How Trump’s Court Just Empowered the President

Summary

Morning Wire Podcast Summary

Episode Title: How Trump’s Court Just Empowered the President
Release Date: July 6, 2025
Hosts: John Bickley and Georgia Howe
Guest: Carrie Severino, President of the Judicial Crisis Network and Co-Author of Justice on Trial

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Overview

In this insightful episode of Morning Wire, hosts John Bickley and Georgia Howe engage in a comprehensive discussion with legal expert Carrie Severino about the recent significant rulings by the Supreme Court. Titled "How Trump’s Court Just Empowered the President," the episode delves into how these rulings align with the Trump administration's objectives and reshape the legal landscape in areas such as birthright citizenship, parental and religious rights, and the balance between adult access to pornography and state interests in protecting minors.

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Supreme Court's Landmark Rulings

1. Trump v. Casa: Birthright Citizenship

• Majority Argument:
  Carrie Severino explains that the Supreme Court delivered a decisive 6-3 ruling in Trump v. Casa, which essentially rejected the use of universal injunctions to block presidential initiatives. She notes, “You can't just say no enforcing this in order anywhere, at all times, in all places. And that's a huge win for constitutional governance and the separation of powers” (01:28).

• Novel Judicial Interpretation:
  Severino highlights Justice Barrett's originalist approach, tracing judicial authority back to historical foundations and emphasizing that the concept of universal injunctions is a recent development, primarily under Trump’s presidency. She states, “It reads like this is more an example of judges who are letting their politics get in the way of what their actual judicial role is” (02:43).

• Implications for Trump Administration:
  Georgia Howe underscores Trump’s aggressive use of executive orders, noting his issuance of 142 orders in the first hundred days. Severino responds, “He can move forward and not have to be fighting that on those multiple levels at once” (03:53). This indicates that Trump's executive actions can now be implemented without immediate nationwide injunctions, allowing greater flexibility and authority.

• Future of Birthright Citizenship:
  The ruling temporarily allows the enforcement of birthright citizenship restrictions while litigation continues. Severino anticipates further Supreme Court involvement, saying, “We're just not going to force them to do it. We're going to right out of the gate, day one” (04:44). This sets the stage for ongoing debates and potential future rulings on the interpretation of the 14th Amendment concerning citizenship.

2. Mahmoud vs. Taylor: Parental and Religious Rights

• Case Background:
  The case involves a Maryland school district that prohibited parents from opting out of LGBTQ-themed educational content. Severino describes the school's stance: “The school just plowed ahead and said, nope, we're not letting anyone opt out” (08:43).

• Majority Opinion:
  The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the parents, emphasizing First Amendment protections for religious freedom and parental rights in directing their children's education. Severino asserts, “These are books trying to promote a philosophical and in some ways a religious agenda that is at odds with these plaintiffs” (09:14).

• Consequences and Nationwide Impact:
  This decision serves as a precedent, preventing other school districts from overriding parental control over their children's education. Severino warns, “If the Supreme Court had gone the other way, I worry that you would have seen even more school districts across the country trying to push the envelope” (10:14).

3. Texas Pornography Age Verification

• Case Overview:
  The Supreme Court addressed Texas’s requirement for pornographic websites to implement age verification measures to protect minors. Severino explains, “The court simply said...the state's interests outweigh the interests of the adults that want just unfettered access to porn” (12:26).

• Balancing Rights and Protections:
  The ruling supports the state's compelling interest in safeguarding children from explicit content while acknowledging adult rights. Severino connects this decision to previous rulings that prioritize child protection over expansive adult freedoms.

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Implications for the Trump Administration

Carrie Severino emphasizes that these rulings collectively empower the Trump administration by reinforcing executive authority and limiting judicial overreach. With the Supreme Court upholding measures that support presidential initiatives and protect parental and religious rights, Trump’s administration gains enhanced capacity to implement its agenda without excessive hindrance from lower courts or activist judges.

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Legal Expert Insights: Carrie Severino

Throughout the discussion, Carrie Severino provides expert analysis on the Supreme Court's decisions:

• On Judicial Overreach:
  “This is more an example of judges who are letting their politics get in the way of what their actual judicial role is” (02:43).

• On Parental Rights:
  “The parents are the ones paying the bills anyway. It's their taxes that you're doing this with” (10:56).

• On Balancing Rights:
  “The state's interests outweigh the interests of the adults that want just unfettered access to porn” (12:26).

Her insights underscore a consistent theme of advocating for limited judicial intervention and enhanced executive and parental authority.

