Justice Sotomayor is pretty predictable. She walks into oral argument with a set of questions she wants to ask, and she will keep asking them, whether or not she gets the answer she wants. I imagine advocates get frustated, but that is part of the game.
During the birthright citizenship cases, Justice Sotomayor asked the same line of questions several times--apparently she thought it was clever. To illustrate the limits of the government's position concerning nationwide injunction, she would change the hypo: what would happen if the government sought to confiscate every gun in America; would every gunowner have to bring an individual law suit to seek relief?
Page 13: JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: --so, when a new president orders that because there's so much gun violence going on in the country and he comes in and he says, I have the right to take away the guns from everyone, then people --and he sends out the military to seize everyone's guns --we and the courts have to sit back and wait until every named plaintiff gets --or every plaintiff whose gun is taken comes into court?
Page 41: JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: If we're afraid that this is or even have a thought that this is unlawful executive action, that it is Congress who decides citizenship, not the executive, if we believe, some of us were to believe that, why should we permit those countless others to be subject to what we think is an unlawful executive action, as unlawful as an executive taking the guns away from every citizen?
Page 44: JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: --it got rejected repeatedly. We can go into the history of citizenship, but I still go back to my question. You claim that there is absolutely no constitutional way to stop, put this aside, to stop a president from an unconstitutional act, a clearly, indisputably unconstitutional act, taking every gun from every citizen, we couldn't stop that.
