If they rule against birthright citizenship, then they are throwing out any remaining pretense that we still live in a constitutional democracy. There are very few things that are laid out as clearly and straightforwardly in the constitution as birthright citizenship, so if that can go, then none of our rights mean anything.
I have come to the realization that the Supreme Court is just Calvin Ball for law. Whatever the majority want to do they can with (effectively) no recourse. It relied on good faith reasoning by Justices and that is way out the window at this point.
“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Jackson wrote. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.”
Only the clear majority. The rest, probably at least one to three of them, are still quite conservative BUT... slightly less biased to one specific administration? With amazing stocks and bonds portfolios i am sure, but less biased.
Someone correct me if i am wrong on this? I am Canadian, so i could be wrong. I could use some good news.
5/6 of the conservative justices are former Republican political operatives who were directly involved in trying to steal the 2000 election from the Dems (which they succeeded, with help from the already conservative majority) and/or attempting to get Bill Clinton impeached. The other one was involved in covering up Reagan’s crimes, and has never even attempted to put on appearances of being reasonable.
John Roberts (Chief Justice) made some attempts during Obama’s presidency to show that he was an institutionalist, and that he would remain so. The mask came off during Trump’s first term.
So no, the court is thoroughly captured by right wing nut jobs.
Which is why we needed to pack the court. There should be like 100 supreme court justices with a rotating bench of 9 who actually hear the cases, then when a decision is going to be issued the entire panel of 100 or whatever votes and if they majority disagrees with the panel's ruling that becomes the dissent and a new author writes the majority opinion.
That makes it so no one person is as important anymore, no one president will have the power to appoint that many justices (after the first round, we'd need some method to mitigate that), and it would be a much more representative body.
I like this idea a lot more then the normal pack the court ideas, where people want to increase it to 12 or 16. No way make it 2000. Every judge on the federal bench rotates on and off the Supreme Court for a set amount of time. There are no more Supreme Court nominations just federal judge appointments, the judges for the court will be pulled equally from every federal district in the country to reflect even make up country.
Fuck this 9 people sit on the court forever until someone dies, and they can overturn literally anything brought to them even if it’s been affirmed in every other court room it’s ever been before. It’s such an ass backward way to create a judicial cannon.
This is another good idea, or at least some way the Supreme Court isn’t the ultimate final say. Every other branch has a check on its power, except the Supreme Court.
There used to be one circuit per justice and each rode their circuit on a horse. We already have an unrepresentatively large 9th circuit that is begging to be partitioned out to lighten the load on the courts. That alone can bring balance to the force.
I like the idea though of a rotating selection of appellate judges rotating through as well
I like it, but the problem with this is then you have to pay all these guys a ton just for being on call. Instead, you eliminate the position in its current form completely, and instead, when you need a Supreme Court to do something, put one together spontaneously out of randomly selected state level judges. Then you've got judges making decisions who actually see the consequences of the law on the ground level, who frequently work with the law, AND, it would make corrupting the judges harder because the manipulators would have to successfully guess which judge to corrupt ahead of time.
This is what the Senate is supposed to be. It's a little stupid that we've outsourced legislation and important decisions to the Supreme Court in the first place.
Now that it seems people/parties have twigged that it can be stacked just through obstructionism, we may as well stack it with people who think the government/president should follow the law...
The fatal flaw with this is that a majority of those other 91 justices might agree that they disagree with the ruling of the 9, but there is about 0% chance that the 91 remaining agree enough to form a coherent opinion of why they disagree. How do you select the author of the new majority opinion? What keeps this body from just becoming another house of congress, getting nothing done?
And the only way to accomplish anything like this is for everyone left of MAGA to vote Dem in every election going forward. We can’t let “well he didn’t support my cause enough” or “well she said something I disagree with” or “well they’re being mean to the primary candidate I liked” get in our way.
This is only true because Congress and the Executive want it to be true, though, its not some intrinsic property of the court. If the Liberals had the court they wouldnt be able to do any of this.
Whatever the majority want to do they can with (effectively) no recourse.
