In her concurring opinion in Trump v. Barbara, where the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruled depriving birthright American citizenship from the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens violates the 14th Amendment, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson went after Justice Clarence Thomas who wrote the principal dissent.
On Tuesday, SCOTUS, in a 6-3 decision, ruled against President Donald Trump’s executive order, which banned the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens and temporary visa holders — often referred to as anchor babies — from receiving birthright citizenship.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed a concurring opinion, disagreeing with the majority’s opinion that the executive order violates the 14th Amendment, but writing that the order does violate federal statute.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the principal dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch. Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissenting opinion, as did Gorsuch.
Jackson, in a concurring opinion joined partly by Sotomayor, specifically went after Thomas’s dissenting opinion, accusing him for wanting to return to the “core tenet” of Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 SCOTUS ruling that claimed enslaved Africans were not citizens of the U.S. and were therefore not a protected class by the government.
“Of course, the ultimate irony is that for all the talk about the detestable Dred Scott decision, the Government and the principal dissent propose a return to its core tenet,” Jackson writes of Thomas’s dissenting opinion. “Their bottom line is that, for certain people, being born on American soil will not suffice to confer citizenship. It is that odious conclusion that the Citizenship Clause plainly rejects, as the Court explains.”
“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,” Jackson writes:
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. [Emphasis added]
Also true is the fact that this Court “has time and again denied Americans that promise.” But consensus about the Fourteenth Amendment’s central motivation does not justify JUSTICE THOMAS’s myopic treatment of it. The Amendment caused a paradigm shift in the trajectory of our Nation; the teacher who scolds a student for bullying a classmate hopes the student learns the broader lesson of treating everyone with kindness, not just that one kid. [Emphasis added]
In the aftermath of the Civil War, those who championed the Fourteenth Amendment—both within and beyond Congress—understood the assignment. Their work product used “language that transcended race and region,” and thereby “changed and broadened the meaning of freedom for all Americans.” Instead of the limited salve the principal dissent makes it out to be, the Citizenship Clause reflects this universalist approach. [Emphasis added]
Jackson also grouped Thomas in with what she calls “a handful of revisionist commentators” who “vigorously promote an interpretation of the Citizenship Clause that diverges sharply not only from what the text says, but also from the historical record as interpreted by the keepers of ‘the call of remembrance’ (trained historians).”
Thomas, Jackson writes, has “‘repurposed the Fourteenth Amendment’” in his dissenting opinion by “ignoring that our Constitution stands firmly against caste and subjugation — on all axes and in all manners — they deny the clear, universalist vision shared and proclaimed by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Framers: to ‘rebuild a shattered empire . . . to plant deep and solid the corner-stone of eternal justice, and to erect thereon a superstructure of perfect equality of every human being before the law.’”
The case is Trump v. Barbara, No. 25–365 in the Supreme Court of the United States.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected].
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