Thank goodness President Donald Trump, with two new executive orders, has re-elevated birthright citizenship to the top of the news cycle. Because it was the subject of one of two overly overlooked late-June Supreme Court outrages that should shake and rattle Americans.
Cynical financialists and opportunistic Democrats love to prattle about the “TACO Trade:” supposedly, “Trump Always Chickens Out” on market-alarming moves.
Well, maybe. But it’s now clearer than ever, after the Supremes’ bumble-and-stumble collapse at its term’s finish line, that Chief Justice John Roberts doesn’t only “Always Chicken Out” on tough calls – he all too often sells out the American people.
On Obamacare, which Roberts saved from a Commerce Clause violation by magically transforming its individual mandate penalty into a tax.
On DACA – the Obamanation illegally protecting illegal alien children of illegal aliens. A Roberts opinion held that Trump’s executive order violated the Administrative Procedures Act in reversing the Obama executive order establishing DACA that lower courts had already found to violate the Administrative Procedures Act. (Got that?)
On Grand Theft Election 2020 challenges: the Court punted repeatedly despite clear, outcome-determinative violations of the constitutional requirement that state legislators establish how presidential electors are selected.
Bringing us directly to the end of June, when on one controversial practice driving that purloined vote – allowing late-arriving ballots – the Court (with the Chief in the majority) mysteriously discovered that “Election Day” means “Election Whenever.”
And to “birthright citizenship,” where in Trump v. Barbara the Roberts-Always-Sells-Out Court interpreted the 14th Amendment phrase “subject to the jurisdiction of” the United States to mean “thumbing one’s nose at” the United States.
This despite the obvious common-sense solution emphasized by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in their dissents: confirming children’s citizenship only when at least one parent has established a domicile – legal permanent residency.
Children of green-card holders? Well, if you must. Children of birth tourists or illegals traversing the border to deliver an instant citizen at taxpayer expense? A hard no.
A position obvious not only to any first-year law student but, as Thomas fastidiously demonstrated, the amendment’s drafters and champions, contemporaneous and subsequent Attorneys General, state legislatures, eminent scholars and – naturally – the Supreme Court on two prior occasions.
Not to mention: none other than the late, arch-liberal Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid(!), who once upon a time introduced legislation to memorialize this very position.
In his Barbara dissent, Alito laid bare the majority’s true motivation: “We should not adopt an erroneous interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment simply out of fear of the consequences of ‘rocking the boat’ or as a reaction to current immigration policy.”
Meaning: Chicken Roberts cobbles a majority canoodling with the Court’s radical leftists whenever he is scared witless of being ousted from the popular girls’ table of elite opinionmakers.
Like on the first black president’s crowning legislative accomplishment. The late Justice Anton Scalia lamented that Roberts’ “interpretive jiggery-pokery” in two Obamacare cases “will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.”
Quipped the legendary jurist: “We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.”
Or the plight of “Dreamers” whose stories are cherry-picked to make them seem more sympathetic than and superior to native-born Americans.
Or birthright citizenship, any rationale for which, as illustrated by Thomas, has always rested more on snooty Swamp consensus than legal analysis.
Or concerns – always claimed to be “without evidence” despite mountains of evidence – about election integrity.
Meanwhile, each Roberts “Chicken-Out” decision has yielded catastrophic consequences. Such as skyrocketing Obamacare premiums – up an eye-watering average of 58% this year – even as outcomes plummet and insurers and hospital conglomerates rake in billions.
The fruits of DACA: chain-migration multiplication, with at least 240,000 U.S. citizen children born to 450,000 residents busy with more than dreaming.
But rarely have diktats been proven as foolhardy as fast as the birthright blunder and Election Day error. Mere hours after the former, reports surfaced of Texas hospitals advertising birth tourism packages – meaning more of the anchor babies already accounting for a stunning 10% of all U.S. births.
The Election Day absurdity was actually exposed before the decision was published. Justice Samuel Alito’s horror scenario played out in real time in June’s Los Angeles mayoral mayhem: a substantial Election Day deficit improbably overcome at the last hour by a surge of late-arriving ballots favoring the trailing candidate.
The source of all this carnage – and the thread, beyond cowardice, connecting Roberts’ Chicken-Out/Sellout jurisprudence? A spiraling surrender of American voters’ sovereignty.
The Obamacare decisions have yielded an essential federal takeover of healthcare: according to the Paragon Health Institute, some half of health care spending now comes directly from the government. Obamacare’s intentional(!) provider consolidation cratered consumer choice.
Voters’ sovereignty over borders and polity was relinquished in Barbara, which transfers power over fiscal integrity, public safety, affordability and educational quality to anyone waddling over the Rio Grande or jetting into a remote U.S. territory to drop a child.
Worst of all, the Roberts Court’s “see-no-evil” approach to brazen extraconstitutional conduct in 2020 and latest engraved invitation to further chicanery has hollowed out the very core of American small-r republicanism: governments “deriv(e) their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Not from cowardly justices engaging in “interpretive jiggery-pokery” to enrich “Big Health” at consumers’ expense. Not from nervous jurists imposing administrative-law double standards, or discovering the precious right to citizenship in a wack application of the duty British subjects owed to medieval kings, to protect a favored class siphoning resources from citizens’ governments.
And certainly not from election officials provided carte blanche to collect, count and likely, concoct ballots until voter-rejected candidates claw over the top.
“Here, sir, the people govern,” the nouveau historical celebrity Alexander Hamilton once insisted. With the expiration of that phrase’s operability in the waning days of June – thanks to Chicken Roberts and his cowardly cohort – the American people face the frightening prospect that their republic has also reached its expiration date.
Bob Maistros, a regular contributor to Issues & Insights, is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist, and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.
Views expressed by guest contributors to Issues & Insights are their own and don’t necessarily reflect the views of the I&I Editorial Board.
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