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Conclusion

The episode of Morning Wire effectively outlines how recent Supreme Court decisions are bolstering the Trump administration's authority and reshaping key legal areas. With rulings that defend executive actions, reinforce parental and religious rights, and balance adult freedoms with child protections, the court appears to be aligning with conservative principles that limit judicial overreach and empower the presidency. Carrie Severino’s expert analysis provides listeners with a clear understanding of the implications these decisions hold for the current and future political and legal landscape.

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Notable Quotes:

• “You can't just say no enforcing this in order anywhere, at all times, in all places. And that's a huge win for constitutional governance and the separation of powers.” — Carrie Severino (01:28)

• “It reads like this is more an example of judges who are letting their politics get in the way of what their actual judicial role is.” — Carrie Severino (02:43)

• “These are books trying to promote a philosophical and in some ways a religious agenda that is at odds with these plaintiffs.” — Carrie Severino (09:14)

• “The state's interests outweigh the interests of the adults that want just unfettered access to porn.” — Carrie Severino (12:26)

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Timestamp References:

• 01:28
• 02:43
• 03:53
• 04:44
• 08:43
• 09:14
• 10:14
• 10:56
• 12:26

Note: Timestamp hyperlinks are placeholders and should link to the respective positions in the transcript or audio.

Transcript

[Carrie Severino]

The Supreme Court ended its term with a series of significant rulings that addressed everything from judicial overreach to protecting parental and religious rights.

[John Bickley]

In this episode, we speak with legal expert Carrie Severino about the court's final flourish of rulings and how they affect the Trump administration's goals and change the legal landscape. I'm Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Sunday, June 6th, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

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[John Bickley]

Joining us now is Carrie Severino, the president of the Judicial Crisis Network and co author of justice on Trial. First of all, thank you so much for coming on.

[Carrie Severino]

Great to be here.

[John Bickley]

So we had a series of precedent setting rulings come out on Friday. Last week we've had a bunch of Scottish rulings over this term that have been huge. We wanted to start with arguably the biggest one from last week. That's Trump versus casa. This relates to birthright citizenship, though the meat of the ruling is actually not on that issue. First of all, what was the majority argument in this case?

[Carrie Severino]

Yeah, now this was an exciting case to get at the end of the term first out of the bat on Friday because normally I'm used to June being a depressing month in a lot of ways. You lose a lot of cases by a bit. This is a 6, 3 solid win. And what the majority said was basically it slammed the door on the idea of using universal injunctions to block presidential initiatives. This is something that has dramatically increased. It's a novelty in federal law overall, but it is super expansive under Trump in particular, where instantly everything he does gets enjoined nationwide. What the court said is you can have an injunction. And this is, remember, this isn't even the case hasn't even been decided yet. They just said, what do we do in the meantime? While the court is looking at this, you can block the executive order as to the actual plaintiffs in the case. In this case, that would be a couple states and that would be some immigrant rights groups. So their members, it might be blocked. As to them, you can't just say no enforcing this in order anywhere, at all times, in all places. And that's a huge win for constitutional governance and the separation of powers.

[John Bickley]

Now, you said this is a novel interpretation or novel use of judicial authority, this idea of these universal injunctions. Can you unpack that a little bit more for us?

[Carrie Severino]

Yeah. So Justice Barrett, in her decision, really did a masterful job of showing the history. And you can really see she clerked for Justice Scalia. He's her mentor. It was an originalist, historically based opinion through and through. She looked way back to England, English common law, and said, what are the authorities of a judge that we thought we were giving to judges in the Judiciary act of 1789? And it's very clear this was never understood to be part of the judicial authority, and in fact, wasn't ever part of the judicial authority until the 1960s. So this is something that's very new in history. And again, almost all of the historical examples of all time of this kind of thing happening have just been over the last few presidencies. And the vast, vast majority have been specifically under President Trump. That doesn't read like it's an actual judicial thing. It reads like this is more an example of judges who are letting their politics get in the way of what their, their actual judicial role is, which is deciding cases by the parties in front of them.

[Georgia Howe]

Trump has been the most aggressive president ever in terms of use of executive authority. I think it's 142 executive orders in the first hundred days. How does this change the landscape for his administration going forward?

