Nina Totenberg
Appearances
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-30-2025 3PM EDT
On one side of the case are two Catholic dioceses in Oklahoma. Representing them is lawyer James Campbell.
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NPR News: 04-30-2025 3PM EDT
On the other side is the state's Republican Attorney General, Gentner Drummond.
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NPR News: 04-30-2025 3PM EDT
A decision in the case is expected by summer. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 11-12-2024 8PM EST
Meadows is one of 18 people indicted in Georgia on charges of illegally conspiring to keep then-President Trump in office in 2020 and Trump was indicted on similar charges, but the Supreme Court earlier this year granted him broad immunity for prosecution for his official acts. Meadows sought to leverage that decision to apply to him.
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NPR News: 11-12-2024 8PM EST
contending that the charges against him should be moved from state to federal court because he was a federal officer at the time the alleged conspiracy took place. But a federal appeals court ruled that Meadows is no longer a federal official and that even if he were, his actions were not related to his official duties.
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NPR News: 11-12-2024 8PM EST
The Supreme Court today has left that ruling in place, which means that the Trump Justice Department cannot dismiss the state charges. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
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NPR News: 12-31-2024 8PM EST
Mexico's Foreign Affairs Secretary Juan Ramon de la Fuente presented the app as one of the ways his country's consulates in the U.S. are preparing for that possibility. This permits us to be notified from the moment someone perceives imminent risk that they could be detained. For NPR News, I'm Nina Kravinsky.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 12-31-2024 8PM EST
The app's alert button is designed so that with one tap, migrants who suspect they're about to be detained by the U.S. Immigration Department can let the Mexican consulate know. President-elect Donald Trump has said he will carry out mass deportations when he takes office in January.
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NPR News: 10-08-2024 3AM EDT
They're called ghost guns because these build-it-yourself gun kits, when assembled, have no serial numbers and can't be traced when found at a crime scene. Moreover, buying a kit does not require a background check. At least until 2022, as these assembled guns became more and more of a problem for law enforcement.
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NPR News: 10-08-2024 3AM EDT
and the Biden administration issued a rule classifying the kits as firearms under the 1968 Gun Control Act. The statute defines a firearm as any weapon that is, quote, designed to or may readily be converted into a functional firearm. The government contends that the kits thus qualify as guns. The sellers of the kits challenge the rule, contending that a bunch of parts do not count as guns.
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NPR News: 05-15-2025 6AM EDT
Today's arguments, however, are likely to focus on a separate question that the Trump administration is asking the court to resolve, a technical legal question that could make the process for challenging any Trump policy far more difficult and lengthy. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 05-15-2025 6AM EDT
NPR's Nina Totenberg reports. Trump has long claimed that there is no such thing as birthright citizenship in the Constitution. And on his first day in office, he issued an executive order barring automatic citizenship for any child whose parents entered the country illegally or or on a temporary visa.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-05-2025 7PM EST
The Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to block a lower court order that required the government to essentially pay its bills, in this case, pay foreign aid contractors for their already completed work.
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NPR News: 03-05-2025 7PM EST
But today, the court majority refused to interfere, telling the lower court only to clarify the government's obligations and to ensure compliance with due regard to for the feasibility of complying with timelines. In dissent, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that he was, quote, stunned at the court's rewarding what he called an active judicial hubris. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
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Trump's Tariff Talks, China's Tariff Response, SCOTUS Probationary Workers
Yes. On Friday, the court allowed the Trump administration to cancel millions of dollars in education grants. Then two days ago, the court threw out a lower court action temporarily barring the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members, though there was a caveat that required all the deportees to have a hearing before a federal judge. on their individual deportation orders.
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Trump's Tariff Talks, China's Tariff Response, SCOTUS Probationary Workers
And yesterday, the court threw out a lower court order that barred the administration from firing 16,000 probationary employees. The court said that the plaintiffs in the case were not the employees themselves, but nonprofit groups who failed to show that they themselves would be hurt by the firings.
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Trump's Tariff Talks, China's Tariff Response, SCOTUS Probationary Workers
It means the fired employee has to be on the job for a year or less, or in some cases more, time that includes people who are serving in a job that they were promoted to, for instance.
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Trump's Tariff Talks, China's Tariff Response, SCOTUS Probationary Workers
Yes, but it's going to take time, and therein lies the rub. The employees have to first challenge their firings at the Merit Systems Protection Board, which is the federal agency charged with protecting civil servants. And for the most part, the most efficient way to do that is systematically with a class action that says, essentially, we are representing all of these citizens.
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Trump's Tariff Talks, China's Tariff Response, SCOTUS Probationary Workers
Similarly situated fired employees, and we as a class should be reinstated. But in order to be certified as a class, they have to go before an administrative judge at the Merit Systems Protection Board. And so far, there have been more than 10,000 cases filed since October, including 20 class action suits. And I would presume that when the dust settles, there will be lots more class actions.
