Supreme Court Blocking Trump Birthright Citizen Attack a ‘Real Relief,’ But Also ‘Bare Minimum’
“Birthright citizenship is protected today. But the workers whose children depend on it still face deportation, worksite raids, and an administration that has made clear it will use every tool available to make immigrant workers afraid, isolated, and stripped of their rights,” said one campaigner.
Demonstrators rally in support of birthright citizenship outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC on April 1, 2026.
(Photo by Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images)
Brett Wilkins
Jun 30, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
The US Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the United States to undocumented parents, preserving 150 years of birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment and dealing a major blow to the administration’s xenophobic agenda.
“Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause,” the high court held in Trump v. Barbara.
The 6-3 decision roundly rejected an executive order issued by Trump on the first day of his second term that sought to deny US citizenship for babies born in the United States to parents who are either unlawfully in the United States or legally living in the country on temporary visas.
Every lower court rejected the order. Just three days after its issuance, US District Judge John Coughenour, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, blasted it as “blatantly unconstitutional.”
A majority of the right-wing Supreme Court agreed.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. “We keep that promise today.”
Roberts was joined in the majority by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing a separate concurring opinion agreeing that Trump’s executive order was unlawful but basing his reasoning on federal immigration law rather than the 14th Amendment.
“As revealed by the court’s opinion with its detailed account of history and precedent, and by the weighty and thoughtful dissents, the constitutional issue is far more complicated than the statutory issue,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
“This is one of the most important decisions in the history of the court, and in my judgment, the court has made a serious mistake,” Alito wrote in his dissent. “As interpreted by the court today, the 14th Amendment confers citizenship on virtually everyone who happens to be born in this country, including the children of ‘birth tourists,’ women who come here solely for the purpose of giving birth to a child and then promptly return home.”
Alito further argued that the 14th Amendment “confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.”
In a 91-page dissent more than three times longer than Roberts’ opinion, Thomas wrote that “the court adds to the sad history of the 14th Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed Blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”
Trump took to his Truth Social network to lament, “The Supreme Court upheld Birthright Citizenship, which is too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation, with the support of the President, that has now been determined during this process.”
“No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!” he added. “Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!”
Stephen Miller, Trump’s xenophobic deputy chief of staff, seethed on X that Trump v. Barbara is “one of the most destructive and outrageous decisions in the long history of the Supreme Court.”
“American citizenship is not the birthright of the world,” the white nationalist added. “It belongs only and solely to Americans. No provision of the Constitution can be read to require our national self-obliteration.”
Defenders of birthright citizenship and the Constitution welcomed the ruling.
“The Supreme Court affirmed what we know in our hearts and in our communities: The 14th Amendment extends the promise of citizenship to everyone born in the US Immigrants belong,” Congresswoman Delia C. Ramirez (D-Ill.), a birthright citizen, said on Bluesky. “No one can deny that immigrants today are also the inheritors of the promise of America—just like so many of my colleagues’ ancestors were.”
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a former refugee from Somalia, said on social media: “The Supreme Court just upheld birthright citizenship, blocking Trump’s attempt to dismantle the 14th Amendment and strip away a constitutional guarantee. If you were born here, you are an American citizen. The Constitution is clear. No one can change that.”
American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick called the decision “the easiest of layups possible.”
Thomas Wolf, director of democracy initiatives at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said that “the court could not have defensibly ruled any differently.”
“The 14th Amendment guaranteed citizenship to everyone born here over 150 years ago,” he added. “The Supreme Court affirmed that 20 years later in Wong Kim Ark.”
ACLU national legal director Cecilia Wang, a birthright citizen who argued the case before the Supreme Court, said the decision “reaffirms a fundamental American promise—if you are born here, you are a citizen. A president cannot change the Constitution by executive fiat.”
Neidi Dominguez, executive director of the multiracial advocacy group Organized Power in Numbers, said that “today the Supreme Court reaffirmed a constitutional right that should never have been in question.”
“Birthright citizenship was guaranteed through the passage of the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, when formerly enslaved Africans and their allies fought to access equal rights and affirm that children born in the United States have citizenship regardless of where their parents come from,” she noted. “That right survives today.”
