Transcript: Angry Trump Unravels as Polls Worsen and Legal Losses Grow

And I have to believe—as much as he was intending to intimidate the court today—that for them it was an opportunity to face-to-face give a constitutional lesson to this president, to teach him that he’s not a dictator. In fact, he was almost daring them to oppose his dictatorship, and if they’re going to save face, I think they have to say what the Constitution says: that absolutely, you might not like it, but the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment—we fought a war about this—guarantees birthright citizenship.

Sargent: Now I don’t want to make the mistake of being too kind to this court, but they actually seem to do the right thing today, and I hope you’re right. I think they are going to take this as an opportunity to show some sort of independence. Now they haven’t been nearly as independent as they should be. They rolled over for Trump a whole lot, but this is a big one and I’ll take it, man.

Brettschneider: I’m with you, Greg. I think there are some moments where—especially for justices like Gorsuch, who have a professed obligation to the text and fidelity to the text, that’s their mantra—when the text is so clear, it would really ruin their credibility to read it in a way that in any way resembles what the Solicitor General and what Trump wants it to say, which is not what it says. And so that commitment to textualism, I think, is really helping here. We saw it in the tariffs case too, of course—they really refused to read the law at issue IEEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as aggrandizing presidential power when in fact it did the opposite. It limited that power.