. That's because of the First Amendment. That's going to make a huge difference.

BLITZER: What do you think, Cully?

CULLY STIMSON, SENIOR LEGAL FELLOW, THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION: Well, the key to this is transparency, right? I don't think this opinion covers the fact that you're still going to have to be transparent about your campaign finance disclosures, right?

So, to Elie's point, the limits were $130,000 to $4 million per Senate candidate and $65,000 to $130,000 per House candidate. But just like when Citizens United came down, people were like, oh, this is going to be the end of the world, actually, all it did is increase the amount of money that was allowed to be spent.

So here, in the 2024 cycle, $7.2 billion was spent by Democrats, $6.3 billion was spent on Republicans, according to Open Secrets, in 2022, $4.2 billion by Democrats, $4.4 billion by Republicans.

And so you're going to see more spending, more coordination, and, yes, more negative ads. But this is the pluses and minuses of the First Amendment. This is the way it works.

PRESTON: May I be crass for a moment, and just note that we're sitting here and we're talking about how much this is going to affect the election, and we're going to see it. Like, we live this world day in and day out.

[10:35:01]

I would hesitate to say that most of Americans will see any difference, because they are so overwhelmed by the amount of advertising that they are seeing right now, whether they're watching it on CNN or whether they're watching it on broadcast networks, or whether they're watching it on Facebook or on YouTube.

It is unbelievable. If you just flip on the TV, the amount of political ads that we're seeing right now, this early on, is only going to be exponential. But, again, I don't think -- I think we have desensitized the viewer.

BLITZER: All right, hold on. Hold on. This is a very important decision. A lot of decisions are coming in.

Pamela, you're over there at the U.S. Supreme Court. Another major decision, the biggest one that we've been waiting for all, all of these months, go ahead.

BROWN: That's right.

The opinion on birthright citizenship just came down here at the High Court, authored by Chief Justice Roberts. I want to go to our Paula Reid for more.

REID: Our intern just sprinted across the lawn.

And we have this, the Supreme Court rejecting President Trump's effort to end birthright citizenship through executive order. This is a right that has been recognized in the Constitution for over 100 years. Then, subsequently, Congress passed laws with language that mirrored what was in the 14th Amendment, saying that if you are born here, you are a citizen of the United States.

Now, in his first campaign, President Trump floated the idea of ending birthright citizenship. He and some of his supporters have complained about abuses of that system, so-called birth tourism, national security concerns.

So, in his second term, one of the first things he did when he came into office is that he signed this executive order ending birthright citizenship. But, at the time, even people inside the administration told me they weren't sure if he was going to be able to do it that way, right?

This is something that would likely have to go through Congress. We saw in the oral argument the justices across the political spectrum were skeptical about this. So it is not a surprise, Pamela, that he has lost to this case.

We just got the physical copy of it, so we will look at who said what, but we know this was authored by the chief justice, John Roberts. This is the last opinion of the term, arguably one of the most significant, but I really just want to emphasize that it's notable that they have rejected President Trump on this, because really most presidents, most of what they have been able to do or attempted to do has been through executive order, because Congress is not really able to do anything on immigration.

But this is a check on his executive power. Yesterday, we saw them grant him sweeping expanded powers in terms of who he can fire, but, today, they are putting limits on his executive power. Now, the president has even said he expected to lose this case. Usually, he doesn't respond well to losing, so we will see what he says.

But this was very much expected.

BROWN: But he has brought this conversation at the very least into the mainstream by bringing this case to the Supreme Court, right? And even though it was unexpected that the High Court would rule on the side of the Trump administration, this is now something that people are talking about.

And during the oral arguments, as I recalled, John Sauer, the solicitor general, was trying to make this argument that, in the 14th Amendment, subject to the jurisdiction thereof, that really meant for parents who are permanently settled here in the United States, for their babies to be citizens, not for someone who is here on, say, a student visa. And they argued, he argued that the world has changed. And I remember

Chief John Roberts coming back and saying, well, the world may have changed, but not the Constitution.

REID: Exactly.