“But let us be clear about what happened here,” Dominguez continued. “The Trump administration tried to narrow the definition of citizenship and the access to the rights that come with it, and even this Supreme Court disagreed. This is a real relief, and it is welcome. It is also the bare minimum.”
“The same court that today defended birthright citizenship last week stripped legal protections from more than 350,000 Haitian and Syrian workers with [temporary protected status] and opened the door to doing the same to up to 1.3 million people,” she said. “Earlier this term, it cleared the way for mass layoffs of tens of thousands of federal workers. Working people are not safe because one constitutional right survived. They are fighting on every front.”
“Birthright citizenship is protected today. But the workers whose children depend on it still face deportation, worksite raids, and an administration that has made clear it will use every tool available to make immigrant workers afraid, isolated, and stripped of their rights,” Dominguez added. “Employers cannot stay silent while the workers they depend on are stripped of their rights one ruling at a time. We are not done fighting.”
Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of the pro-democracy group Common Cause, issued a statement saying, “While we welcome the court finally upholding a constitutional amendment ratified nearly two centuries ago, upholding the law is no cause for celebration, it is a requirement.”
“Let today be a stark reminder that this court continues to systematically dismantle voting protections for Black and brown communities, tilting the scales of justice toward a dark era where a wealthy, privileged few dictate the rules for the rest of us,” she added. “Today may be a brief victory for the rule of law, but our fight to protect our multiracial democracy continues.”
Wolf at the Brennan Center said that “today’s ruling is the right one amid an avalanche of Supreme Court opinions undermining our democracy.”
“In just the past few weeks alone, the court further undermined the Voting Rights Act, encouraged more aggressive partisan gerrymandering, dangerously expanded presidential power over federal agencies, and further depleted protections for immigrants,” he noted. “This ruling does not make up for all the damage the court has done this term.”
On Tuesday, the court also ruled that states may ban transgender girls from participating in sports at schools receiving public funding.
The bad news buried in the Supreme Court's birthright citizenship ruling
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito (image from Creative Commons)June 30, 2026ALTERNE
Today, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s Day One executive order canceling the right to birthright citizenship. Good. That executive order declared that children born in the U.S. would not be considered citizens if their parents were living in the country illegally or were visiting the country on temporary visas.
The executive order never took effect. It was quickly blocked by multiple lower courts because it appeared to directly conflict with the 14th Amendment, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
The Trump regime appealed the lower-court rulings, contending that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship provision had been misunderstood for more than a century. The administration argued that the drafters of the amendment were focused on guaranteeing citizenship for the children of former slaves—and that the amendment was never intended to extend citizenship to the children of people who weren’t living in the country legally.
Trump and his Solicitor General, who argued this case before the Court, also said that narrowing birthright citizenship was necessary to prevent “birth tourism”—the practice of immigrants coming to the U.S. to give birth here and obtain citizenship for their child.
Trump has been vowing to try to change the law since entering politics in 2015, arguing the 14th Amendment was written specifically to enshrine the rights of freed slaves. His critics have countered that it was always designed to apply to the children of immigrants too. A 1898 Supreme Court decision confirmed that U.S.-born children of immigrant parents are entitled to American citizenship.
Today, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the deeply-rooted understanding that virtually everyone born on American soil is automatically a U.S. citizen was enshrined in the Constitution with the passage of the 14th Amendment in in 1868: “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.”
In another era, this would have been a no-brainer. No constitutional lawyer I know thought the Court would decide otherwise. The lower federal courts had consistently and unanimously ruled against Trump.
Had Trump won, it would have probably caused panic among recent immigrants and their families. Although Trump has insisted his policy would apply only to future births, it was far from clear that the logic of any win for Trump wouldn’t apply retrospectively if a future president (JD Vance? perish the thought) wanted to go there.
What I find troubling is that the decision was 5 to 4 rather than unanimous or nearly so, as it should have been.
Only five of the nine justice ruled against Trump on constitutional grounds. Brett Kavanaugh dissented on statutory grounds; while agreeing that Trump’s executive order was unlawful, he argued that the court should have resolved the case under federal immigration law rather than the Constitution.
