Lawfare

Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito tore into the court’s majority for imposing a “medieval” rule on “birthright citizenship” that negates the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, days before the 250th anniversary of America’s founding document.

Both justices issued dissenting opinions in Trump v Barbara (2026), in which the court’s 6-3 majority upheld the notion of “birthright citizenship,” that any baby born on U.S. soil—regardless of his parents’ immigration status—is a citizen.

Justice Thomas said the court’s majority in Trump v. Barbera (2026) presented a legal argument that was “not historically accurate.”

“American citizenship, the court says, was based on a medieval English ‘feudal’ principle, according to which each person ‘owed personal service to the lord of the soil’ as his ‘master’—a perpetual servitude that was ‘born with the child and only ended in the grave,’” he summarized. According to the court’s majority, Americans adopted the feudal principle and Congress codified it in the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment.

Alito, for his part, cautioned that “before saddling the nation with a medieval rule, we had better be certain the Constitution requires it.”

He warned that the court’s decision confers citizenship on “birth tourists,” the children of women who travel to the United States just to give birth.

Alito also noted

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has once again proven herself to be an utter embarrassment to the judicial branch and all those who came before her on the court.

Tuesday saw the Supreme Court rule in a 6-3 decision that President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship conflicts with the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

According to NBC News, Trump’s order, dated Jan. 20, 2025 — his first day in office after being sworn in for his second term — interprets the amendment to mean birthright citizenship extends to children of at least one parent who is a citizen or permanent resident, barring temporary visitors’ or illegal aliens’ children from obtaining citizenship.

Jackson was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed that the order violated federal law, but not the Constitution. The amendment’s history dates back to Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War.

The intent was to grant citizenship to former slaves, but the majority now say it means anyone who comes into the country by any means whatsoever can give birth to a child who will automatically be, by default, a U.S. citizen.

In her concurring opinion, Brown Jackson decided to invoke the history of the postwar period, but did so in an incredibly cringeworthy manner unbecoming of the highest court in the land.

She wrote, “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.’”

If you’re completely confused about what it means when someone “understood the assignment,” you’re not alone. According to Yahoo! Life, “The slang term is a popular way to praise someone who is going above and beyond to do a good job. According to Urban Dictionary, ‘understood the assignment’ means, ‘a phrase used when someone is giving it 110% …Whether it’s what they’re doing, what they’re wearing, someone who is really on top of their s***.’”

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Legal systems talk about legal doctrine, and the Supreme Court’s opinions in the birthplace citizenship case decided this week kicked off with a discussion of 17th-century English precedent. The discussion between justices is anchored in centuries of history and theory, but it’s mostly not anchored in a more immediate question: When a pregnant “birth tourist” in another country pulls up the website for an American obstetrics clinic that specializes in delivering babies for foreign visitors, what does she think she’s trying to get? What is U.S. citizenship to parents who use a border crossing to obtain it for their children?

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, appointed by President Donald Trump in 2020, has built a reputation for careful jurisprudence since joining the Supreme Court. Yet in recent decisions, including a 5-4 ruling on Mississippi’s mail-in ballot rules, she has joined outcomes that challenge core conservative priorities on election integrity and border security.

A lot of people on the right are understandably upset about the Supreme Court’s decision this week upholding birthplace citizenship under the 14^th Amendment. It’s easy to see why. All one has to do is read the scathing dissents by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, which expose the flawed reasoning and intellectual dishonesty of the 5-4 majority — a majority that was clearly searching for a specific policy outcome and justifying it under the color of the Constitution.

But let me offer a cautious caveat to the black-pilling. The court’s decision wouldn’t be the catastrophe that it is if we hadn’t just lived through a Democrat administration that demonstrated what a dangerous weapon mass illegal immigration can be in the hands of left-wing ideologues who want to remake America.

There is a plausible world in which birthp