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Trump's Tariff Talks, China's Tariff Response, SCOTUS Probationary Workers
A lot of suits. Can the Merit System Protection Board actually act quickly? The MSPB system is meant to be fast, with cases finalized in 120 days, and the judges' decisions become final in 35 days unless there's some intervening action by the Merit Systems Protection Board. Initially, any appeal would be taken by the MSPB board, but the agency didn't even have a quorum until two days ago,
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Trump's Tariff Talks, China's Tariff Response, SCOTUS Probationary Workers
And the two board members there for the moment might well cancel each other's votes out. And in any event, the law allows a relatively quick appeal to the Court of Appeals for the federal circuit. And in that setting, for sure, there will be thousands of employees who do have legal standing to sue and have been harmed. NPR's Nina Totenberg. Thank you, Nina. Thank you.
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Defense Department Leak, Mourning Francis, SCOTUS Considers Opting Out
At the center of the case is the school system in our own nearby Montgomery County, Maryland. And it's the most religiously diverse county in the United States of America. It has 160,000 students of almost all faiths. And on one side are parents who want to opt their elementary and middle school children out of classes. when those classes include storybooks with LGBTQ characters and themes.
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Defense Department Leak, Mourning Francis, SCOTUS Considers Opting Out
And the parents contend that the books expose their children to ideas that contradict their religious values. I talked to Grace Morrison, who's one of the parents who's suing the school system. Her daughter was 10 when the LGBTQ books were introduced in their curriculum. So rather than risk exposure to the unwanted ideas, Morrison is homeschooling her daughter, and here she is.
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Defense Department Leak, Mourning Francis, SCOTUS Considers Opting Out
And what she really wants to do is to have her kid in the public school and be able to say that when certain material is discussed at all, the kid will be opted out of class and go to a different classroom.
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Defense Department Leak, Mourning Francis, SCOTUS Considers Opting Out
Well, the board initially did allow opt-outs, but it says it became just unmanageable. Unlike a sex ed class, for example, where the school system does allow opt-outs, the board says it became a logistical nightmare to take children out of a classroom when a single storybook that features some Same-sex parent or gay and lesbian kids could come up at any time.
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Defense Department Leak, Mourning Francis, SCOTUS Considers Opting Out
And then there's the question of where do you draw the line? Could parents opt their kids out of a science class where Darwin's theory of evolution is being taught or a history class where there's a section on how women got out of the kitchen and into the workforce? These are things that are against some people's religious views. Well, what has the law said up to now before this case?
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Defense Department Leak, Mourning Francis, SCOTUS Considers Opting Out
Well, I talked to Yale law professor Justin Driver, who's written extensively about the history of public schools, and he says that generally these curriculum decisions are left to local school boards unless there's some effort to coerce students into accepting a religious belief. He defends the way the Montgomery County system has handled this issue.
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Defense Department Leak, Mourning Francis, SCOTUS Considers Opting Out
Well, answering that question is dangerous. My guess is that a majority of the justices will side with the objectors who want an opt-out, but that's not a certainty. I draw that conclusion mainly because a majority of the court has had little exposure to attending a public school themselves. I don't know where they sent their kids to school, but only three of the justices went to public schools.
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Defense Department Leak, Mourning Francis, SCOTUS Considers Opting Out
The other six all attended private Catholic schools.
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Defense Department Leak, Mourning Francis, SCOTUS Considers Opting Out
Thank you, Steve.
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Syria's Relationship With Israel, Birthright Citizenship, Trump's Big Bill
Well, A, that's the million-dollar question. At one level, it's about birthright citizenship, namely the constitutional provision that, as you say, guarantees automatic citizenship to anyone born in the United States.
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Syria's Relationship With Israel, Birthright Citizenship, Trump's Big Bill
The Justice Department, knowing that it almost certainly will lose its claim that the 14th Amendment doesn't really mean what it says, the department has instead asked the court to focus on a separate question, a technical legal question that could make the legal process for challenging any Trump policy far more difficult and lengthy. Okay. So this might be an odd one.
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Syria's Relationship With Israel, Birthright Citizenship, Trump's Big Bill
Can you lay it out for us, please? Sure. Not only does the text of the 14th Amendment guarantee automatic citizenship, the Supreme Court 127 years ago unanimously declared that is clearly the meaning of the amendment. And that precedent has never been disturbed. And to put icing on the cake, Congress passed a statute codifying birthright citizenship almost a century ago.
