Even the Washington Post agrees the U.S. Supreme Court overreached by trying to prevent voters and politicians from shaping the rules about who can get shares of Americans’ citizenship.
“The justices decided more than they had to,” as they rejected President Donald Trump’s Executive Order curbing birthright citizenship, said an op-ed by the very pro-migration editorial board at Jeff Bezos’ newspaper.
“The case could have been decided on narrower ground,” including by citing Congress’ 1952 citizenship law, the paper noted, adding:
Declining to reach the constitutional question would have allowed that [citizenship] debate to continue. Opponents of the decision could have pressed their case in Congress, which the 14th Amendment explicitly empowers to enforce its provisions. Legislators might have considered fixes for some of the policy problems Trump’s order was meant to address — including “birth tourism,” or traveling to a U.S. jurisdiction solely for the purpose of ensuring citizenship for one’s child.
The Post‘s acknowledgement that citizens should sometimes be allowed to govern their own country was also reflected in the court’s split decision, where four of five court judges accepted that Americans have some rights to curb the existing elite-backed practice of awarding citizenship to birth-tourists, temporary workers, or illegal migrants.
That court’s split was a surprise to the court’s lawyers, the New York Times admitted:
In the end, birthright citizenship as a constitutional right survived by one vote — the latest sign of how far the conservative legal movement has shifted on the issue.
“This should have been a 9-0 decision,” said Bethany Li, executive director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which filed an amicus brief against the president’s order.
…
“A year and a half ago, people said there was no support for this view, that it was ahistorical and atextual,” said Ilan Wurman, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who filed an amicus brief in support of Mr. Trump’s executive order. “So to get four votes for the Trump administration’s position here is quite a coup.”
In a second New York Times article, other law professors griped about the close result:
[Kate] Shaw: Trump lost by only the narrowest of margins; the vote was 5-4 on the constitutional question. What does it say that this effort… [which] you describe as the most unconstitutional thing Trump has done — came this close to succeeding?
[William] Baude: We should be thanking our lucky stars for [majority votes from] Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett.
[Stephen] Vladeck: It’s a striking indictment of the dissenters — especially Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Similarly, many pro-American lawyers, politicians, and activists are alarmed and demoralized by the court’s 5-4 decision to bind citizens with constitutional handcuffs formed from medieval legal extrapolations, Ivy League dreamcasting, and “grotesque” disregard for reality.
But politicians and activists say that citizens can gradually win this political fight against elites and their many subordinate and imported allies.
“The fact that this case was a 5-4 decision effectively means that the concept of birthright citizenship… is hanging by a thread,” Vice President JD Vance told Laura Ingraham, adding:
What I take from that is, yes, we’ve got to fix the immigration system even more, we have to be even more aware of who is coming into our country to make sure that they are not benefiting from this atrocious Supreme Court ruling. But, it also means that we have to keep fighting, because we actually have an opportunity to reverse this decision just as we’ve reversed so many bad decisions throughout the generations.
“The fight to restore American citizenship and retake our nation begins in earnest today,” said a Tuesday tweet by Theo Wold, who worked in President Donald Trump’s White House during the first term. Wold wrote:
There is a whitepill from the Supreme Court’s ruling on birthright citizenship. When I worked in the 45 White House, I drafted President Trump’s original birthright citizenship executive order. At the time I was laughed out of rooms by senior legal officials at the White House who told me it wouldn’t get a single vote at the Supreme Court. Today, there were four votes at SCOTUS for the right reading of the 14th amendment.
Citizens do win fights with the judges. On Tuesday, for example, public opinion helped the court’s swing-voting judges knock down a wave of pro-transgenderism rulings by lower judges amid a lavishly funded, elite-run pro-transgenderism political campaign by many advocacy groups and media outlets.
One strategy, say experts, is for the agencies and Congress to pass laws that address obvious political problems stemming from the court’s ruling.
The government should be “doubling down on enforcement, preventing the issuance of non-immigrant visas to pregnant women, add a pregnancy question to the B1/B2 [tourist] visa application,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He told Breitbart News:
Republicans, since they’re the only ones who are interested in this issue, need to make this a political issue by making the case in a sustained way to the public — not just waving their arms around and saying it’s ridiculous. They should operate a sober, substantive case that makes the Democrats defend birth tourism.
“Congress could, if it chose, address the issue of birthright citizenship for the children of non-permanent aliens,” wrote Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld in The Free Press:
Statutes could, for example, severely punish birth tourism. If the illegal alien parents are deported, it might even be constitutional to keep their minor children united with them, in the interests of family unification.
“But Congress has passed no such law,” he added.
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