{"id":481,"date":"2026-07-24T11:36:30","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T11:36:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=481"},"modified":"2026-07-24T11:36:30","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T11:36:30","slug":"the-supreme-courts-biggest-case-of-the-term-shows-popular-constitutionalism-in-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=481","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court\u2019s Biggest Case of the Term Shows Popular Constitutionalism in Action"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

This is part of Amicus and Slate\u2019s \u201c<\/em>By the People<\/em>\u201d series, exploring how the American people can reclaim the Constitution\u2014and the law\u2014from this monarchic Supreme Court.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Trump Got Elected, and Reelected, Because of Men. Now They\u2019re Turning Their Backs on Him.<\/a><\/p>\n

Every summer, the nation waits to hear the Supreme Court announce, case by case, what the law is. This end-of-term ritual presents the court as settling the Constitution\u2019s meaning. Yes, the court settles disputes between parties. At the same time, Americans who oppose the court\u2019s decisions can<\/em> challenge the principles on which the decisions rest, and they have done so for a very long time, in some instances ultimately succeeding in changing the law.<\/p>\n

The birthright citizenship case the Supreme Court just decided demonstrates how deep-rooted this practice is, particularly in the conservative<\/em> legal movement. The court closed its term in Trump v. Barbara<\/em> announcing that birthright citizenship continues to extend to children of undocumented persons if those children were born on United States soil. Conservative critics immediately greeted the 5\u20134 decision by asking longingly, \u201cIs Trump v.<\/em>
Barbara<\/em> the New Roe<\/em>?,\u201d denouncing Justice Amy Coney Barrett for joining the majority,and urging Americans to overturn the decision: \u201cThe formidable resources of the conservative legal movement\u2014from its theorists to its jurists\u2014must be trained on sending Trump v. Barbara <\/em>to the ash heap of judicial excess.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

Conservative legal scholars now seem to understand this truth better than progressives: The Supreme Court does not<\/em> have the final word, if there is sufficient popular momentum against a decision.<\/p>\n

The conservative legal movement honed its skills attacking decisions of the Warren and Burger courts. It developed originalist arguments against Brown<\/em> and Roe<\/em>, and used these arguments and judicial appointments to overturn the abortion right\u2014and to build the originalist case for gun rights and for fetal personhood under the Constitution.<\/p>\n

This strategy of mobilizing against court decisions is not owned by the right. Constitutional law was reshaped by the campaign to outlaw segregation, by the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, and by the campaign for constitutionally protected . Nor are campaigns against the court new. Constitutional law has also been shaped by movements and against Comstockery\u2014obscenity laws restricting sexual and reproductive freedom. <\/p>\n

In fact, as Trump v. Barbara<\/em> shows, democratic constitutionalism of this kind is as old as the American constitutional order. Birthright citizenship was the focus of early interpretive rivalries between American citizens and the Supreme Court rooted in the debate over abolishing slavery\u2014a constitutional dispute rooted in the founding itself.<\/p>\n

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The majority\u2019s decision in Barbara<\/em> recounts how before the 14th<\/sup> Amendment\u2019s ratification, Americans followed the long-standing common-law rule making persons born on American soil citizens by birth. In the 1850s, in the midst of disputes whether Black people were equal citizens, the Supreme Court decided in the infamous Dred Scott <\/em>case that citizenship did not extend to the descendants of enslaved people\u2014that freedmen born in the country were \u201cnot included, and were not intended to be included, under the word \u2018citizens\u2019 in the Constitution.\u201d As Chief Justice John Roberts summed up that cataclysmic ruling, \u201cfor them, blood, not soil, was made the rule.\u201d This decision inflamed conflicts that soon led to the Civil War. At the war\u2019s end, Americans ratified the 14th<\/sup> Amendment, whose first sentence overturned Dred Scott<\/em> and reinstated birthright citizenship, providing, \u201cAll 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Oh, Fun, Trump Is Just Out Here Freestyling About Nuclear Weapons and the Middle East<\/a><\/p>\n

