Marble Falls        Ok, we all know that one of the first wild and crazy executive orders President Trump signed was a shot at the upper deck in the bleachers to end birthright citizenship.  It didn’t really matter to him that the Constitution is crystal clear that if you were born here under any circumstances, you are a citizen of the United States.  He and some of his people didn’t like it, so he wanted to waive a wand and have it begone.

In a case, so cut and dried, old schoolers might have thought you could get a “writ of mandamus” on this, since his usurpation of the Constitution was so obvious.   Maybe that might have been true once upon a time, but no more.  Instead, the plot thickened.  A federal judge issued a national injunction to stop the administration in its tracks from unilaterally ending citizenship at birth.  In the new Trump playbook, every time he has an itch, the Justice Department files an emergency petition with the Supreme Court, taking another long shot that maybe he can pull a victory out of the jaws of defeat from the conservative super majority.

The Supreme Court did look at this mess, but in their desperation to continue to give the president a “win,” no matter the law, they refused to confront the issue head-on and instead took a side road and rendered a decision about universal national injunctions, rather than birthright citizenship.  In short, they didn’t like them, but in fact, a lot of people don’t like single federal judges issuing injunctions across the country.  In the Biden and Obama administration, there was a lot of this “venue shopping,” where conservative Republicans would run to south Texas and file one suit after another to get national injunctions to try and stop the Affordable Care Act and any number of other policies.  Interestingly, despite this ruling, some federal judges have ignored it, when they had cause, and continued issuing national injunctions, so we’ll see how that all turns out someday.

But, until recently, here is what I had missed.  Despite all the references to the decision, it took me a while to see that the actual citation on the case everyone was talking about is Trump v. CASA, Inc, et al or more simply referred to as now by legal scholars and pundits, as CASA.  Now as much as many of us aren’t a fan of this Supreme Court’s vacillation on this issue and so many others, I have to admit that I’m proud of the CASA part of this decision, because once again an organization that is firmly part of our tradition stood up tall and didn’t back down, as so many others are doing.  CASA is the immigrant rights and worker center organization, headquartered in Maryland, but also working in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, directed by Gustavo Torres.  We’ve gone behind the scenes in applauding their work before in resisting Trump’s anti-immigrant deportation crusade on the El Salvador case, so it didn’t surprise me that they were front and center on this as well, even if it had slipped by me for a bit over the last six weeks since the decision.

A lot of people, even organizers, don’t fully understand why capacity matters, but CASA is a good case study of that now, just as ACORN was for our members over many decades. Part of the point of building large organizations with resources is about having the ability to meet the challenge of the times, which is what CASA is doing for the immigrant community, just as ACORN does for low- and moderate-income families.  We build large organizations for a reason, not simply for the sake of being big.  Having enough size and stature that we can both lead the way, protect our members, and take a punch without falling when the times are tough is part of the mission and responsibility.  The CASAs and ACORNs are not the movement, but they are the organizations that can support a movement and respond to constituency crises when they arrive, and when “small is beautiful” is not enough.

Meanwhile, another federal judge has more pointedly ruled that Trump can’t dictatorially terminate birthright citizenship, so the Supreme Court is going to have to finally meet this issue head on.  The safest bet in Vegas will be that CASA will be filing an amicus brief when that time comes as well.