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Syria's Relationship With Israel, Birthright Citizenship, Trump's Big Bill
President Trump, however, has never accepted any of that. So on day one of his second presidential term, he issued an executive order barring citizenship for any child born in the U.S. whose parents were either not here legally or who were here legally but on a temporary basis, like a work visa. Immigrant rights groups and 22 states promptly challenged the Trump order in court,
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Syria's Relationship With Israel, Birthright Citizenship, Trump's Big Bill
Since then, three federal judges, both conservative and liberal, have ruled that the Trump order is, as one put it, blatantly unconstitutional. And three separate appeals courts have refused to unblock those orders while appeals are ongoing.
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Syria's Relationship With Israel, Birthright Citizenship, Trump's Big Bill
Well, as I said, the department certainly knows it's going to lose on birthright. So instead of asking the court to rule on the legality of Trump's executive order, the administration is asking the court to do something else.
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Syria's Relationship With Israel, Birthright Citizenship, Trump's Big Bill
to curb the power of federal district court judges to do what they did here, not only rule against the administration, but bar enforcement of Trump's executive order nationwide.
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Syria's Relationship With Israel, Birthright Citizenship, Trump's Big Bill
The odd result is that today the context is birthright citizenship, but most of the debate is likely to focus on the tool these judges used called universal injunctions, like the ones in this case that have barred the administration from enforcing its policy anywhere in the country, while the case proceeds through the appellate courts in numerous jurisdictions.
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Syria's Relationship With Israel, Birthright Citizenship, Trump's Big Bill
Legal scholars, of course, differ dramatically on this question of nationwide injunctions and whether they're sometimes needed to prevent legal harms from continuing. But ultimately, Notre Dame law professor Samuel Bray thinks... This case was filed at just the right time psychologically when the justices are slogging through lots of other emergency appeals.
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Syria's Relationship With Israel, Birthright Citizenship, Trump's Big Bill
The summer break, he says, is good for the justices. They get time to recharge, let tempers cool, and come back from vacation refreshed for a new term in the fall. But in layman's terms, this could really screw up their summer.
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Birthright Citizenship Arguments, Trump's Mideast Trip, Sean 'Diddy' Combs Trial
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously 127 years ago that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which was enacted after the Civil War, says unambiguously that all babies born in the United States are automatically U.S. citizens. President Trump, however, has always had his own interpretation.
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Birthright Citizenship Arguments, Trump's Mideast Trip, Sean 'Diddy' Combs Trial
So on his first day in office this year, he issued an executive order declaring that the children of parents who entered the U.S. illegally or on a temporary visa are not entitled to automatic U.S. citizenship. Three different district court judges ruled that the executive order violated the Constitution.
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Birthright Citizenship Arguments, Trump's Mideast Trip, Sean 'Diddy' Combs Trial
In addition, they issued temporary nationwide orders called universal injunctions that temporarily barred the enforcement of the Trump order anywhere in the country while the cases litigated in the appeals courts. The Trump administration, claiming that the judges had exceeded their authority, then went to the Supreme Court asking it to block those nationwide injunctions.
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Birthright Citizenship Arguments, Trump's Mideast Trip, Sean 'Diddy' Combs Trial
Correct. But yesterday, they didn't seem so certain, especially after Trump's Solicitor General, John Sauer, reiterated the president's view that the 14th Amendment only applies to former slaves and their children.
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Birthright Citizenship Arguments, Trump's Mideast Trip, Sean 'Diddy' Combs Trial
Justice Sotomayor asked whether if a new president ordered the military to confiscate all guns in the country, would the course have to sit back and wait until every person whose gun is taken files a lawsuit? Justice Kagan then followed up asking Sauer about Trump's birthright executive order known as an EO.
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Birthright Citizenship Arguments, Trump's Mideast Trip, Sean 'Diddy' Combs Trial
Later, when Solicitor General Sauer hedged on whether the administration is committed to abiding by any court ruling, Justice Barrett leaned forward in her chair asking him whether the administration would abide by appeals court orders. Sauer responded this way. There are circumstances when it is not a categorical practice.
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Birthright Citizenship Arguments, Trump's Mideast Trip, Sean 'Diddy' Combs Trial
I don't think that answer went down very well. Here's Justice Kavanaugh for instance asking a series of practical questions.
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Birthright Citizenship Arguments, Trump's Mideast Trip, Sean 'Diddy' Combs Trial
The federal officials will have to figure that out. Replied Sauer, we just don't know. Justice Jackson then interjected.
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Birthright Citizenship Arguments, Trump's Mideast Trip, Sean 'Diddy' Combs Trial
When Sauer suggested that litigants could bring class actions instead of individual lawsuits, lawyer Jeremy Feigenbaum, representing the state, said that would produce, quote, unprecedented chaos on the ground.
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Birthright Citizenship Arguments, Trump's Mideast Trip, Sean 'Diddy' Combs Trial
Nope.
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Birthright Citizenship Arguments, Trump's Mideast Trip, Sean 'Diddy' Combs Trial
Thank you.