The Court’s three most conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito — dissented. Thomas wrote for the group: “The Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”
Pure and utter claptrap.
Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito are so far to the right of America that their views on this case and other matters should be presumed bonkers. Yet what’s particularly sobering is that Trump is only one justice away from having a Supreme Court majority that would have gone his way on this absurd reading of the 14th Amendment.
Clearly, the Supreme Court must be changed — either by expanding the number of justices or by invoking term limits on Supreme Court justices. The Constitution would permit both remedies.
Perhaps the best thing about today’s majority decision is that it’s such a direct repudiation of Tump, who has long taken a personal interest in the issue. During his 2024 campaign, he made curtailing birthright citizenship a key element of his immigration platform.
When the high court heard arguments on the case in April, Trump took the unprecedented step of showing up in person for the hearing, making him the first sitting president ever to attend a Supreme Court argument. For the Court to so directly reject his position today is surely a humiliation for Trump.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
“Birthright citizenship is protected today. But the workers whose children depend on it still face deportation, worksite raids, and an administration that has made clear it will use every tool available to make immigrant workers afraid, isolated, and stripped of their rights,” said one campaigner.
Demonstrators rally in support of birthright citizenship outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC on April 1, 2026.
(Photo by Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images)
Brett Wilkins
Jun 30, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
The US Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the United States to undocumented parents, preserving 150 years of birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment and dealing a major blow to the administration’s xenophobic agenda.
“Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause,” the high court held in Trump v. Barbara.
The 6-3 decision roundly rejected an executive order issued by Trump on the first day of his second term that sought to deny US citizenship for babies born in the United States to parents who are either unlawfully in the United States or legally living in the country on temporary visas.
Every lower court rejected the order. Just three days after its issuance, US District Judge John Coughenour, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, blasted it as “blatantly unconstitutional.”
A majority of the right-wing Supreme Court agreed.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. “We keep that promise today.”
Roberts was joined in the majority by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing a separate concurring opinion agreeing that Trump’s executive order was unlawful but basing his reasoning on federal immigration law rather than the 14th Amendment.
“As revealed by the court’s opinion with its detailed account of history and precedent, and by the weighty and thoughtful dissents, the constitutional issue is far more complicated than the statutory issue,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
“This is one of the most important decisions in the history of the court, and in my judgment, the court has made a serious mistake,” Alito wrote in his dissent. “As interpreted by the court today, the 14th Amendment confers citizenship on virtually everyone who happens to be born in this country, including the children of ‘birth tourists,’ women who come here solely for the purpose of giving birth to a child and then promptly return home.”
Alito further argued that the 14th Amendment “confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.”
In a 91-page dissent more than three times longer than Roberts’ opinion, Thomas wrote that “the court adds to the sad history of the 14th Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed Blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”
Trump took to his Truth Social network to lament, “The Supreme Court upheld Birthright Citizenship, which is too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation, with the support of the President, that has now been determined during this process.”
“No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!” he added. “Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!”
Stephen Miller, Trump’s xenophobic deputy chief of staff, seethed on X that Trump v. Barbara is “one of the most destructive and outrageous decisions in the long history of the Supreme Court.”
“American citizenship is not the birthright of the world,” the white nationalist added. “It belongs only and solely to Americans. No provision of the Constitution can be read to require our national self-obliteration.”
Defenders of birthright citizenship and the Constitution welcomed the ruling.
“The Supreme Court affirmed what we know in our hearts and in our communities: The 14th Amendment extends the promise of citizenship to everyone born in the US Immigrants belong,” Congresswoman Delia C. Ramirez (D-Ill.), a birthright citizen, said on Bluesky. “No one can deny that immigrants today are also the inheritors of the promise of America—just like so many of my colleagues’ ancestors were.”
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a former refugee from Somalia, said on social media: “The Supreme Court just upheld birthright citizenship, blocking Trump’s attempt to dismantle the 14th Amendment and strip away a constitutional guarantee. If you were born here, you are an American citizen. The Constitution is clear. No one can change that.”
