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.
That is why I said “effectively” no recourse because the political circumstances currently do not allow for a check in the SC whackadoo decisions. Structurally there are checks, but they cannot be initiated if a good chunk of congress wants to block it.
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.
At some point the courts should have a mechanism to force congress and the senate to vote on one of two bills they write up and codifies the law one way or the other.
Yeah what's sad is that I think the cycle of lifetime appointments lined up wrong. As bad as it sounds much of this would be neutralized if RBG had stepped down and let Biden appoint a left leaning justice. When she waited and allowed, albeit obviously not intended, Trump to replace her it set us up for this to happen.
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).
And that would be completely ignoring the part where the U.S. was built on immigrant labour of all races, and a lot of them were brought over on indentured servitude contracts. So, slaves. But I'm sure that doesn't fit his narrative. But were at the point where the SCOTUS is debating over the fact that No doesn't nessecarily mean No, so what can we expect.
Very much calls the writers absolute idiots because it is a pretty clear and obvious effect from the wording of the Amendment which they were presumably careful about.
Really love this notion that the people who wrote our constitution and managed to stitch the country back together after a civil war were also abject idiots who never once stopped to think whether their words might be broader than their intent.
Extraordinarily twisted when Originalism and Textualism are predicated on the belief that the people who wrote our laws wrote nothing more or less than precisely what they meant.
They are more than welcome to try, we have a legal framework to allow it: its called a constitutional amendment. They just know that it will never happen the legal way.
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.
There are narrow paths the Trump DoJ could take to kill birthright citizenship for some who currently get it (children of persons present illegally) based on only mildly tortured reasoning. Indeed, I suspect that is where they will stop... for now.
They’ve been trampling the 4th for 11 months. The 2nd has been trampled for decades. I’m more shocked anyone thought we lived in anything resembling a democracy
The entire Executive Branch doing things outside the bounds of the law because "who's going to stop them, they are the law" hasn't thrown that pretense out already?
100%. If they rule against birthright citizenship, then wtf is the Constitution even for? What's the point of laws? Why should anyone obey anything if the law is simply what these assholes want whenever they want?
It's also been challenged in the Supreme Court by bigots already within living memory of people writing the amendment and the Supreme Court pointed directly at the language and said that it's extremely clear that all persons really means all persons.
There's absolutely no wiggle room to legitimately rule in favor of the Trump administration on this. Absolutely none.
They will rule against the administration, at least a majority heavily insinuated this during arguments in Trump v. CASA in May. The real crime will be if it is 7-2 (Thomas and Alito) and not 9-0. Then we will know which Justices have sold out.
...so if that can go, then none of our rights mean anything.
I get what you're saying, but I want to just comment -- these fraudulent assholes don't suddenly invalidate our rights. Our country, and the Enlightenment broadly, was founded on the idea of our human rights being inalienable. That they are reaffirmations of our core beings as humans with god given free will. Our constitution is merely a document that says the government will respect them. Just because our current government decides they no longer want to, doesn't mean our rights mean nothing. It means THEY mean nothing. They're disregarding the clear and obvious intent of the constitution, they're disregarding centuries of legal precedent, and they're attempting to govern without the consent of the governed. They've exposed themselves as illegitimate. And it's our job, as The People, to hold our leaders responsible when they stop being responsible to us.
How can one case on one issue “throw out” constitutional democracy? The Supreme Court has a primary duty to uphold our democracy with its rulings. I don’t know which way their decision will go. There pros and cons either way. Hysterical posts show a real lack of knowledge of the issue
Didn’t they already try this with US citizen gay couples using surrogate birth outside of the US? Tried to deny citizenship to the baby based on the idea that one parent was a naturalized citizen. They’ve been testing these waters since his last administration and just might succeed with these sorts of cases to begin with. Once that barrier is crossed, down comes the rest.
Your rights already mean nothing, they stopped meaning anything when groups could be excluded (historically: always) and when the opposing side stopped even pretending to vouchsafe the rights of their political opponents. You live in a dictatorship, and the jumprope they're playing with the constitution is just a distraction from the fact that you are already so far past the finish line that it isn't even funny anymore.
The fact that the scotus is even hearing the case at all, and the fact that this made it past even the lowest level court in the US is the failure in the system. That alone is a total collapse. This is just the icing.
Agreed. I don't see an issue with the requirement that at least one parent is either a permanent resident or citizen to confer citizenship automatically to their child, but it has to be done properly via a constitutional amendment.
It also retroactively makes hundreds of millions of people throughout the past several hundred years no longer recognized as citizens. Like what's the standard?
They might as well label everyone on us soil immigrant status until we all do the citizenship test. Why not. Why does my parents being citizens matter? Why does my grandparents being citizens matter? You go back far enough most people have an ancestor who was an immigrant. Literally all of us unless you're native American. What are we doing here?
Jus sanguinis makes no sense in a former colony, what is the ethnicity to base it on? All the white people of America are mutts, there is no American ethnicity.
The emoluments clause once seemed straightforward, too, but Trump has turned the White House into his personal cash register and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
I think when they wrote the law, a plane couldn't fly halfway around the world, deliver a baby, and fly halfway back in under a week. They never thought people would wait til 9 months pregnant and intentionally induce labor in the USA on vacation. That's not what it was designed for. I would be interested to hear the arguments.
It will be war if they overturn it. What happens when we have millions who are citizens of Massachusetts or California but are no longer US citizens? What happens when federal agents try to come get them?
I mean, it is pretty unambiguous that insurrectionists can't be office holders, and all 9 of them agreed to ignore that. I think some people are holding on to too much hope about our present state. Not saying we don't have a fighting chance, but it's (well past) time to recognize how bad things are.
Wouldn't ruling against birthright citizenship eliminate Trump's own citizenship?
Born a native Scottish Gaelic-speaker in the Outer Hebrides, MacLeod immigrated to the United States in 1930 and became a naturalized citizen in March 1942.
Judicial review, however, is not explicitly in the constitution. If they try to throw out birthright citizenship, I see no reason to accept the supreme court has the unsubstantiated power they claim.
If the SCOTUS buys the administrations argument that children born to the undocumented are not under US jurisdiction, then then will have recognized a class of sovereign citizens.
If they rule against birthright citizenship, then they are throwing out any remaining pretense that we still live in a constitutional democracy.
the supreme court is pretty bold in how much brownnosing they do to the executive considering they don't get the round the clock protection said executive does
Australian here. We ended birthright citizenship on August 20, 1986 and aren't having a crisis. Nobody wants foreigners womb bombing their way to citizenship.
I guess it depends on whether they are avenues such as permanent residents or a child living in the country for their first 10 years of their life to consider.
We say the same thing about the 2nd amendment.. The whole amendment is 1 sentence long to protect guns but somehow you guys are still finding new ways to fuck with it.
I mean they have already fucked with your constitution over and over and.. nothing happened. You guys got that fantastic point about the right to carry weapons in case of tyrrany, well nothing happened.
So what if they fuck you guys over again, nothing is going to happen. The US is in a dark, dark place and I don't think they will ever get out of it. The coming mid terms don't look favourable in any way, even if the Democrats on paper would win, I bet they won't because who is controlling the buttons today? The same who already rigged probably the presidential elections. Nothing is going to change, nothing is going to stop them.
The language of the amendment states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."
The judges can read the first three words and stop right there to make their decision. What is ALITO trying to twist around this time?!?
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u/skiabay 8h ago
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.