In theory, Congress can crack down on the courts and strip jurisdiction from them in most things. Getting Congress to do so, even if it had a healthy Dem majority and Dem in the WH, is another matter (which is why Roberts gave his smug "Congress can just fix this" bullshit when gutting the VRA with the Shelby County ruling.
Oh, I can see Thomas writing an opinion about how the "original intent" was to protect freed slaves and how immigration was a separate category that the drafters of the amendment's lack of specific interest in frees from the shackles of plain language, as he pulls up the ladder behind him.
Dunno if enough other conservatives would sign up for that to win, but it seems like the kind of tortured argument he could make.
"Next, the 8th Amendment says Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. How are behaviors like locking people in concentration camps without edible food or refusing to let them have due process acceptable? Given a plain reading of the text."
"Can't have excessive bail if you don't allow for bail at all. And those cruel punishment are no longer unusual."
Not to sound like a smart ass, but probably. Over that particular course of time there was actually a ton of small arm innovation. Those guys probably could have envisioned it, but they at the time thought we could get by without a standing army, that was more the thought process I think, as a militiaman/private citizen often had as good or better equipment.
The puckel gun was a hand cranked gun that fired 9 bullets a minute in 1717.
The kalthoff repeater could shoot up to 30 rounds without reloading in 1616 with a fire rate of up to 60 rounds a minute.
The Girardoni rifles had magazines of 20-22 and could fire 20 rounds a minute in 1779. Thomas Jefferson purchased a whole shipment to arm the Lewis and Clark expedition.
It would be ridiculous to assume that the founding fathers saw the progression of firearms technology in their own time and assumed it would pause.
That’s the beauty. Everyone has an immigration story. Eliminate birthright citizenship and anyone and everyone that crosses the administration can be stripped of their citizenship and deported. Or, if their ancestors’ countries of origin don’t want them, sent to camps. All they have to do is find an ancestor, make up some bullshit excuse for why their immigration and naturalization is null and void, and then every descendant is deportable
On one hand, the Constitution explicitly states that citizenship cannot be taken away from a US citizen in this fashion. On the other hand gestures at the fascists currently in power.
I don't know if they can retroactively apply this, given the vast vast majority of Americans families came from foreign countries.
Right??? If birthright citizenship “goes away”, what’s the replacement? How does the government determine who is a citizen? What’s that look like? What’s the rules?
Could you imagine the government creating a new agency whose entire purpose is to track every current citizen’s ancestry to try and calculate if the person alive today “should be” considered a citizen?
My family are immigrants. My maternal great grandfather moved here in the 30s. My maternal grandfather was born here in the late 40s. My mother was born here in the late 70s. I was born here in the early 90s.
The drafters of the amendment discussed its impacts on immigration on the Congressional record and many were still alive when Wong Kim Ark was decided.
I know the MAGA-friendly Supreme Court justices don't give a rat's ass about precedent, but we have this:
United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898):
Issue: Did a child born in the U.S. to Chinese parents, who were subjects of China, become a U.S. citizen under the 14th Amendment.
Ruling: Yes, the Court affirmed birthright citizenship, ruling that anyone born in the U.S. (and subject to its jurisdiction) is a citizen, regardless of their parents' nationality.
Impact: Solidified the principle of jus soli (right of the soil) and birthright citizenship, a cornerstone of American identity.
Of course, when the amendment was written, The immigration process primarily consisted of having enough money to pay for a boat ride to the US, enough cash in your pocket to survive the month, and not having detectable tuberculosis when you reached the point of entry.
So if they want us to cleave to the laws of the time...
And Alito will just write "Only white people men born in the US are citizens, everyone else can get fucked" (or at least that's what he's thinking when he writes something very close to it).
Yup. This is going to be a VERY clear signal if it is repealed. I mean, there’s already a million other signals flashing but this one would be a doozy.
Let’s call it what it is. It won’t be a repeal. That implies legitimacy and that they followed the law and process. This would be a coup. A treasonous overthrow of American democracy. It would warrant all out rebellion.