[Carrie Severino]

Yeah. Now, this is not to say that he's not going to still have to defend a lot of those orders in courts. Then he's, of course, getting challenged on them left and right. But it does mean that those orders actually have a chance to take effect while the litigation is going on. So instead of immediately hitting the pause button on every single one of those and just praying you can get through the litigation within the four year presidential term, now, actually he can move forward and not have to be fighting that on those multiple levels at once. The long road is finding all of these getting looked at in detail by the courts. But in the meantime, he's not going to be hampered by activist judges.

[Georgia Howe]

So in this particular case, we have birthright citizenship. A very thorny topic to say the least. Where do you think this goes? I mean, do you think that ultimately this is going to come back to the Supreme Court and we're going to have a ruling in Trump's favor or is this really a difficult case to argue?

[Carrie Severino]

100%. This comes back to the court. I don't think it's clear yet where the court will come down in it. You know, we've got language in the 14th amendment then governs birthright citizenship, but you have to read it within the context of those who are under the jurisdiction of the United States. And that's the tricky language. The court's going to have to take a look at it. But what this means is in the meantime, the order does go into effect and there's going to be a lot more litigation in the lower courts. At the end of the day, the Supreme Court's probably going to have to step in maybe more than once to keep the other courts on track. And we'll get it. We'll get a decision from them. We're just not going to force them to do it. We're going to right out of the gate, day one. That's where I think the dissenters got a little out over their skis. They wanted to just decide the birthright citizenship thing. And you've got Justice Sotomayor going on and on about what her opinion, the merits of the case is. That's not the decision for today, folks. We'll get it soon enough.

[John Bickley]

There has been a lot of attention paid to Justice Coney Barrett's response to Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent. What drew her particular attention and is there something notable there in terms of legal arguments?

[Carrie Severino]

Yeah, I think that's another way that her opinion was Scalia esque, in a way. We all remember some of the great rejoinders that Justice Scalia had to sloppy or silly reasoning in the dissents. And that's what Justice Barrett was calling out with Justice Jackson today. Her opinion was really just full of rhetoric about how could a court ever allow anyone to do anything that's contrary to the Constitution. And it just missed the whole concept of limited powers. And so that was one of Justice Barrett's comebacks on that is, look, you maybe not believe in an imperial executive, but you believe in an imperial judiciary that anytime just roving around, you see anything that looks wrong, you gotta smack it down. It doesn't matter if they're before you. It doesn't matter anything else, just do. Justice that's not how a government of limited powers works. And I think that's what Justice Barrett felt it was so important to make very clear.

[John Bickley]

Now, in terms of the merits of the case, with the argument from the Trump administration side that the 14th Amendment actually limits this idea of citizenship based on birth origin. What is the Trump administration's argument in this case?

[Carrie Severino]

So what they're saying is there are certain people who are obviously, if you're the child of an American citizen and the child is born, they're clearly a citizen. Right. But their question is, who are the people that are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States whose children are not automatically citizens even though they're born in America? Everyone agrees that includes people like, you know, the children of ambassadors or the children of an invading army. I don't know how many invading armies bring pregnant women with them, but that if they did and those women gave birth, clearly would not be American citizens. The line that President Trump is trying to draw is he says, look, illegal immigrants in many senses are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United states. They're violating U.S. law to get here. That is some. A group that shouldn't be included. And then a little bit harder argument, but, but one that also, you know, I think needs to be explored some more is people who are here just temporarily. You know, if you're, it's one thing if you're a green card holder, you, you, you know, you have permanent residency, but what if you're just here on a student visa? What if you're just here for as a tourist? And we know there are a lot of people that get citizenship under those circumstances. Are those people properly citizens subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, or are they really subject to their countries that they just were here visiting from? So that's something the court's gonna have to look at. They'll look at the history and all of the background on these things, and I think it's. We have to be careful not to just jump to the conclusion that we, we hope is true, because we, we want that to be what the Constitution says. We need to look at what the Constitution actually means.

[Georgia Howe]

Now, another significant ruling handed down Friday lines with the Trump administration's stance on parental rights and religious rights, particularly as it relates to the LGBTQ agenda. Can you lay out the majority opinion in Mahmoud vs. Taylor?

