The Constitution Is On Life Support - Jay Willis @ Balls and Strikes

[In It to Win It]

https://ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/birthright-citizenship-opinion-constitution-on-life-support/

On Tuesday morning, the United States Supreme Court came exactly one vote away from holding that the Fourteenth Amendment does not mean what it says—that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” As outlined their dissenting opinions in Trump v. Barbara, four sitting justices—Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh—would have instead held that the Constitution has nothing to say about President Donald Trump’s racist crusade to erase the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.

Trump v. Barbara is probably the highest-profile case of the term, in part because of its real-world stakes for millions of people, and in part because it is not every year that the Supreme Court has to answer a question like “Does the Constitution allow the president to ignore more than a century of Supreme Court precedent simply because he doesn’t like brown people?” Because this case received so much media attention, and went against Trump, and came down on the last morning of the term (the drama!), over the next few days, you are going to be soaked by a broken fire hydrant of fawning op-eds informing you that the result in Barbara proves once and for all the Court’s independence from Trump, and that the institution remains resolutely committed to its mission of Doing Law, Not Politics.

The decision does none of these things. Trump v. Barbara is the stupidest Supreme Court case in recent memory: the nation’s nine fanciest lawyers spending God knows how many hours pondering a question about the Fourteenth Amendment’s meaning that a bright sixth-grader could have answered without difficulty in roughly 30 seconds. The fact that a bare majority of the Court eventually arrived at the howlingly obvious, so-simple-it-feels-like-a-trick-question result—and only after months of forcing noncitizen parents wonder if their children would soon be rendered stateless—is not evidence of the justices’ boundless intellect or analytical rigor. It is a damning indictment of an institution that is teetering on the brink of stuffing the entire enterprise of constitutional governance in the garbage.

The fact that FOUR sitting Supreme Court justices were willing to greenlight Trump's racist attack on the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship is a national embarrassment. Tear down the institution, it is beyond saving.

— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) 2026-06-30T17:08:07.385Z

[johnnyfins]

1. In some ways, I still can't believe this was not

9-0. Looking at the members of the court, I see why it was split but I don't know how you can say that the 14th amendment doesn't say what it says. Deliberate partisan fuckery.

[scarletlib]

2. How can they they say the 2nd Amendment has a totally different meaning from what was originally written?

Because they want to.