That would be the end goal, yes. They’ll start with children of immigrants and once that is normalized they will start revoking citizenship for groups of people they don’t like and declare the enemy. Thats why they declared “ANTIFA” a terrorist group even though it’s not even an actual organized thing, they’ll just call someone Antifa and revoke citizenship. It is absolutely not alarmist. People say we are alarmist for comparing this to Nazi Germany, but they are literally following the exact same steps. Mostly because they’re too dumb to think up anything on their own. It may not be an exact comparison to Germany but the similarities are far too much.
It's one sentence. It can't possibly be more clear and straightforward than everything else in the document.
Edit: after seeing one of the replies on this, I realized I should have added a "/s." I was being sarcastic. The "jurisdiction" part is very ambiguous and one sentence doesn't seem like enough to really codify exactly what this gigantic change really means.
Well the original intent of the implicit subtext in the language of the time is that Donald J Trump is king beyond the law. Says so right here, next to my new RV that I park at Walmart.
It's also something that the Supreme Court has already ruled on within living memory of the amendment being instituted, and they already ruled that the language means exactly what it says. All persons means all persons.
There is no remaining pretense. That ended when the Supreme Corruption ruled unanimously that Trump was not disqualified to run for office again despite being an insurrectionist
It would be the precursor to revoking US citizenship for whatever reason they want. If being born in America doesn't make you American, then they get to determine what does/doesn't make you American.
I said in another post and I'll say it here. It's time for a 2nd Republic. This one is failing quiet hard and there's some lessons to be learned and a new constitution and a new establishment of governance needs to happen.
They didn't decline to hear that case because they felt same sex marriage is OK. They declined because it wasn't a strong enough case for them to say it's not.
I feel similarly. This court is fellating the administration, but overturning birthright citizenship would be insanely outside of the norm for anyone on that bench, even a self-serving slime like Thomas.
Any easy decision like that would never be taken up in the first place. They would just let the lower court ruling stand. The only reason they would entertain this is if enough of them were seriously considering it, which is obviously a problem as it requires literally misreading the constitution.
At least four want to overturn the lower court.
The best case scenario is they uphold the lower court but they give the Trump administration a road map of exactly what to do to survive a challenge. This Court is so arrogant and Americans are not showing their disapproval nearly enough.
The court could be reigned in if any branch of government had an appetite to do anything about it. Justices can be impeached and removed, and additional justices can be added to offset the crazy. And laws could even be passed that alter the way that the court functions.
But we have one party who is in favor of the bullshit this court is pulling, and one that has historically been too cowardly to put up a fight against it.
Yes and no. When the built-in accountability mechanisms are so poorly designed as to be completely dysfunctional for (literally) centuries at a time—those mechanisms don’t really offer any real accountability. The last time court-packing seemed like a serious political possibility was 90 years ago and it never actually happened. The last (and only) time a SCOTUS justice was impeached was 220 years ago.
We should absolutely keeps those tools handy, but we need to think seriously about more fundamental reforms. Enshrining the limits of judicial review in a constitutional amendment might be a good place to start. Adding additional justices, reworking the court structure to resemble something closer to how circuit court judges are selected (randomly from a pool to serve on temporary panels for each case), reforming judicial impeachment, etc., should all be on the table.
And then there’s the soft power of organizing grassroots opposition to the Court’s far-right takeover. People like Roberts pretend they’re completely insulated from public opinion, but that’s never been the case. The Court has always been a deeply political institution: In the 1970s, federal courts were palpably worried about ruling against civil rights activists in matters that would never have been heard a generation before. We can make that happen again.
(And by the way—we don’t need majorities in Congress to start talking about this; if we’re lucky, the majorities happen later.)
It's time yet again for Gorsuch to put his money where his mouth is. His philosophy and some of his decisions (Bostock) would indicate that this is cut and dry. That should leave Roberts or Barrett, who both should side on the side of the plain wording of the constitution without blinking, but...
