President Donald Trump said he plans to take the extraordinary step of attending Supreme Court oral arguments Wednesday in a case that could end birthright citizenship in the U.S.
"I'm going," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. "Because I have listened to this argument for so long."
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later confirmed to NBC News that Trump plans to be there Wednesday morning when Supreme Court justices hear arguments on the constitutionality of a January 2025 executive order he signed that seeks to limit birthright citizenship to people who have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or a legal permanent resident.
Both the court and the nonprofit Supreme Court Historical Society said in October that there is no official record of any sitting president having attended oral arguments at the high court.
Trump attended the formal ceremonies at the court confirming his Supreme Court appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, but he has never been there before for arguments.
Trump would be present weeks after his attacks on justices following the court's ruling against his tariffs. At the time, he called justices "disloyal to the Constitution." In the days leading up to oral arguments in that case, Trump indicated he might attend them at the Supreme Court but ended up not going.
Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at New York University, said Trump's presence during oral arguments "certainly raises the temperature of the argument, which might be the President’s intent."
"The case is about the powers of the presidency as an institution," Pildes said in an email to NBC News. "By showing up in person, the President would instead be personalizing the case, as if it’s a personal confrontation between him and the justices."
He added that presidents have avoided attending oral arguments because there is an understanding that the court's decisions apply to the presidency as an institution, not to just an individual president's time in office.
“They have understood it’s not good for the country to up the level of confrontation by representing the dispute as a more personalized one through showing up in person,” Pildes said.
While Trump's presence would be unorthodox, he is by no means the first president to publicly comment on a pending case tied closely to a White House agenda. President Barack Obama drew criticism in 2012 after he said the Supreme Court would be taking an “unprecedented, extraordinary step” if it struck down the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
Chief Justice John Roberts has worked hard to keep the Supreme Court independent from the two other branches of government, frequently speaking out against threats to and attacks on the judiciary. Many of those attacks have come from Trump, the head of the executive branch.
"The problem sometimes is that the criticism can move from a focus on legal analysis to personalities," Roberts said March 17. "And you see from all over, I mean, not just any one political perspective on it, that it's more directed in a personal way, and that, frankly, can be actually quite dangerous."
"Personally directed hostility is dangerous and has got to stop," he added.
The Supreme Court agreed in December to hear the case after lower courts ruled against Trump's plan to end automatic birthright citizenship for almost anyone born in the U.S.
The 14th Amendment has long been interpreted to protect birthright citizenship, as it states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
The Trump administration is pushing back against the longtime interpretation of that clause.
