With the Supreme Court's 2025, 2026 term winding down, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told Fox News Sunday viewers that the Trump administration should brace for a loss on its marquee constitutional challenge, the executive order restricting birthright citizenship. Turley was not alone. Every legal voice on the panel reached the same conclusion.
The assessment landed just days before the Court is expected to hand down its final batch of opinions in late June or early July. Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream, who also covers the Court, likened the remaining calendar to a "Super Bowl" because of the weight of the decisions still pending, birthright citizenship, late-arriving mail-in ballots, and whether biological sex determines eligibility in women's sports.
Bream predicted the administration would lose the birthright citizenship case. Turley agreed, pointing to Chief Justice John Roberts's posture during oral arguments on April 1, arguments President Trump attended in person, the first time a sitting president had ever done so.
"The oral argument did not give a lot of room for hope, particularly with Roberts coming out right away and expressing skepticism. The question is whether anything happened during conference."
Turley acknowledged a slim possibility of a last-minute shift, citing Roberts's own history. The chief justice is "often believed to have switched his vote on the individual mandate in the Obamacare case at the last minute," Turley noted. But he added bluntly: "Most of us are expecting this is probably going to be a loss for the administration."
Tom Dupree, a former principal deputy assistant attorney general who worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, reinforced Turley's read. Dupree said the administration walked into the fight knowing the odds.
"I think the administration knew going into this that this was going to be a heavy lift for them, precisely for that reason. Judges year after year, decade after decade, have said that birthright citizenship is enshrined in our Constitution. I don't think there's going to be a change at the last minute."
Dupree went further. He said many courts have held that the Fourteenth Amendment sets the standard for birthright citizenship and that ending the practice would "probably ultimately take a constitutional amendment." That is a steep climb, requiring two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of state legislatures.
The legal fight traces back to January 20, 2025, when Trump signed an executive order on birthright citizenship upon returning to office for his second term. The order drew immediate legal challenges. In June 2025, the administration won a Supreme Court decision concerning nationwide injunctions against the order, a procedural victory that kept the underlying constitutional question alive for full briefing and argument.
Turley himself called the executive order approach "a uniquely bad idea," even as he acknowledged the broader policy frustration driving it. The Court heard oral arguments on the merits on April 1 of this year. And now the justices are writing.
The Supreme Court's current term has already been packed with consequential rulings, but the birthright citizenship case carries singular political significance. It tests whether a president can, by executive action alone, redefine who qualifies as a citizen at birth on American soil, or whether that question belongs to the Constitution's text and, ultimately, the amendment process.
The birthright citizenship case was not the only pending decision the panelists dissected. Turley offered a more optimistic forecast for the administration on a separate case involving late-arriving mail-in ballots, a question with direct implications for election integrity.
Turley read the oral arguments as pointing toward a ruling that "federal election day" means Election Day, period. He tied the issue to California's extended ballot-counting practices, which have drawn sustained conservative criticism.
"Having this debacle in California, extending the counting for so long, only sort of reaffirms the logic of that. Now, this is for federal elections. So for dual election, state and federal, it can get a little bit wicked if you want to try to give people extra time. But if the Court rules that 'Election Day' means election day, those ballots have got to be in on that day."
He pointed to the Los Angeles mayoral race as a vivid example. Nithya Raman, described as a socialist candidate, pulled ahead of reality star Spencer Pratt "on the strength of 'late ballot drops,'" the kind of outcome that fuels public skepticism about drawn-out counting windows.
Dupree agreed the Court appeared ready to rule on the late-ballot question but cautioned that the decision would likely be narrow. He raised a secondary wrinkle: if the Court declares that everything must happen on one particular day, the logic could theoretically call into question early voting as well, since those ballots arrive before Election Day.
"I think for this case, this decision, it only concerns those late-arriving ballots, so I think this decision is going to be somewhat narrow in that sense. But you're absolutely right that if the Court says 'Election Day' means Election Day, everything's got to be done on this one particular day, arguably it would call into question early voting because those are coming in before Election Day."
That distinction matters. A ruling confined to late-arriving ballots would address the most glaring integrity concern, votes trickling in for days or weeks after polls close, without upending the broader early-voting infrastructure that millions of voters, including many Republicans, now rely on.
Turley predicted "a good day" for those who believe biological sex should determine eligibility in women's sports, though the specific case name was not identified during the broadcast. The issue has become one of the sharpest cultural flashpoints before the Court this term, with recent high-profile decisions showing the justices are willing to wade into politically charged territory regardless of which side takes the hit.
The women's sports question sits at the intersection of Title IX enforcement, state-level athletic policies, and the administration's own regulatory posture. A favorable ruling would validate the position held by a majority of American voters in poll after poll, that female athletes should not be forced to compete against biological males.
Efforts by the political left to reshape the Court itself continue in the background. Kamala Harris has rallied donors behind a multimillion-dollar campaign aimed at blocking future Trump Supreme Court nominees, a reminder that the stakes of each term extend well beyond individual cases.
The panel's consensus paints a mixed but instructive picture for the Trump administration. On birthright citizenship, the case the president personally attended oral arguments for, in an unprecedented gesture, the legal terrain looks hostile. Roberts's early skepticism, decades of judicial precedent, and the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment all point toward defeat. Even Turley, a frequent defender of executive authority, called the executive-order strategy a bad vehicle for the policy goal.
On election integrity and women's sports, the outlook is brighter. If the Court draws a firm line that Election Day means Election Day for federal races, it will impose a basic discipline that most voters already assume exists. And a ruling affirming biological sex as the standard in women's athletics would settle a question the administrative state has spent years muddying.
The broader lesson is one conservatives should absorb honestly. The Supreme Court is not a rubber stamp for any administration, it has shown a willingness to block government action across partisan lines when the legal merits demand it. That independence is a feature, not a bug. The path to ending birthright citizenship, if the public wants it, runs through the amendment process the Constitution prescribes, not through an executive order, however politically satisfying.
The decisions will arrive within days. When they do, the scoreboard will tell us whether the administration's boldest legal gambles paid off or whether the Constitution's own guardrails held firm. Either way, the system is working the way it was designed to, and those who want to pack the Court because they dislike a particular outcome should take note.
Winning at the Supreme Court requires more than conviction. It requires the law. On birthright citizenship, the law may simply not be where the administration needs it to be, and no amount of presidential presence in the gallery changes that.