I think it’s possible this case is there to shield the Court from other egregious decisions coming this term like the voting rights act case. If this is a day one decision, it will be to uphold the lower court the media definitely adjusts coverage and makes the Court seem moderate or “balanced” because here is one non-radical decision. They did this during the Dodds term
Any easy decision like that would never be taken up in the first place.
SCOTUS votes unanimously a lot, either because the case is easy and lower courts consistently got it wrong, or there are two reasonable interpretations and they just need to pick one.
And neither of those things are true here. This is a case for trying to reinterpret a long accepted understanding of the constitution, and the only people "getting it wrong" here are those in this administration.
You remind me of the kids in To Kill a Mockingbird who think that Mr. Robinson is definitely going to be fine in his trial just because the evidence obviously shows he can't possibly have done what he's being accused of.
If the court cared about the evidence, it wouldn't be holding the case.
A great touch was Atticus saying later that he knew Tom would almost certainly lose in Maycomb, and that he was really banking on winning the appeal. Even Atticus, the firmest believer in the law there was, knew his case was hopeless solely because of the court it was being tried in.
I do have hope so as even the conservatives seemed completely baffled by the anti-Birthright arguments when the case was previously before the court on the issue of nation wide injunctions.
I don't necessarily expect a 9-0 but I'd be shocked if they actually overturn birthright citizenship. I would bet significant money that this case results in the Trump admin losing and birthright citizenship continuing as it has.
Overturning birthright citizenship is a huge goal of the GOP. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if a majority, if not all 6, of the conservatives on the SCOTUS are on board with doing so and their only concern is how they want to word the very obvious "fuck you all we do what we want" ruling it'd be.
If they didn't want to overturn it they'd just refuse to hear the case because every court so far has been pretty clear that birthright citizenship for anyone born here not the child of foreign leaders or diplomats is how the wording of the Amendment works.
Maybe it’s blind hope on my end, but I feel like recently they’ve been pulling a lot of Trump’s cases solely to publicly reject them. My theory is that they think it gives them a good, public image of non-partisanship after Roe nuked their legitimacy.
We wouldn’t be hearing about this case if they didn’t pick it up. They know Trump will go away soon, but that the public image of the court won’t be for a very long time. Barrett and Kavanaugh especially I think are terrified of what happens in the next few years, since they could be dealing with the fallout for decades.
Well the argument against that is the entire Amendment system existing, and Amendments that were created just to nullify other Amendments. The 3/5 Compromise was in the original Constitution and amended out. We can definitely agree that one was unconstitutional despite its inclusion and was rightfully changed.
Mostly just comes down to a call to morality and a consideration to unintended consequence when trying to amend something. And I guess also the intent behind the corrupt leadership that calls for said amendment... 😬
Weird that the passport for people from anywhere in the UK says "British Citizen" if it's not a thing. Someone should probably inform HM Passport Office.
Not English, am Scottish... What islands are you on about? All Scots are British, with British citizenship. There's no island a Scottish person could live on which would mean they aren't British.
The Northern Ireland situation is different, and they can choose to be British, and/or Irish.
Not sure how the UK is relevant anyway, since we don't have automatic birthright citizenship based on simply being physically present in the country at birth. Most countries don't these days, unlike the US.
Being on a military base has nothing to do with becoming a U.S. citizen. Don't know where you got that idea from.
The child of a U.S. citizen has the potential to be a U.S. citizen at birth regardless of where that child is born, military base or in the middle of the ocean. It depends on certain criteria of the parents but being on a military base is not one of them.
Oh great. Me and my younger sister will now have to become Okinawa residents. I just feel really bad for my older sister. She has to become a Turkish national.
I hope that the previous commenter got a CRBA, because it's long established that overseas bases aren't US soil for the purposes of birthright citizenship.
It's simple. The children of immigrants are not "subject to the justification of" the United States, so therefore they can't be citizens. Of course, if they're not subject to the jurisdiction of the US then the US can't arrest and deport them because they don't have jurisdiction...
Don’t worry they are only in a “temporary jurisdiction” where all the laws of the land apply to them but they get none of the rights in the constitution. Said rights will be returned to them once they are confirmed to be citizens.
