Biden administration tells Supreme Court to pass on birthright citizenship case

President Joe Biden's administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday not to take up a case regarding citizenship rights for American Samoans despite advocates who say it would give the high court a chance to undo decades of precedent that Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor have decried as racist.

Justice Department Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the Supreme Court in a brief filed Monday that an appeals court was correct to find that Congress should be in charge of citizenship decisions about people born in territories and that the case in question, Fitisemanu v. U.S., would be a poor vessel for reexamining a series of century-old rulings known as the Insular Cases.

“The government in no way relies on the indefensible and discredited aspects of the Insular Cases’ reasoning and rhetoric,” Prelogar wrote, adding, “This case would be an unsuitable vehicle for reexamining those cases.”

But last term, Gorsuch and Sotomayor, who represent opposing ends of the court's ideological spectrum, rebuked such rulings, saying they relied on racist and imperialist sentiment to deem residents of some U.S. territories not fully entitled to the Constitution's protections, including birthright citizenship.