Trump seeks do-overs at a Supreme Court that rarely grants them

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — When it comes to the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump has become a believer in unlikely second chances.

In the days since the court’s term ended last week with a flurry of high-profile opinions, the president and his legal team have floated the idea of invoking a longshot request to have the justices reconsider decisions they just made — a procedure that, in some cases, hasn’t worked in more than half a century.

Trump’s lawyers have already filed for a rehearing of the court’s decision to deny an appeal over a $5 million verdict finding that he sexually abused and defamed magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll. And on Wednesday, Trump vowed to ask the court to re-do its decision shutting down his birthright citizenship order.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling is wrong,” Trump posted on social media. “I will be asking for a Rehearing by the United States Supreme Court, IMMEDIATELY. This miscarriage of justice will destroy America if they don’t change their absolutely insane decision.”

Supreme Court rules technically allow parties to file for a rehearing within 25 days of a decision. But in practice, the court usually only grants such requests when a significant development comes to light in the aftermath of a ruling, not because the losing party simply disagrees with the outcome.

The court voted 6-3 on June 30 to invalidate Trump’s effort to end automatic birthright citizenship through executive order. A five-justice majority concluded that the order violated the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment and a sixth justice, Brett Kavanaugh, reasoned that the order was constitutional but was nevertheless barred by federal immigration law.

The last time the Supreme Court entertained a request to review a decision in an argued appeal was in 1965. That case, Maryland v. US, involved a 1958 airplane crash between a commercial plane and a Maryland National Guard training flight and the question dealt with whether the plaintiffs could seek damages against the United States government. The court ruled in 1965 that the pilot was an employee of the state of Maryland, not the federal government.

But the plaintiffs argued that the lower courts had reviewed only the liability of the pilot, not government air traffic controllers. And so the Supreme Court, in a brief order, allowed that separate issue to move forward in lower courts.

Almost a decade earlier, the court granted a request to rehear a case involving the court martial of two civilian wives who killed their military husbands overseas — one in England and the other in Japan. On rehearing, the court concluded that the women could not be tried by court martial. To this day, it remains the only time the Supreme Court ever reheard a case it had decided and reversed itself.

“It is extremely rare for the court to grant reconsideration,” said Michael Dorf, a constitutional law professor at Cornell Law School.

“When it does so, it is typically because some vital information was not before it originally,” Dorf told CNN. “Simple attempts to re-litigate a decided issue invariably fail.”

The Department of Justice did not respond to questions about Trump’s promise to seek a rehearing.

Trump’s odds, based on past practice, might be slightly better in the case of Carroll — but it’s still highly unlikely.

The president’s attorneys urged the Supreme Court this week to reconsider its decision to deny his appeal of the $5 million verdict in the Carroll case. And they have subsequently asked lower courts to delay that payment so the justices may consider that request.

Trump has noted that he will soon appeal a separate case involving Carroll and it has suggested the Supreme Court should wait to consider the two cases together. But the president’s lawyers already made that suggestion in a letter to the court last month. The court nevertheless denied the appeal last week without dissent.

Lawyers for Carroll declined to comment for this story.

Reconsiderations of decisions to deny an appeal are somewhat more common than rethinking a final decision, though they almost always involve a significant change in circumstances since the court acted. The last time the Supreme Court granted such relief was more than a year ago, in a case involving a federal anti-doping law for the horseracing industry. There, the Supreme Court sent the dispute back to a federal appeals court for additional review after a different federal appeals court drew the opposite conclusion of the law’s constitutionality.

In asking a lower federal court to withhold payment to Carroll, Trump’s attorneys cited about a dozen cases — dating back to in 1940 — in which the Supreme Court had reconsidered a decision to deny an appeal.

“Rehearing is not some legal impossibility,” Trump’s lawyers told the lower court this week. “The court must not ignore the grave and irreparable consequences of disbursing funds that may never be recovered.”

The federal judge in that case rejected that argument on Wednesday, ordering the release of the funds to Carroll.

Trump quickly appealed. A federal appeals court quickly denied the request Wednesday for immediate relief while it considers Trump’s ask for a longer pause on the payment.

CNN’s Kara Scannell contributed to this report.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.