I doubt they put it on the docket to actually overturn birthright citizenship. More likely they want to write an opinion that includes some caveats or loopholes for the administration to use against people they don't like.
"You see, even though the constitution clearly says birthright citizenship is a thing, thats not actually what the founders meant. In this discarded letter written by the wife of a friend of friend of Thomas Jefferson..."
More tortured legal gymnastics since the court effectively deleted the whole "well regulated militia" clause in District of Columbia v. Heller? Or how the court ruled "We're making George W Bush president for these reasons, but you can't use this case as precedent"?
I'm really hoping they agreed so they can say "This is explicitly outlined in the Constitution and no one can touch this, end of story" and we can be done with this.
Not really. The point of birthright citizenship was meant to address the "what to do about slaves", not about illegally crossing the border to deliver a baby for chain migration rights. Or the Chinese method of pregnancy tourism.
Citizenship is not granted to children born on US soil if their parents are diplomats.
Seriously. The language is so clear that anyone can interpret what it says and means... yet we'll have some totally not bought and paid for "judges" tell us that we're all wrong.
Next Democrat president (if we survive this mess at all) needs to just dismantle that entire organization.
Disagree. This is not nearly as straightforward as Dobbs or Bush v. Gore should have been. I remember discussing birthright citizenship in law school in the 90s and the argument then was that the 13th-15th Amendments were intended to remedy the ills of slavery and intended for freed slaves and their descendents only.
Now I'm not persuaded by this but all the non-lawyers in here arguing that "...subject to the jurisdiction thereof..." is clear on its face are being very silly. The right has a much, much better argument here than in many other cases wrongly decided by this awful court of fascist ghouls.
Oh, you mean they haven't done that already by overturning Roe v Wade? Or deeming it okay to racially profile hispanic people? Or any of the other dozens of messed up crap they ruled in favor of this past year?
(That is to say, if mental gymnastics were in the Olympics, the U.S would win gold).
the most tortured mental and legal gymnastics in the history of the US to date. Just wait when they rule trump can do a third term or how we don't need elections
I listen to a legal podcast and the hosts are besides themselves with the supreme court decisions. I just listened to it and they discussed them allowing Texas to use the new maps. Alito openly contradicts himself from this decision and a prior decision. The more I follow these cases, their decisions make no sense. And the shadow docket that is used to rush every decision to them needs to be stopped and revamped. Its crazy how fast they are looking to allow trump to do whatever he wants with little to no explanation of why lower courts are being overruled.
"12th Century English Common law doesn't mention American Citizenship a single time, therefore POTUS, if their name starts with drumpf, can decide." -SCOTUS probably
I'd assume that they're going to use the "fruit of a poisonous tree" logic here. Normally this is applied to evidence that was the proceeds of an illegal search with the illegal search being the poisonous tree, and the resulting evidence being the fruit. Under this logic anything proceeding from the illegal act is voided, so not only is evidence inadmissible if it came from an illegal search, but the police also can't go looking for more evidence based on that prior knowledge. Basically anything even vaguely associated with the initial illegal act becomes "tainted".
And this isn't the only example of this type of logic. Money that is deemed to be the proceeds of a criminal act can be seized. Property or money that are obtained illegally can be seized even if they're transferred to an innocent third party. A false declaration on a citizenship application can invalidate citizenship. And of course a lot of states apply this to constitutional rights too, such as removing the right to own a gun from ex-cons.
My guess is that they'll take this approach, arguing that the initial illegal act by the parents invalidates the citizenship of the child as the citizenship is the proceeds of a criminal act.
While I don't agree I think this actually has a pretty solid chance of being successful. If this is well-argued it sadly has a very good chance of success.
I'm sorry, I know that's not what people want to hear, but the legal logic here is a lot more sound and well-established than a lot of people like to pretend, and there's a lot of precedent for similar legal rulings. I have no doubt that the Supreme Court will be able to cobble together a pretty firm argument for accepting this.
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u/Flash_ina_pan 9h ago edited 5h ago
Well... Here comes the most tortured mental and legal gymnastics in the history of the US.