In 1898, the same Supreme Court that upheld Jim Crow segregation as constitutional also upheld the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, by a 6–2 vote. This was a profoundly racist Court in a profoundly racist era—around the peak of the lynching epidemic—that nonetheless could find no way around the plain text of the Constitution, and was forced to affirm that people of Chinese descent could be citizens.

Nearly 130 years later, in our much more enlightened time, that bedrock guarantee drew more opposition at the Supreme Court. This week, in Trump v. Barbara, a 6–3 majority struck down President Trump’s executive order repealing birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors. But only five justices voted to invalidate the order on constitutional grounds. The other four indicated varying degrees of openness to narrowing birthright citizenship, if not exactly along the lines that the Trump administration had sought.

By ruling with such a slim majority, “the Court has just handed right-wingers a new bloody shirt to wave in every single political campaign,” Aderson Francois, a law professor at Georgetown University, told me. “The main legacy of the decision is that for the next few years, this will become the new Roe v. Wade.” After all, conservatives now know they are only one vote away from eliminating birthright citizenship by judicial fiat.

The Fourteenth Amendment has not changed since 1898. What have changed are the Republican Party and the modern conservative movement. Trump believes that “if you import the Third World, you become the Third World.” His rise to power began with his willingness to be a standard-bearer for a movement that cast the first Black president as an illegitimate invader and demanded to see his birth certificate. Trump’s second-term campaign promised “mass deportation” of those very same “Third World” immigrants, and since taking office, he has established an effectively whites-only refugee policy, specifically for white South Africans, illustrating that his objection is less to immigration itself, or to immigrants from the “Third World,” than to immigrants who are not white.

Trump’s logic holds that the growing number of nonwhite people in America is a threat to the nation, whose fundamental character is racial, and that the country is the exclusive property of white Christians rather than all of its people. Birthright citizenship is an obstacle to this idea of America because it makes anyone born here a citizen, regardless of their race, religion, or origin—even if that origin is “the Third World.” As Trump goes, so goes the Republican Party. Neither the text of the Constitution nor more than a century of precedent have proved a match for the partisan-motivated reasoning of several supposedly impartial right-wing justices, whose views on what the Constitution says shift with the ideological currents.

A razor-thin majority of the Supreme Court confirmed today that the Fourteenth Amendment means what it says: “All persons” born in the United States and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens of the United States. In January 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that attempted to unilaterally revoke that guarantee, limiting citizenship at birth to only U.S.-born children with at least one parent who is a citizen or legal permanent resident.

If implemented, Trump’s directive would have denied the rights and privileges of citizenship, like the ability to vote and freedom from deportation, to hundreds of thousands of people born in the U.S. every year. But on Tuesday, the Court held this scheme unconstitutional, ruling 5-4 in Trump v. Barbara that Trump’s order contravened the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment as it has been understood across centuries.

Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by the three Democratic appointees and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, explained that early American colonists imported the English common-law rule of citizenship by birth in a territory, but that slave states had “abandoned” that rule by making citizenship depend on “blood, not soil.” In the “odious decision” of Dred Scott v. Sandford, Roberts continued, the Court had “imposed the Southern States’ beliefs onto the Nation,” holding that the longstanding tradition of citizenship by birth did not apply to Black people.

Roberts’s opinion makes clear that Congress adopted the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War to “repudiate” Dred Scott. Roberts also quoted the amendment’s drafters, who were explicit about their aim to put the “great question of citizenship” squarely “beyond the legislative power.”

By attempting to exclude people with disfavored ancestry from citizenship at birth, Trump’s directive was a brazen effort to reproduce an antebellum white supremacist legal order that the Fourteenth Amendment and subsequent Supreme Court decisions already repudiated. Trump v. Barbara should thus have been an extraordinarily easy case; it should not have taken so long or been so difficult for the Court to affirm the constitutional foundation of multiracial democracy in the United States.

The legal profession is much like a priesthood; both lawyers and theologians interpret a central text, be it the Bible, the Quran, the Gita, or the Constitution. We bury ourselves in canonical commentaries on that text. And we are all supplicants to beings much more powerful than ourselves.

Which explains why I’ve spent the past few years contemplating what happens when God goes mad.

The Supreme Court wrapped up its most recent term during a bizarrely haphazard celebration of the United States’ 250th birthday. And it has struggled to articulate a coherent vision of the Constitution no less than President Donald Trump has struggled to keep the National Mall’s reflecting pool clear during that celebration.

The Court isn’t just the most powerful institution in the United States — the only body capable of overriding both Congress and the president. It is supposed to be the caretaker of something sacred and eternal. As Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote, the whole purpose of a written constitution is “to prevent the law from reflecting certain changes in original values that the society adopting the Constitution thinks fundamentally undesirable.”

That is, the Constitution fixes in place certain rights and governmental structures that are not supposed to change just because someone loses an election or because a few seats on the Supreme Court change hands. The right to free speech, the rule establishing that people born in the US are Americans, and the idea that all Americans, including the president, are subject to the same laws are abiding principles that should survive a change in administration or in the Court’s makeup.

But this Court does not simply overrule foundational precedents so often it is difficult to keep track; its work is increasingly illegible to people — even lawyers — who do not share the Republican justices’ values. I am grateful that I no longer practice law, because one of a lawyer’s primary duties is to advise clients on whether something they plan to do in the future is legal. And this Court’s interpretations of the law are often too opaque and unpredictable to allow lawyers to advise clients on what the law will be tomorrow.