And John Sauer, who has had a tremendous record of successful arguing on behalf of President Trump in various cases, here, he had a really difficult task, because not only did he have to sort of argue around the 14th Amendment; he also had to argue against the language that Congress has put down twice, right?

If they didn't intend for this right to extend to people who come here, whoever you are, whoever your parents are, they wouldn't have written what they did. So he had a real uphill climb here. I don't think this will change his standing within the administration.

The president really likes him. He's very popular at the Justice Department, and he has been very successful. But this is certainly a notable loss and, of course, comes just a few months after he also lost President Trump's tariffs case.

BROWN: Yes, this was ratified in the 14th Amendment in 1868, and then the Supreme Court upheld it in the Ark case in 1898. Then it was codified into law. So it really was an uphill climb for the administration, but nonetheless a significant decision out here at the Supreme Court -- Wolf.

REID: Yes.

BLITZER: All right, guys, thank you very much.

I want to bring back Laura Coates, our chief legal analyst.

The Civil -- after the Civil War in 1868, as you know, the 14th Amendment was approved. And let me put it up on the screen if we have it. "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."

And the key phrase has always been subject to the jurisdiction thereof. I have always assumed that meant children born in the United States whose parents may have been diplomats, who were foreign diplomats legally here in the United States or children of students who are here on student visas from foreign countries, maybe they were not going to be citizens.

But what do you make of this subject to the jurisdiction thereof clause and how it impacts?

[10:40:03]

COATES: It's so important to focus on what you have said, but it is equally important to note that this Supreme Court could not have ruled any other way and held on to its legitimacy as the nine supreme members of the judicial branch. The only outcome that would have been constitutional is the one that

we saw today, for the reasons you have stated. It is codified in the 14th Amendment. You had the horrible Dred Scott decision that suggested that even the children of freed blacks were not entitled to citizenship in this country.

You had the Wong Kim Ark case, where a man who was born in the United States, but his parents were born in China, was almost not allowed back into the country because they said he didn't have allegiance to the United States of America and could not be American because of his parents were not born here. The Supreme Court rejected that.

Case after case after case has said that there is a birthright in this country. To suggest otherwise would leave people stateless. A child, for example, who was born here whose parents were not born in this country would not have any other place to go if they were deported, although we see a trend towards that.

But to the point of the jurisdictional aspect, the Trump administration was arguing that they were not truly subject to the jurisdiction of this country because they didn't have true allegiance. Now, that would lead to absurd results, because if they didn't have jurisdiction subjectivity, then how were you arresting them?

How could they have any rights to be fairly searched or otherwise, let alone deported and have due process? But I want to read to you what Chief John Roberts wrote for the majority opinion.

He said: "Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land."

And so, as much as this was a predictable or ought to be predictable, it is important to note it's taken several months for this case to make its way to an actual written opinion. And there were many who questioned why it was even brought to the Supreme Court and entertained.

The Supreme Court has thousands of cases they could choose from. And they routinely reject hearing most of them. But, this one, they decided to take. And I think it is very instructive to know that this Supreme Court, who's often challenged about their allegiance to the president of the United States or loyalty test that might be implied, that they have decided to have a loyalty, as they should, to the words and the text of the Constitution.

This was the right result for those who believe the 14th Amendment text remains the same, and it does.

BLITZER: It's a huge, huge decision, Elie Honig.

So can parents of children who were born in the United States, even if the parents were undocumented immigrants, can they can they assume these kids are not about to be expelled or deported from the United States? They are legal U.S. citizens just like the rest of us? HONIG: Yes, exactly, Wolf.

And that's the main takeaway from today, which is that birthright citizenship survives as we have known it for 158 years since its ratification through the 14th Amendment in 1868 after the Civil War. It means what we have always thought it means, which is, if you are born here, regardless of your parents' station in life, you are a citizen, only with the narrowest of exceptions for the children of diplomats, as you said before.

