Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman sharply criticized President Donald Trump's latest attempt to circumvent a Supreme Court ruling against his birthright citizenship agenda, describing two executive orders signed earlier this week as "laughable" and built on "cockamamie" legal reasoning.

Speaking on the podcast Talking Feds, Litman said he expects both orders to face swift legal challenges. The Supreme Court ruled against Trump's effort to end birthright citizenship last month in the case Trump v. Barbara. The ruling marked a significant setback for one of Trump's signature immigration priorities and reaffirmed more than 150 years of settled constitutional law rooted in the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 to guarantee citizenship to all persons born on U.S. soil — a principle the Supreme Court upheld as far back as United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898.

"Both [orders] emerge from a place that is laughable, really, in terms of whether the law supports it," Litman said. He characterized the first order as "unconstitutional as can be" and the second as "very suspect."

The fundamental issue, Litman explained, is that both orders rely on an interpretation of the 14th Amendment that only Justice Clarence Thomas endorsed. The Supreme Court majority explicitly rejected that reading, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing in his opinion that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means simply being subject to U.S. law — a direct rebuke of the interpretation underpinning Trump's new orders. The administration's continued pursuit of the policy despite the ruling underscores the broader tension between executive action and judicial authority that has defined much of Trump's immigration agenda.

The first order advances what Litman called a "cockamamie argument" that children of people who entered the country unlawfully are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. It seeks to carve out new categories, including alien enemies, members of designated foreign terrorist organizations, and individuals who enter specifically to give birth.

Litman dismissed the reasoning as straightforwardly flawed: "Are alien enemies subject to the laws? Of course they are. Are terrorists subject to the laws? Of course they are."

He added bluntly that the 14th Amendment provides "zero power for the president to decide who is a citizen."

The second order, targeting "birth tourism," could potentially survive if narrowly applied to border screening procedures, Litman acknowledged. However, it would not withstand legal challenge if used to strip citizenship from anyone already born on U.S. soil.

Litman concluded that one order "is going down as soon as they use it, and the second will depend on how they use it."