American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick called the decision “the easiest of layups possible.”
Thomas Wolf, director of democracy initiatives at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said that “the court could not have defensibly ruled any differently.”
“The 14th Amendment guaranteed citizenship to everyone born here over 150 years ago,” he added. “The Supreme Court affirmed that 20 years later in Wong Kim Ark.”
ACLU national legal director Cecilia Wang, a birthright citizen who argued the case before the Supreme Court, said the decision “reaffirms a fundamental American promise—if you are born here, you are a citizen. A president cannot change the Constitution by executive fiat.”
Neidi Dominguez, executive director of the multiracial advocacy group Organized Power in Numbers, said that “today the Supreme Court reaffirmed a constitutional right that should never have been in question.”
“Birthright citizenship was guaranteed through the passage of the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, when formerly enslaved Africans and their allies fought to access equal rights and affirm that children born in the United States have citizenship regardless of where their parents come from,” she noted. “That right survives today.”
“But let us be clear about what happened here,” Dominguez continued. “The Trump administration tried to narrow the definition of citizenship and the access to the rights that come with it, and even this Supreme Court disagreed. This is a real relief, and it is welcome. It is also the bare minimum.”
“The same court that today defended birthright citizenship last week stripped legal protections from more than 350,000 Haitian and Syrian workers with [temporary protected status] and opened the door to doing the same to up to 1.3 million people,” she said. “Earlier this term, it cleared the way for mass layoffs of tens of thousands of federal workers. Working people are not safe because one constitutional right survived. They are fighting on every front.”
“Birthright citizenship is protected today. But the workers whose children depend on it still face deportation, worksite raids, and an administration that has made clear it will use every tool available to make immigrant workers afraid, isolated, and stripped of their rights,” Dominguez added. “Employers cannot stay silent while the workers they depend on are stripped of their rights one ruling at a time. We are not done fighting.”
“Let today be a stark reminder that this court continues to systematically dismantle voting protections for Black and brown communities, tilting the scales of justice toward a dark era where a wealthy, privileged few dictate the rules for the rest of us,” she added. “Today may be a brief victory for the rule of law, but our fight to protect our multiracial democracy continues.”
Wolf at the Brennan Center said that “today’s ruling is the right one amid an avalanche of Supreme Court opinions undermining our democracy.”
“In just the past few weeks alone, the court further undermined the Voting Rights Act, encouraged more aggressive partisan gerrymandering, dangerously expanded presidential power over federal agencies, and further depleted protections for immigrants,” he noted. “This ruling does not make up for all the damage the court has done this term.”
On Tuesday, the court also ruled that states may ban transgender girls from participating in sports at schools receiving public funding.
The bad news buried in the Supreme Court's birthright citizenship ruling
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito (image from Creative Commons)
Today, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s Day One executive order canceling the right to birthright citizenship. Good. That executive order declared that children born in the U.S. would not be considered citizens if their parents were living in the country illegally or were visiting the country on temporary visas.
The executive order never took effect. It was quickly blocked by multiple lower courts because it appeared to directly conflict with the 14th Amendment, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
The Trump regime appealed the lower-court rulings, contending that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship provision had been misunderstood for more than a century. The administration argued that the drafters of the amendment were focused on guaranteeing citizenship for the children of former slaves—and that the amendment was never intended to extend citizenship to the children of people who weren’t living in the country legally.
Trump and his Solicitor General, who argued this case before the Court, also said that narrowing birthright citizenship was necessary to prevent “birth tourism”—the practice of immigrants coming to the U.S. to give birth here and obtain citizenship for their child.
Trump has been vowing to try to change the law since entering politics in 2015, arguing the 14th Amendment was written specifically to enshrine the rights of freed slaves. His critics have countered that it was always designed to apply to the children of immigrants too. A 1898 Supreme Court decision confirmed that U.S.-born children of immigrant parents are entitled to American citizenship.
Today, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the deeply-rooted understanding that virtually everyone born on American soil is automatically a U.S. citizen was enshrined in the Constitution with the passage of the 14th Amendment in in 1868: “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.”