What Donald Trump tried to do on his first day in office in January 2025 is to narrow that significantly, to say you do not get the benefit of citizenship if your parents are here illegally or even temporarily. That view has now been firmly rejected 6-3 by the Supreme Court, with the chief justice and conservative Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joining with liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson to reject that.

So, birthright citizenship survives. The second takeaway is, this is a strike against Donald Trump's use of executive power. As Laura was saying, this law, this doctrine comes from the Constitution itself. It comes from subsequent Supreme Court decisions after ratification. It comes from a law passed by Congress.

And Donald Trump took the position that I can change this all with a stroke of my pen, by an executive order on day one and override all that. And, here, the Supreme Court says, no, you cannot.

BLITZER: A major defeat for Donald Trump, right?

STIMSON: Yes, or any president who wants to try to do this by executive order.

The interesting part about this decision to me is the chief, just like he did yesterday in Slaughter, spends a lot of time going through the history of the United States. He goes through the odious decision of Dred Scott, which, of course, was authored by Roger Brooke Taney from Frederick, Maryland.

He lays out from Blackstone's commentaries all throughout the history of our country this concept of jus soli, which means right of the soil. So if you were born in England, you were a person of the soil and you were an English citizen and how that migrated over here to the United States. It's been the case the whole time. It was embedded in the 14th Amendment.

And so I'm not surprised by this at all. Now, that does not say, and the court doesn't touch, I don't think, that Congress couldn't try to start the process of amending the Constitution to clarify that, which may be a way some people will go.

[10:45:10]

But, for today, people born to illegal aliens in this country, their kids are automatic citizens the moment they are born.

BLITZER: They're U.S. citizens, as I said, just like the rest of us.

I want to go to the White House right now. CNN's Alayna Treene is standing by.

Have you heard anything yet, any reaction coming in from White House officials or from the president, for that matter?

ALAYNA TREENE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Not yet on this most recent decision, Wolf, regarding the court really shutting down this executive order from the president to try and end birthright citizenship for millions of people.

Look, this is an issue, I think important context here, that the president has really been fixated on, not even just this term, but dating back to his first administration, when he wanted to do something similarly. This is something that he's spoken a lot about. He's criticized the laws in this country for many time -- many, many times regarding this case.

But I will also say it's not something, from the conversations I have had with White House officials, Wolf, that they were entirely expecting to go his way either. I'd remind you, when they issued, when the president issued that executive order trying to end birthright citizenship for millions of people in this country, a lot of that was designed to try and take this fight to the Supreme Court.

He wants to show his base and his supporters that this is an issue he was fighting for and that he cares about. So that was part of this from the get-go, I think an acknowledgement that the president and some of his team recognize this might not go his way.

That was especially clear, I'd remind you, when Trump took the unprecedented step of actually showing up to the Supreme Court himself, something that has not been done by previous presidents, to kind of stare down the justices when legal arguments were taking place over this exact case.

Then, you could hear -- you heard even the conservatives on the bench, hearing some of the skepticism from them. That included the chief justice, John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito, a lot of them having questions about how this would work in practice and what this could mean about challenging the 14th Amendment.

So we're waiting to see what exactly Trump and some of his top officials have to say about this. But I don't think they were entirely surprised. Of course, though, a loss for the president here on something he really was hoping would be able to move ahead.

BLITZER: Yes, a major loss for the president of the United States. And this is it. Look at this. This is a thick, thick document, the full explanation from the Supreme Court on why they have rejected what Trump was proposing to eliminate what's called birthright citizenship.

I want to bring in Priscilla Alvarez, who covers immigration for us, Mark Preston, who covers politics for us. They're both here in THE SITUATION ROOM. Priscilla, what's going to be the reaction to this decision?

PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, look, as we have been waiting for this decision for months, but people within the president's orbit have been planning this for years.

In fact, when I was having conversations with sources even during the transition, they were -- one told me specifically -- quote -- "Something has to kick off the legal battle." And on the first day of President Trump taking office last year, he signed this executive order that wasn't just about children born to undocumented parents, but those, as everyone has noted here, who are here temporarily.