In recounting this history, Roberts recognized that the American people had struggled with each other and with the court over the Constitution\u2019s meaning\u2014and, for the first time ever, recognized Frederick Douglass\u2014an escaped slave and prominent spokesperson for the abolitionist cause\u2014as an author of the 14th<\/sup> Amendment: \u201cThe Court had overruled the common law, but the people\u2014eventually\u2014would overrule the Court. It took more than a decade\u2014and the addition of names such as Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chancellorsville to our national canon\u2014but Douglass\u2019s vision of \u2018our common humanity\u2019 would be fulfilled.\u201d This recognizes Douglass as one of the earliest and most prominent popular constitutionalists.<\/p>\n

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a member of the Barbara <\/em>majority, wrote separately to emphasize the significance of the court recognizing Black participation in the Reconstruction of citizenship, explaining \u201cthe importance of ensuring that Black experiences and perspectives \u2018are not (here again) excluded from\u2019 our analysis of the relevant history.\u201d Douglass may not have held a role as a judge, legislator, or even enfranchised citizen, yet he nonetheless played a pivotal role in shaping the nation\u2019s understanding of equal citizenship in the Civil War era. Typically, \u201cthe Court\u2019s cases neither name nor quote the disfranchised, .\u201d When the court recognizes Douglass as an author of the Reconstruction Amendments in Barbara<\/em>, the court is \u201cdemocratizing constitutional memory.\u201d<\/p>\n

But how can Americans who disagree with the court move new ideas about the Constitution from the margins to the center? One pathway is to make claims on a shared past. That, of course, is the path that conservatives took when they attacked Brown<\/em> and Roe<\/em> as contrary to the original understanding. Black abolitionists made a similar move when they argued that slavery was contrary to the Declaration of Independence, as increasing numbers did in the decade before the Civil War, a story I tell in forthcoming work on constitutional memory and the declaration.<\/p>\n

Douglass himself had an acute sense of the politics of memory. In 1852, speaking as a Black man to a white audience, Douglass famously asked \u201cWhat to the slave is the Fourth of July?\u201d Increasingly audible Black abolitionist objections may well have also prompted rebuke from the Supreme Court in Dred Scott<\/em>, when Chief Justice Roger Taney declared it a matter of \u201chistorical fact\u201d that \u201cat the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted,\u201d Black people were not considered citizens of the United States. The Dred Scott<\/em> decision in turn provoked abolitionist protest\u2014and sharpened partisan conflict.<\/p>\n

Debating in 1858 to represent Illinois in the Senate, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas continuously returned to the question of whether the declaration\u2019s protections were exclusively meant for white people. Lincoln rejected Douglas\u2019 claim that Americans were a race defined by blood; instead he argued it was memory of the war for independence and the principles of the declaration that bound Americans like an \u201celectric cord.\u201d That debate over the declaration helped engender the equal citizenship amendments added to the 1789 Constitution at the Civil War\u2019s end\u2014specifically, as the Supreme Court recounts, in the 14th<\/sup> Amendment\u2019s first sentence repudiating Dred Scott<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Civil War conflict continues as a war of memory. Last year, Vice President J.D. Vance signaled his attraction to blood-and-soil citizenship in a speech attacking fidelity to the declarationas ground of citizenship; having ancestors who fought in the Civil War (blood), Vance argued, was more worthy. This fight over the meaning of the declaration and of the 14th<\/sup> Amendment will continue. Those who would have the court\u2019s decision in Barbara<\/em> endure must be prepared to defend it with an understanding of the Constitution forged outside the courts that might make Frederick Douglass and other parents of our second founding proud.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more North Carolina Republicans Have a New Plan to Disenfranchise Voters. It Could Determine Control of Congress.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The birthright citizenship case the Supreme Court just decided demonstrates how deep-rooted this practice is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":480,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[210,74,167,23,11,15,16,17],"class_list":["post-481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jurisprudence","tag-by-the-people","tag-constitution","tag-history","tag-john-roberts","tag-jurisprudence","tag-supreme-court","tag-voting","tag-voting-rights"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Supreme Court\u2019s Biggest Case of the Term Shows Popular Constitutionalism in Action - Home Move Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=481\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Supreme Court\u2019s Biggest Case of the Term Shows Popular Constitutionalism in Action - 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