[Carrie Severino]

Yeah, that case had to do with a Maryland school district that was refusing to allow parents an opt out when they introduced books that. That were advancing the LGBTQ agenda. And what the parents were saying is look everywhere else. This is very unique in the country to not allow an opt out. I remember opt out when I was a kid from health classes where they were teaching things, etc. But this school said Nope, this is too important. And ironically, they even said when we did have for an opt out, too many people were opting out. So instead of taking the subtle hint that the parents are not interested in the school giving this values education on these issues that might differ with their own values, the parents want to be the ones to introduce these very sensitive and important topics. The school just plowed ahead and said, nope, we're not letting anyone opt out. The majority opinion said, that is not going to fly, that the First Amendment really protects religious freedom and parents have a right to direct their children's education doubly so when it comes to their religious education. Justice Sotomayor and her dissent tried to say, oh, no, these are just books talking about, like, being nice and tolerance. But I think Justice Alito was very clear in his opinion. These are books trying to promote a philosophical and in some ways a religious agenda that is at odds with these plaintiffs, who spanned a lot of different traditional religions and Muslims and Jews and Christians across the spectrum. There are a lot of people probably of no religion that want it, that want to be their own children's educator on this and want to address it the way they want. So this is a great victory for parental rights and for protecting children from becoming hostages in the culture wars.

[Georgia Howe]

How consequential is this ruling? I mean, is this going to change the landscape across the country?

[Carrie Severino]

The Maryland school district, luckily, was really on the leading edge of trying to deny these rights. If I think the real danger is, if the Supreme Court had gone the other way, I worry that you would have seen even more school districts across the country trying to push the envelope on how far they can wrest control of children's religious and values education from their parents. This is a great reset to remind them it's the parents that are that are doing this. The parents are the ones paying the bills anyway. It's their taxes that you're doing this with. Instead of having the schools kind of think that they are more important, and ultimately they know better than the parents about how to raise the children.

[Georgia Howe]

So in many ways, Maryland was trying to be a forerunner here on this issue.

[John Bickley]

I would assume there's some districts in California that would have some similar policies. I'm curious to see if there's other cases that come up in some other.

[Carrie Severino]

States at this point. They would be on very bad legal footing if they tried it, but that's not going to prevent them. There's a lot of people who try crazy things.

[John Bickley]

Sure. To what extent can public schools require exposure to LGBT themed content after this, is it going to be that they have to have opt out requirements? Is that what you foresee?

[Carrie Severino]

Yeah, I think they'll at a minimum have to have opt outs available for families. And remember, this is particularly egregious. This isn't like high schoolers even. This is, we're talking down to kindergarteners who are being presented with this really inappropriate for their age level. Even if it's coming from, you know, your own perspective. Do you really want your kid, your kindergartner being exposed to this and having that be their entree to this complicated topic? So I think a lot of schools are gonna hopefully take the memo and say, you know, maybe this is something we can put off until K are a little bit more mature and able to address these issues. But at a minimum they will need to provide an opt out. They can't just push it into the broader curriculum as they were trying to do because the parents ultimately have that right over the children.

[Georgia Howe]

So, final question. Another ruling that came down last Friday. How does the Supreme Court balance adult access to legal pornographic content with state interests in protecting minors? This is a case out of Texas. Can you tell us about this ruling and what it means?

[Carrie Severino]

Yeah, this is important because every time you get a new technological development, the court has to kind of catch up and make sure we understand how does, how does the First Amendment still apply here? How does the Constitution work with this? And the Constitution has, in the First Amendment, it has been determined that under obscenity law there are certain materials that may be obscene as to children, but are not technically obscene as to adults. And so the adults have a right to view them. But, but the state still has a compelling interest to protect children from that material. Texas was trying to navigate that by requiring porn sites in their state to do some kind of age verification. And the sites were pushing back, saying, no, no, no, this is going to create a hurdle for adults who want to view it. I think at the end of the day, what the court said is, well, yes, it may create a hurdle, but we're not doing that to try to quash the adult speech. We're doing that to try to protect the children. And when the state has such a compelling interest in that protection, and really the hurdles, we all know if you were wanted to buy cigarettes or alcohol line, you have to do the same kind of age verification. This isn't impossible to do. It's commercially available. So the court simply said, you know, on the balance, the state's interests outweigh the interests of the adults that want just unfettered access to porn. I think that fits in a pattern with the Mahmoud case of the court protecting children and also with the previous case that was decided, the US vs Scrametti case, that said Tennessee may protect the children within its borders from being mandate having mandated access to long term effects of these experimental transgender surgeries and treatments. So the court really does want to preserve the government's ability to protect children. That's a great takeaway from this term.

[Georgia Howe]

Well, definitely big wins for the agenda.

[John Bickley]

Of the Trump administration and pretty decisively most of these six, three rulings. Thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it.

[Carrie Severino]

Great to be here.

[John Bickley]

That was Carrie Severino, president of Judicial Crisis Network. And this has been a weekend episode of Morning Wire.