And there are a lot of people who do come here temporarily, not only on student visas, as you mentioned, Wolf, but also for business, and they can be here for years. And that was going to affect those children as well.

So the idea behind this push was always to bring it to the Supreme Court. In fact, when that executive order was signed, the sources I was talking to didn't expect that it was going to take effect right away. They wanted it to go all the way to the court, and now they have their answer from the Supreme Court this morning.

So this is something that allies have pushed for on particularly the subject of jurisdiction -- to the jurisdiction of issue, and now they have that answer. I will note this had the potential to impact millions of people. And I will give you just one data point from one year.

In 2023, mothers who were undocumented or had a temporary legal status had 320,000 babies in the United States. That's 9 percent of the number of babies born that year. Had something like this gone into effect, 245,000 of those children would not have become U.S. citizens. That's just one slice one year, but we're talking about millions over the span of time.

So this could have had massive ramifications. We know now that citizenship as it was understood yesterday is also understood the same way today. But this is a blow for the allies around President Trump who wanted to have this conversation, who wanted it to go to the Supreme Court, and were hoping for a different outcome, even if they were doubtful they were going to get what they wanted.

And everything that Trump did, dating back to his first administration, but also from the day he took office, was a means to an end to this point today, this morning.

BLITZER: The political fallout, what do you think, Mark?

PRESTON: Well, first of all, let me just say 245,000 people, we're sitting here and we talk in a very septic way about the legal opinion and how it's going to matter, but 245,000 kids this morning or their parents are breathing a sigh of relief.

[10:50:10] That's amazing right now. Again, we're talking about people.

BLITZER: That's just from one year.

(CROSSTALK)

PRESTON: That's from one year, right? So just -- exactly, right?

So just think about how many people right now that this ruling really matters to them. This will affect their life going forward. Politically, let's tie what happened earlier today. We are now going to open this up to a continued political fight with really no limits on spending that we will see.

We will see the Republican Party use this as an issue going to the midterm elections. We will see the Democrats do the same thing in some of these states. But this issue isn't going away. I think he's right. I think we will see some movement in Congress. There's no way the Constitution is going to change.

However, that doesn't matter that it won't become a political issue. It doesn't matter this is not going to become an issue in Congress, and it doesn't matter that this thing -- that this issue potentially could be an issue that could also stop other issues from moving forward.

We're already seeing things happening right now in Congress about Donald Trump not getting his way on certain bits of legislation. So what does he do? He stops everything else. This is one of those issues that could be, moving forward, something that blocks other things that need to get done to get done because he's so upset about losing it.

ALVAREZ: Can I just say, though, there is, according to public polling, broad support for this concept of birthright citizenship. The United States is also not alone in having birthright citizenship.

And I think this can be one of those examples where we see the president and this administration really push the envelope. And sometimes that's not where the public is. We have seen it on other matters of immigration. So we will see just how far they intend to push this.

Of course, this is something the president did because his allies have pushed for it. There's been a conversation in his orbit about this and among immigration hard-liners about this. But this is one of those precarious issues where generally we're seeing from polling the public does support birthright citizenship.

And so this could be one of those issues where it does -- where does the buck stop or does it stop at all? I guess we will find out.

BLITZER: And it's true. Hundreds of thousands of families right now are relieved that their children who were born in the United States are not going to be subject to being deported as a result of the change in the law. The law stands as it as has been for 150 years or so. If you're born in the United States, you're a U.S. citizen.

COATES: So important that will not change, but important context here. This never went into effect, even though he tried on day one. There was even a Reagan-appointed judge who essentially called this blatantly unconstitutional.

It questioned at all levels the ability to roll back the 14th Amendment in this way. It was always doubted. But what to look at is the context.

It was just last week the Supreme Court did affirm the president's ability to have control and exercise over border control, over Temporary Protected Status, and considered largely a complete loss for Haitians, for Syrians as well who are in this country under a protected status, because the court was essentially saying there are some areas in which we as a society have conferred and delegated responsibility to the executive branch to determine what's appropriate and what's not.