In another era, this would have been a no-brainer. No constitutional lawyer I know thought the Court would decide otherwise. The lower federal courts had consistently and unanimously ruled against Trump.
Had Trump won, it would have probably caused panic among recent immigrants and their families. Although Trump has insisted his policy would apply only to future births, it was far from clear that the logic of any win for Trump wouldn’t apply retrospectively if a future president (JD Vance? perish the thought) wanted to go there.
What I find troubling is that the decision was 5 to 4 rather than unanimous or nearly so, as it should have been.
Only five of the nine justice ruled against Trump on constitutional grounds. Brett Kavanaugh dissented on statutory grounds; while agreeing that Trump’s executive order was unlawful, he argued that the court should have resolved the case under federal immigration law rather than the Constitution.
The Court’s three most conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito — dissented. Thomas wrote for the group: “The Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”
Pure and utter claptrap.
Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito are so far to the right of America that their views on this case and other matters should be presumed bonkers. Yet what’s particularly sobering is that Trump is only one justice away from having a Supreme Court majority that would have gone his way on this absurd reading of the 14th Amendment.
Clearly, the Supreme Court must be changed — either by expanding the number of justices or by invoking term limits on Supreme Court justices. The Constitution would permit both remedies.
Perhaps the best thing about today’s majority decision is that it’s such a direct repudiation of Tump, who has long taken a personal interest in the issue. During his 2024 campaign, he made curtailing birthright citizenship a key element of his immigration platform.
When the high court heard arguments on the case in April, Trump took the unprecedented step of showing up in person for the hearing, making him the first sitting president ever to attend a Supreme Court argument. For the Court to so directly reject his position today is surely a humiliation for Trump.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
SCOTUS Sides With Dictatorship — and Chaos
Earlier today, the Supreme Court declared war on U.S. democracy. It also declared war, basically, on modern society, on everything it takes to function in the 21st century. And I’m not sure that people understand that yet.
Really shocking decisions handed down by the Supreme Court. There were a couple that were not awful. Lisa Cook gets to stay at the Federal Reserve, although that in itself is a huge contradiction to the important stuff that the court did. I mean, Lisa is important and the Fed is important, but much more important is Humphrey’s Executor, which is the generations-long precedent that says that when Congress creates an independent agency, it is independent. It’s able to make decisions.
Of course, the president has some role. Typically, the president can choose the agency’s head subject to congressional approval, but the president can’t just go and fire officials that he doesn’t like for whatever reason or for no reason, because the agencies that operate the U.S. government and basically run our society are supposed to be professional. They’re supposed to be following their legal mandate. They’re not supposed to be personal tools of a dictator in the White House.
Well, the court just scrapped that. Now, lawyers, people who are legal experts, can do a better job of explaining just what went down. But what I think is important to understand is not only does this give essentially dictatorial powers to the occupant of the White House, but it also makes it extremely difficult for the economy to function. It makes it extremely difficult for society to function.
We live in a complicated world, a world of technology, where there are all kinds of spillovers, all kinds of ways in which it’s important that there be well-established ground rules. If you’re a business, take the example of medicines and foodstuffs, where we have an FDA, Federal Drug Administration, that is charged with ensuring that products that people consume are safe. We do that for very good reason. We know that not just that that there have been examples, historically, of products that were foods, medicines that were not at all safe, but also that people want some assurance.
The fact that something has been FDA approved is a bit of a warranty, that it might turn out to be very harmful, but probably not. Businesses that want to invest in developing stuff need to know that there are some ground rules that determine what they can and cannot sell.
Now imagine that all these decisions are made by political appointees who are loyalists to the president, who basically do whatever the president wants, whatever the people around the president want.
Do you want to invest in something where you have absolutely no idea what the ground rules will be, whether it will be approved or not? Do you want to invest in a whole business line when, for all you know, the White House will abruptly decide that your product isn’t safe and that a competitor’s product is, based on spurious grounds?
And what would cause those decisions to happen? Well, how about the fact that some businesses are better at the business of bribing the president and his family than others. And if you think that this is outlandish — you know, a few years ago you might have said this was outlandish, things like that wouldn’t really happen — well, as we speak, these things are happening all the time.
