Born in the USA
It’s a puzzlement how some of the originalist, textualist conservatives who sit on the Supreme Court of the United States have a problem finding what they always insist on looking for: the clear meaning of words — like these in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Yet somehow Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch seemed to have missed the words “all persons” while Justice Brett Kavanaugh had some problems understanding the words “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges…”
Maybe we should shift some of the focus on how reading is taught today back to the curricula around the time these “legal scholars” learned their ABCs?
Obviously it’s good news that the Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to rewrite the Constitution. But the fact three justices can’t or won’t read simple English and a fourth only took issue with how the executive order was written is a chilling reality.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., no one’s idea of a flaming liberal, was succinct in asserting children born in the United States to undocumented parents or to parents temporarily in the country are citizens at birth.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’”
As the son born to parents who were in the process of becoming naturalized citizens, this is comforting news. Perhaps that also offers solace to all the jurists, since none of their ancestors are indigenous or came over on the Mayflower.
But to Thomas, a direct descendant of formerly enslaved people, the authors of the 14th Amendment were only thinking about enslaved people, like Dred Scott. To him, citizenship stops at the water’s edge.
In a 91-page dissent, joined by Gorsuch, Thomas insisted:
“Blacks were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans. They had no other homeland, owed no allegiance to any foreign power, and were subject to no other authority … [T]he same could not be said for the children of foreign temporary visitors,” who were “attached to their home country,” lacked “similar bonds to this country,” and “would not be called upon in time of war.”
A lengthy restatement of what has become the governing conservative “principle”: I got mine, screw you.
That earned him a major clap back from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson:
“Despite his longstanding endorsement of a ‘colorblind’ Constitution, Justice Thomas now surprisingly suggests that the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure, relating only to ‘freed slaves such as Dred Scott,’ and those who shared with them certain characteristics,” wrote Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
“It is for this reason, he says, that ‘children who were born in the United States but [to parents] not domiciled here’ are not entitled to claim birthright citizenship. But that narrow vision of the Fourteenth Amendment bears little relationship to the history of its ratification. Even worse, Justice Thomas’s telling elides the entire point of the Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.”
Trump’s executive order, issued on his first day back in the Oval Office, had been uniformly rejected at all previous levels of the courts.
In the words of federal Judge John C. Coughenour, appointed by another apparently flaming liberal named Ronald Reagan:
"Where were the lawyers when this decision was being made?...I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.”
Where were they? Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the operational hand at the controls of the Trump pogrom against immigrants, opted to skip law school. As for the members of the White House Counsel’s office and now, the Department of Justice, well, they are all part of Donald Trump’s personal law firm.
And despite Roberts’ vote to uphold the 14th Amendment — and his insistence that "we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges” — a clear reading of recent history suggests otherwise.
Another key player, aside from the legacy media, in the Slow-Motion Coup is the conservative legal establishment. That includes Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society that handpicked Trump’s SCOTUS nominees and Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, who manipulated Senate rules to deprive President Barack Obama of two picks that led to the lifetime tenures of Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Nor should we ignore the masterful media manipulation involved to snag the lifetime tenures of Thomas and Kavanaugh.
You might call it a high tech lynching of the American judicial system.
Ever faithful to his political masters, Kavanaugh even offered what some call a roadmap to overturning the otherwise clear language of the 14th Amendment:
“Kavanaugh found that Trump’s executive order violated a federal statute that, in his view, grants citizenship to immigrants’ offspring. At the same time, the justice all but invited Congress to “amend” that statute “or otherwise enact new legislation” that strips automatic citizenship from the children of “those unlawfully or temporarily in the country.”
I don’t think statutes can amend a constitutional amendment. But then again I’m not a lawyer, much less a conservative political operator offering fealty to Trump’s trashing of 250 years of American beliefs.