And so people can breathe a sigh of relief today that the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship remains, but there's still the policy debates that will continue that the court has not foreclosed for this for the Congress or the president of the United States to try to regulate the effective movement of people seeking either asylum or citizenship in this country.

But these are separate issues that are often conflated in culture wars. The idea of a birth tourism will be will be spattered about here, the idea that people are intentionally coming to the United States just to have so-called anchor babies. You will hear those terms now with increased negative advertising that will not have to be traced in many ways and attitude about it.

But it is important to know the context here what the Supreme Court did and what it did not do. What it did do was hold true that birthright citizenship exists and it remains, that they rejected squarely this idea of allegiance, that one couldn't -- that there was some higher test of allegiance than one's birth on American soil, you had to prove your Americanness, which has become a core cultural war issue that people have tried to denigrate who's American and who's not, as opposed to what's being said.

But they do still respect the executive branch's control in some respects over the effective and policing of people in and out of the borders. And that I think needs to still be a part of the context.

BLITZER: Excellent, excellent point.

I want to go back to Pamela. She's just outside the U.S. Supreme Court.

You're getting more reaction, more interpretation of what this all means practically, Pamela.

BROWN: Right. And, Wolf, we have learned that the Supreme Court is adjourned for

this season. That means they are done, and they dropped their last opinion, the most highly anticipated one on birthright citizenship, which is a loss for Trump.

But when you look at the big picture, the Trump administration also had a lot of wins. So I want to go to our chief legal affairs correspondent, Paula Reid, to break It all down -- Paula.

[10:55:05]

REID: Look, the way I see, this is a conservative supermajority.

The president has had a lot of success both in and out of office winning cases here. This term was somewhat successful for him. I mean, he has lost some battles, but he is winning wars.

Let's talk first about executive power, where, yes, today, he lost the birthright citizenship case. They said, look, you can't just eliminate birthright citizenship through executive order. Now, Justice Kavanaugh did point out the fact that, if he took that executive order and could get Congress to put that same language into law, he would probably be good.

But they do have some limits. But, yesterday, they issued him sweeping power to fire officials at roughly two dozen federal agencies that Congress had intended to be independent. I mean, that changes roughly a century of how we understood the executive power to be somewhat limited.

They opened the door for him to be able to fire these officials. So that was a really historic case. So, in his continued efforts, it began in the first term, it continues now, to expand executive power to push what is called the unitary executive theory, something a lot of conservatives support, the idea of a really powerful executive, he is winning.

Now, I think we have also seen something really interesting, Pamela, in terms of what's going on with elections, as, yesterday, the Supreme Court weighed in on a case that not a lot of folks were talking about, but it could have had enormous implications.

Here, the court ruled that, when it comes to mail-in ballots, even -- if a state has a law that they have to be postmarked by Election Day, but can still be counted if they arrive a few days late, that is OK. States can do that, because the Trump Justice Department and the RNC have been pushing back on that.

And if the RNC, if the Trump administration had won on that case, it would have opened the door to really limit the window in terms of when you can vote. And that is something we know they want to do. So, today, really another enormous win, though, in the larger battle to win elections, where the Supreme Court here lifting caps on how much political parties can coordinate with individual candidates.

We expect that that decision will have an enormous impact on elections and flood money into the GOP,because, historically, they have been more successful raising big money, but when it comes to smaller donors, that tends to be the purview of Democrats.

So these are the ways that, even if he loses a case here or there, overall, when it comes to expanding his power and trying to win upcoming elections, he has done really well here this term. Now, the only thing that could make it better, of course, is if he got a retirement. We don't expect that. We don't have any reporting on that, but we know this is a conservative supermajority.

And if he got another Supreme Court justice, I mean, that would pretty much be the best thing that could happen.

BROWN: Yes, and he won on the culture wars and some of these issues like upholding the state bans on transgender athletes playing in girls' sports. That was something that the White House has been very invested on as well.

So, very busy day here at the High Court. Thank you, everyone who has been watching. Stay with us, a lot of news ahead. Our special coverage from the High Court will continue after a quick break.

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