'Outright hostile!' Analysts warn Amy Coney Barrett doomed Trump at the Supreme Court

It may have lasted only a few minutes, but a withering exchange between Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Trump's own solicitor general likely sealed the fate of the president's bid to gut birthright citizenship, according to a new analysis.

Slate legal analyst Marc Joseph Stern pointed to a single moment during Wednesday's Supreme Court arguments as the turning point that effectively ended Trump's case. And it came from one of his own nominees.

Barrett zeroed in on Solicitor General John Sauer's central argument that children don't receive birthright citizenship if their parents lack "domicile" in the United States. She asked a simple but devastating question about what happens to the children of enslaved people who were forcibly brought to America against their will.

Enslaved people, Barrett noted, hardly had "intent to remain" in a country they were dragged to in chains. Under Sauer's own theory, their children wouldn't qualify for citizenship either — completely obliterating his argument that the entire point of the 14th Amendment was to grant citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their children.

"She made very clear that she viewed the children of slaves through the lens of unlawful immigration," said fellow analyst Evan Bernick. "She thought that the situation of enslaved people’s children was not something that could be settled on the basis of any domicile requirement. Because if we think about domicile as 'presence with intent to remain,' well, enslaved people didn’t intend to remain anywhere! They were taken. They were forced into a place. So domicile can’t be the rule, because then you can’t unproblematically grant citizenship to the children of formerly enslaved people."

Sauer had no answer.

"So this felt like the moment that Sauer completely lost the case, because he had to admit that his chief theory cannot be squared with what he himself acknowledges the 14th Amendment was ratified to do," said Stern.

Bernick predicted the court will rule against Trump 7-2, with Barrett leading the charge.

"Absolutely. Barrett was outright hostile to the solicitor general’s arguments," he said.