Josh Marshall, writing at TPM (gift link):
As you’ve seen, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of
birthright citizenship by a 6 — or perhaps 5½ — vote margin.
See Kate Riga’s report on the majority decision and Josh
Kovensky’s piece on the dissenters’ goal of doing away
with birthright citizenship. I repeat my point from
yesterday which is that the occasional non-corrupt
decision doesn’t make the Court any less corrupt or in need of
reform. In this case, in a sane world, the dissents from Neil
Gorsuch, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas would on their own be
sufficient basis for impeachment and removal from office. One
might as well believe or pretend to believe that the federal
senate is unconstitutional despite its being unambiguously
written into the structure of the document itself. The level of
abuse of power that is the basis of these dissents can only be
seen as criminal in nature and grows from the culture of
corruption and impunity that now reigns on the Court.
The 14th Amendment starts:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject
to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and
of the State wherein they reside.
The idea that the plain meaning of the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment was even debatable would have been laughable just 15 years ago. And, hopefully, soon, will be laughable again. It’s like arguing that the clear language of the 19th Amendment doesn’t guarantee women the right to vote. It’s a farce that this case even went to the Supreme Court, let alone that these three mooks dissented. (Alito and Thomas are lost causes; they’d vote for a Fourth Reich. Gorsuch I’m a little surprised by.) Needless to say, it’s rather unnerving that the majority required two — or one-and-a-half, depending on how you view Kavanaugh’s odd partial concurrence — votes from justices Trump put on the Court.
Marshall wrote a great explainer about this back in April (also a gift link):
Birthright citizenship is the unambiguous and certain law of the
land. It is also good policy. What is less appreciated is that it
undergirds the entire citizenship system in the United States, a
country that keeps very, very little record of who is and isn’t a
citizen in the first place. The only people who really have any
clear record of their citizenship are naturalized citizens. You or
I who were born in the U.S. might appear to have those. We have a
passport or maybe some other document that you can only have as a
citizen. But that is almost always because we said we were a
citizen or we provided some document that only had any
significance on the basis of birthright citizenship. Usually, of
course, that’s a birth certificate. That’s where the factual
conversation ends. It is the lynchpin that makes the entire U.S.
citizenship system work in the absence of really any record
keeping. […]Quite apart from the constitutional and civic merits, the whole
fabric of U.S. citizenship falls apart without the anchor of
birthright citizenship.
The only proof that I’m a U.S. citizen is that I was born here. My birth certificate names my parents but doesn’t say anything about their citizenship. Likewise with their birth certificates. That’s how citizenship in this most remarkable of nations works.
