Appeals court refuses to pause Trump’s Georgia case so defense lawyer can take ‘fully paid for and non-refundable’ international 70th birthday trip with his wife of 45 years

Donald Trump

Donald Trump speaks at the annual Road to Majority conference in Washington, DC, June 22, 2024. (Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP)

A federal judge in Washington state on Thursday issued a temporary restraining order halting President Donald Trump’s “blatantly unconstitutional” executive order ending birthright citizenship in the United States.

U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, presided over the hearing based on the 85-page complaint filed in Seattle federal court earlier this week by the attorneys general of Washington, Oregon, Arizona, and Illinois.

At the close of the hearing, Coughenour issued an order prohibiting the Trump administration from taking any steps in furtherance of the executive order on birthright citizenship, reasoning that it ran contra to the country’s founding documents.

“This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” Coughenour said during the proceedings, according to a report from The New York Times.

He continued, saying he couldn’t believe a licensed lawyer could believe the move to be constitutional.

“I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that is a constitutional order,” the judge said, per the Washington Standard. “It boggles my mind.”

According to the filed complaint, Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship violates the 14th Amendment and the federal Immigration and Nationality Act. The States argue that a sitting president lacks the authority to override the U.S. Constitution, asserting that no provision or law empowers him to determine who should or should not be granted U.S. citizenship at birth.

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