{"id":322,"date":"2026-06-30T23:07:29","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T23:07:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=322"},"modified":"2026-06-30T23:07:29","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T23:07:29","slug":"brett-kavanaugh-gave-trumps-attack-on-birthright-citizenship-a-road-map","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=322","title":{"rendered":"Brett Kavanaugh Gave Trump\u2019s Attack on Birthright Citizenship a Road Map"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Some media outlets reported on Tuesday that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of birthright citizenship by a 6\u20133 vote. But that\u2019s not quite right: The court held that the 14th<\/sup> Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants only by a 5\u20134 margin. Justice Brett Kavanaugh in fact dissented from that holding, alongside Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch. But unlike that trio, Kavanaugh found that Donald Trump\u2019s executive order violated a federal statute <\/em>that, in his view, grants citizenship to immigrants\u2019 offspring. At the same time, the justice all but invited Congress to \u201camend\u201d that statute \u201cor otherwise enact new legislation\u201d that strips automatic citizenship from the children of \u201cthose unlawfully or temporarily in the country.\u201d Kavanaugh\u2019s position means that the court actually affirmed\u00a0the traditional understanding of the 14th<\/sup> Amendment by the barest 5\u20134 margin. If Trump replaces any member of the majority, Tuesday\u2019s core constitutional holding will be extraordinarily vulnerable to reversal.<\/p>\n

Read more Brett Kavanaugh\u2019s Personal View of Sports Is Now the Law of the Land<\/a><\/p>\n

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On a pop-up bonus episode of Amicus for Slate Plus members, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed Kavanaugh\u2019s split decision and its ominous implications for future attempts to rewrite the meaning of the 14th<\/sup> Amendment. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.<\/p>\n

Dahlia Lithwick: Kavanaugh always wants to get in that Solomonic pose, and today he split the baby again, leaving the court 5\u20134 on the constitutional issue but 6\u20133 on the statutory question. He certainly made it plain that if Congress wants to go ahead and revoke birthright citizenship, that\u2019d be cool with him.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Mark Joseph Stern: <\/strong>It\u2019s odd, because the federal statute in question literally mirrors the language of the 14th<\/sup> Amendment. But Kavanaugh said that when Congress enacted it in the middle of the 20th<\/sup> century, everyone thought birthright citizenship protected all children of immigrants. He then said that this was a misunderstanding of the 14th<\/sup> Amendment, and that in reality, that amendment does not necessarily apply to the children of immigrants. So Congress can<\/em> change the statute\u2014but until it does, Trump\u2019s order \u201ccontravenes\u201d it.<\/p>\n

I want to stay for one beat on the implications of having a 5\u20134 split, here, because I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s going to get nearly enough air time in the next couple of days of the news cycles.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Because Kavanaugh\u2019s vote confuses people, right? People will say it was 6\u20133. But on the major constitutional question, which matters the most, it wasn\u2019t 6\u20133.<\/p>\n

It should have been a 9\u20130 case: Here\u2019s what the Constitution says, here\u2019s what the Supreme Court said about this in 1898, here\u2019s what the statute says. There is no debate here. So how did Kavanaugh create one?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kavanaugh dwelt on the fact that the Framers of the 14th<\/sup> Amendment recognized the children of diplomats as an exception to birthright citizenship in 1868. That was because they weren\u2019t subject to full U.S. jurisdiction, since they inherited their parents\u2019 diplomatic immunity. Kavanaugh claimed those children are somehow \u201crelevantly similar\u201d to the children of undocumented and temporary immigrants today. So in his view, Congress has the latitude to expand the class of people who don\u2019t receive birthright citizenship from this tiny, quirky category of kids born to diplomats residing in the United States to this massive class of children born to immigrants who have visas or lack papers.<\/p>\n

Read more The Supreme Court\u2019s New 6\u20133 Elections Case Was Not Nearly As Bad As Expected<\/a><\/p>\n

That is not what I expected from Kavanaugh. I thought he might leave the 14th<\/sup> Amendment question open. Instead, he went whole hog and cast his lot with Trump. He basically told Mike Johnson and Republicans in Congress that, in his view, they can strip away birthright citizenship as they please. The consequences, of course, would be catastrophic: It would create an underclass of noncitizens who, by accident of birth, are denied basic rights and civil liberties, who are detainable and deportable to countries they\u2019ve never set foot in.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of bad history in Kavanaugh\u2019s dissent and the other three. We used to call that <\/strong>fauxriginalism<\/strong>. But this is so much more pernicious. It goes beyond just bad history.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The consequences of the dissenters\u2019 position would be so perverse, and they don\u2019t recognize it at all. They are all on board with the MAGA cruelty. Kavanaugh says: If that\u2019s what Congress wants, it can do it.<\/em> The other three dissenters believe Trump can do it now. So I\u2019ll give Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett their due for getting it right. But until recently, their position was the view of all three branches of government and of all serious legal scholars and historians. The fact that four dissenting justices embrace an idea that was strictly relegated to fringe nativists until the Trump era nearly gives me a heart attack.<\/p>\n

Well, the conservative legal movement learned a really important piece of information today, which is that a completely crackpot theory that was off the wall a year and a half ago can get on the wall and can even garner four votes. Many will take today not as a win for birthright citizenship but as a challenge to do it \u201cright\u201d the next time around; you mentioned Kavanaugh essentially saying: Wink wink, Mike Johnson, do it right next time, we just need a statutory tweak<\/em>. What\u2019s the actual lesson here? There are four votes for anything Donald Trump wants?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The lesson is that the conservative legal movement can run this playbook on almost anything and come within striking distance of a win. They did it with mail ballots on Monday. They did it with birthright citizenship this time. And I\u2019ll say it again: You would be hard-pressed to find a clearer constitutional guarantee than this. There are many provisions of the Constitution that are majestic generalities; this one is as straightforward as it gets. But some Federalist Society scholars cooked up this garbage about how there\u2019s a secret escape hatch in the 14th<\/sup> Amendment that lets Trump do whatever he wants, and four justices bought into it. So if the right could run the playbook on this, they can run it on anything.<\/p>\n

I do want to take a step back and think about the infrastructure that they\u2019ve built up, because it is impressive. The right spent decades and billions of dollars creating this system in which pseudo-scholars write these nonsense law review articles, which then get cited by a Trump judge on the lower court, then picked up by Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, and suddenly it\u2019s got four, five, maybe six votes. This machinery creates the legal scaffolding to support Trump\u2019s wackiest, most racist ideas. The sky\u2019s the limit for what constitutional guarantees and precedents are vulnerable at this Supreme Court. And the people who run the machine know it. They came one vote away this time; they can go tell their funders that next time they\u2019ll nab that fifth vote. And frankly, they might be right. Trump v. Slaughter <\/em>shows that Roberts and Barrett are very much susceptible to this fake history and fake scholarship. The machine may not have prevailed today, but it could next time.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more Brett Kavanaugh Took Direct Aim at One of Ruth Bader Ginsburg\u2019s Biggest Legacies<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some media outlets reported on Tuesday that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of birthright citizenship by a 6\u20133 vote. 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