Brian Lera on WNYC.

We're so happy to have Nina Totenberg with us, the NPR Legal Affairs correspondent,

as she does nationally for NPR.

Nina will help us make sense of a few of the critical issues currently before the Supreme

Court.

And beyond that, there's the bigger picture question of democracy right now, as we've been

discussing on so many occasions on the show.

One of Nina's recent pieces was about the clash between President Trump and the courts

generally, and at what point it's a constitutional crisis.

Nina, always nice of you to give us some WNYC time in addition to your NPR time.

Welcome back to the show.

My pleasure.

Let's start with the birthright citizenship case, argued on Thursday, which I think the public hasn't fully digested

yet. I think our listeners might have been expecting arguments about the meaning of the 14th Amendment

as it pertains to birthright citizenship, which is in there, but instead they got arguments about

whether one federal district court ruling in one part of the country can apply to the president

nationwide? Why did it focus on that? Well, it could have done other things. And there are, but

it, for whatever reason, and only they know internally, they decided to grant the Trump administration's request to hear this case,

but the only thing that the Trump administration asked the court to do was to push back to lower courts

and say you can't issue a nationwide injunction,

meaning you in Washington State and you in Massachusetts and you in New Jersey,

you are not permitted to issue decisions that apply to the whole country until the case is further

...