A new Economist/YouGov poll is a rich text for political observers of the Supreme Court. The Court is unpopular (only 36 percent of American adults approve). It is loathed by Democrats (80 percent of whom disapprove of the Court). And its approval among Republicans is surprisingly soft, given that the GOP controls six of the nine seats on the Court. Only 69 percent of Republicans approve.

The least popular justice, meanwhile, is Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Although President Donald Trump’s most recent appointment to the Court is a conservative Republican, she is barely above water within her own party — a result that is unsurprising, because Barrett has recently come under fire from several far-right lawmakers and media figures.



In the rush of major rulings that the justices handed down at the end of June, Barrett joined two 5-4 decisions that ruled against Trump and his Republican Party. And not just on any issues, but two that have become increasingly central to the MAGA-era right: elections and immigration.

For many Supreme Court experts, the biggest surprise in both cases is that the vote was so close. In Watson v. Republican National Committee (2026), Republicans challenged a Mississippi law that allowed ballots that are mailed before Election Day, but that arrive up to five days later, to be counted — despite the fact that states have counted late-arriving ballots since the Civil War. And, in Trump v. Barbara (2026), Barrett also rejected Trump’s argument that a constitutional provision, that makes most people born in the United States citizens, has been misread by the Supreme Court for nearly 130 years.

But these decisions sparked angry responses from many of Trump’s allies, who had built up the ballot case into a bulwark against nonexistent election fraud touted by the president and the birthright citizenship case into a last stand against often-conspiratorial fears of an immigration “invasion.”

On Tuesday morning, the Supreme Court closed out its 2025-26 term by handing down three opinions that, in order, (further) enhanced Republican lawmakers’ power to discriminate against trans kids, made it (even) easier for wealthy people to buy politicians, and preserved (barely) the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. The justices clocked out for the summer—on the merits docket, at least—shortly thereafter, because the most reliable predictor of the pace of the Court’s work remains the justices’ desire to enjoy a long Fourth of July weekend.

As I wrote in Balls & Strikes this week, birthright citizenship was probably the term’s highest-profile case, in part because President Donald Trump cared so much about the result, and also because the relevance of an elderly social media addict’s gutter racism to the meaning of the Reconstruction Amendments was, to say the least, a novel legal question. The facts that the Court (1) left the case until the very last day and (2) did not give Trump everything he wanted lent themselves well to a time-honored, recency bias-inflected format for end-of-the-term recaps: Once again, the justices delivered some wins for Trump and some losses for Trump, thus wrapping another dramatic season of Supreme Court, that long-running reality show in which nine elite lawyers go behind closed doors to decide who gets rights and who does not.

I probably pay more attention than is reasonable or healthy to term recaps, because for the vast majority of Americans who do not follow the Court on a week-to-week basis, skimming a term recap is the most exposure they will get all year to the choices the justices make. And if you were just glancing at headlines this week, you could be forgiven for concluding that our principled, nonpartisan Court is as committed as ever to defending the rule of law, and that we all owe a debt of gratitude to Chief Justice John Roberts for his continued service.

I probably pay more attention than is reasonable or healthy to term recaps, because for the vast majority of Americans who do not follow the Court on a week-to-week basis, skimming a term recap is the most exposure they will get all year to the choices the justices make. And if you were just glancing at headlines this week, you could be forgiven for concluding that our principled, nonpartisan Court is as committed as ever to defending the rule of law, and that we all owe a debt of gratitude to Chief Justice John Roberts for his continued service.

Do not get me wrong: It is good that the Court managed to affirm the plain meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, as judges and politicians and scholars and everyone capable of reading at a fourth-grade level has understood it for more than a century. But two cases the Court decided last week—cases that earned less attention and yielded fewer breaking-news push alerts than birthright citizenship—paint a clearer picture of the Court’s disposition toward Trump halfway through his second term, and as the 2026 midterms approach.

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.