The high court stands up for birthright citizenship

There is cause to celebrate after Chief Justice John Roberts led the US Supreme Court to rule 6-3 against President Donald Trump’s idiotic executive order attempting to terminate birthright citizenship for people born in this country to parents who are undocumented or have some form of temporary status, according to the Tribune News.

Roberts wrote a strong opinion that rejects Trump’s xenophobic and wrong view of the Constitution and rings loud and clear in the days before America’s 250th birthday. Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice for reaffirming what this county is about and it’s not just fireworks and picnics.

Had Trump, and not Roberts, prevailed, it would have set off immense chaos and misery, leaving populations of people effectively stateless and violating the Constitution with each and every one, as the 14th Amendment explicitly guarantees this right. Justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito and Neil Gorsuch would have happily let it get trampled.

That this was not a 9-0 decision should put those three men to shame. The trio all agreed that Executive Order No. 14160, issued Trump’s first day back in office on Jan. 20, 2025, did not violate the Constitution and opted to interpret the phrase “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” as excluding persons born in the US and subject to its jurisdiction.

They would have you believe that we are simply not sophisticated enough to understand their complex reasoning, but the fact of the matter is that any layperson can understand this question and how these justices are twisting the words to suit their own ends. It’s worth bearing in mind that this was, for the last 130 or so years, not considered an open legal question. What pangs of uncertainty may have existed in the immediate aftermath of the 14th Amendment’s 1868 ratification were put to bed by the court in 1898 when it ruled in favor of the California-born Wong Kim Ark, waving away arguments about Ark’s supposed allegiance and his parents’ Chinese provenance that are very similar to the zombified versions that the MAGA crowd has resurrected now.

For almost the entire intervening time, this was a settled matter, the pet project of cranks like John Eastman that no one took seriously. It is only because Trump and zealots like Stephen Miller decided to take this up that friendly legal scholars rushed to backfill legal rationalizations for their effort. These were then adopted and parroted by these three right-wing justices, though fortunately it was not enough.

The amendment itself was ratified in 1868, after the Civil War and almost a century after the nation’s founding, a marker of the slow and often stilted progress that we have made towards actually realizing the ideals that were first enshrined in that founding Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Now, on the occasion of the nation’s 250th anniversary, Trump and his cronies are working to wrestle that progress back and betray the principles set to paper by the Founders. This particular gambit was just too brazen even for a friendly court, though the effort continues on many other fronts, with Trump now calling on Congress to end birthright citizenship via legislation and without the need for constitutional amendment. That would be some trick.

The Constitution won here, but it remains at grave risk on this semiquincentennial.