On Thursday, U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour shot down President Donald Trump’s sweeping assault on birthright citizenship, blocking the policy nationwide as an egregious violation of the 14th Amendment. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the decision on this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: Judge Coughenour had no patience for the attempts by Trump’s Justice Department to defend this order. He called it “blatantly unconstitutional.” And then, when he was speaking from the bench talking about what was before him, he said: “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” And there was this moment when he said: There have been judges historically who have done stuff like this, and I’m not gonna be that guy.

Mark Joseph Stern: I think this will be remembered as one of the most important moments in Donald Trump’s second term—much like we remember, as one of the most important moments in his first, when a judge blocked the first iteration of the Muslim ban, and all those people detained at airports were freed. Then and now, the lawyers showed up. And at least in this first round, they prevailed big-time. This is exactly the ruling they wanted, that all advocates of birthright citizenship and our constitutional order wanted: not any equivocation, not any ambiguity, just a huge smackdown of the president and his administration. And, in the process, a well-earned diss to the lawyers who are shamefully—though I think, on their part, shamelessly—defending this unconstitutional mandate.

As Judge Coughenour explained—first from the bench, then in his temporary restraining order—this is settled law. The Supreme Court settled this in 1898. Nothing has changed since. All of the precedent points in one direction. The president cannot take away birthright citizenship from children born in the United States. He can’t take it away from children born to undocumented immigrants, or children born to legal immigrants, as he has attempted to do here. The whole thing is outrageous. So Judge Coughenour slapped a nationwide block on the order.

This will be fought, it will be appealed, and it will eventually get to the Supreme Court, probably sooner rather than later. There will also be more decisions from other judges, since there are now so many lawsuits proliferating against this order. And I think they will all point in the same direction. But this was the first, and in some ways may be the most important, because Judge Coughenour was so firm and so decisive in saying not only that this was wrong, but that history would scorn him if he did not stand up to this injustice.

I was struck by exactly the same thing, Mark. There was this “Have you no decency, sir” valence to this—like, no lawyer who has been admitted to the bar should sign a pleading defending this order. This really was a meta-judgment, with Coughenour saying: How dare you come into my court and pretend that the 14th Amendment allows this. This was not just a judgment about an attempt to rewrite the Constitution by executive order. It was also a judgment against a bunch of hastily scrambled DOJ lawyers who are willing to say absolutely anything, even if it isn’t true.

He is a Reagan appointee, right? And kind of a curmudgeonly one by all accounts. Does that matter?

I think it definitely matters. Look back four years for a comparison: When Biden first came into office and Republicans filed a bunch of lawsuits, they forum-shopped to Trump-appointed judges. They went straight to the most far-right judges, hand-selected by Trump, to ensure that they would secure these sweeping injunctions against the Biden administration. It was very obvious and very cynical. But this was not a case of judge-shopping. This was a case of a Reagan appointee who is not known to be liberal. But he had to acknowledge what the Constitution states and what precedent affirms.

So I do think it grants a bipartisan sheen, perhaps a nonpartisan sheen, to the judgment. This is not the dead hand of the Biden administration strangling the Trump administration. This is someone who’s been there for decades, who’s seen it all, who’s delivered victories and defeats evenhandedly to both sides. And he’s saying: I cannot waver. There is no room for argument. The answer is clear.

I also think it’s important that this happened so quickly. Because the longer that Trump and his allies were allowed to argue against birthright citizenship without a decisive legal decision, the more danger there was that the idea would take hold—that Maybe there is an argument against birthright citizenship, and Maybe Trump had a point.

I’ll just note that some Trump supporters are already trying to do that. So Ilan Wurman, who is a law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, tweeted on Thursday: “Maybe the birthright citizenship order will ultimately be held unconstitutional, but I find it highly embarrassing for a judge to say something so unequivocally at a preliminary stage without the slightest acknowledgement that there is an entire literature that disagrees.”

This is the classic play to pretend that there is another side to a legal argument that has been settled. Oh, there is some “literature” that disagrees? Well, the undisputed intellectual leader of that literature, of that argument, is John Eastman. This is the guy who spoke at Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally. Who advised Mike Pence to illegally refuse to certify electoral votes on Jan. 6. Who was found by a federal judge to have “dishonestly conspired to obstruct the joint session of Congress.” The Jan. 6 committee recommended that Eastman be charged with obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Eastman has been indicted in two different states for unlawfully conspiring to fraudulently overturn a free and fair election. He has been barred from practicing law in D.C. and California.

This is the godfather of the ostensible intellectual argument against birthright citizenship! But most people who read that tweet, who hear that there is “another side” to this, are not going to look into who’s actually peddling this stuff. They’re just going to think: Oh, it’s a matter of debate, so maybe there isn’t one right answer. And that, again, is how the Federalist Society operates. Their goal is to move ideas from “off the wall” to “on the wall,” as Yale Law Prof. Jack Balkin has explained. Our friend Ian Millhiser at Vox has written eloquently about this and how well it works when the judiciary is quite aligned with the Federalist Society goals. There is an army of lawyers who pretend that settled law is actually unsettled. They inject this uncertainty that then gives cover for conservative judges, including Supreme Court justices, to radically alter the law.

So, again, it’s critical that this attack on birthright citizenship got resoundingly smacked down early on, before the idea really took root, and before this brigade of cynical, partisan scholars could ride in to give it bogus intellectual backing.

I just want to quote from the Seattle Times’ reporting on what happened in the courtroom. Judge Coughenour said: “There are other times in world history where we look back and people of goodwill can say Where were the judges? Where were the lawyers?” And I’ll say again: Go back and read the Nuremberg Judges’ Trial of German jurists and lawyers who were complicit in Nazi crimes. It is important to understand that if judges and lawyers are willing to accede to everything, they will accede to anything. Now we have an 84-year-old Reagan appointee saying that throughout history, there have been moments when we’ve asked: “Are you really judges? Are you really lawyers?” And I think that is profound.