So you are setting up a situation in which, you know, it’s a little bit like traffic laws. Traffic laws, yeah, they can be annoying, but aren’t we all kind of glad that there are in fact rules about when you can turn and when you can go through an intersection? In order to function, in order to drive your car around you need to have a set of stable traffic rules, not a situation in which a police officer can decide you broke the law and the other guy did not because I say what the law is. And especially not where the police officer does that based upon who’s been paying him off or who he expects to be paid off.
The real world is far more complex than traffic rules but we need those rules and we need some stability and those rules cannot be specified with every letter, every punctuation mark set by Congress. The world is too complicated and changes too much. You need to have standing ethos, standing doctrine at the agencies that make modern life possible.
Now all of that is gone.
Now, it just adds to it that all of this is being done to empower a president who is the worst possible person for this job. This is not somebody you want supervising anything, everything that Trump touches turns to crud because he doesn’t care and he doesn’t actually understand or recognize that there’s such a thing as expertise as knowing what you’re doing.
So this would be terrible even if we had a temporarily competent administration. But now you’re doing all of this, the Supreme Court is doing all of this to empower the guy who brought you the Reflecting Pool, who brought you the Iran war. Utter nightmare.
Now, what will happen, hopefully, we emerge at the other end having fended off dictatorship. Then, I mean, as everybody knows, this Supreme Court is not actually empowering the presidency. It is empowering this president. And as soon as there’s a Democrat in the White House, suddenly there will be all kinds of restrictions on what that person can do.
Well, this cannot go on. This is a clear argument that says we have to one way or another disempower the Supreme Court. I don’t know enough to tell you what is the best route to do that but court packing or something else is going to have to happen. Because this has been the clearest signal yet that we have six people (there are three who are not part of it, but we have six people) who are fundamentally hostile to democracy, fundamentally hostile to the modern world and determined to put the catastrophically bad leader that we currently have sitting in the White House in charge of everything, which is a nightmare scenario on every level.
Take care, I guess.
Tyrant Trump’s Biggest Legacy – Bringing Out the Worst in America
Jimmy Carter’s campaign motto in 1976 was “Why Not the Best!” declaring everywhere he went: “I want to see us once again have a nation that’s as good and honest and decent and truthful and competent and compassionate and filled with love as are the American people.”
Dictator Donald Trump wants the opposite and is bringing the worst out of America. Here are a few of his metastasizing initiatives:
1. Championed the worst forms of energy – coal, oil, and gas – and depressing solar energy and wind power with restrictive policies, and even paying ongoing wind project companies nearly a billion dollars in your tax dollars to stop construction! Also, he is using many billions of your tax dollars to subsidize the failing nuclear power companies to build more expensive, unneeded, uninsurable, un-investable (by Wall Street), unsafe, boondoggles while his GOP takes large campaign contributions from fossil fuel and nuclear power corporate welfarists.
2. Encouraged the worst corruption of the Pentagon—more waste, contractor fraud and abuse—led by a foul-mouthed buffoon pushing illegal wars, mass deaths, and racism. Hegseth is despised by many high-ranking officers for his misogynistic firings and incompetence.
3. Brought out the worst from his toady Attorney Generals at the Justice Department—firing prosecutors and other lawyers for perceived vengeance. Trump gives orders directly to DOJ officials, thus ending any traditional arms-length independence at that Department. Trump has gotten his Attorney Generals to dismiss over 100 corporate crime cases, to decline enforcement of laws holding polluters and corporate criminals accountable, and made DOJ his personal law firm.
4. Encouraged the worst from the Environmental Protection Agency, whose puppet director believes that more methane, other greenhouse gases, motor vehicle gases, auto factories, and coal pollution are permissible for America’s children to breathe. EPA Director Lee Zeldin should rename his shattered agency and fired scientists “The Trump Anti-Environment Protection Agency.”
5. Suppressed or cancelled programs of scientific truth-seeking while publicizing pseudo-scientists who go far beyond healthy skepticism to peddle quackery about climate violence, pandemics, and vaccines that lead to distrust and disarray among vulnerable people wanting to protect their families. For Trump, climate catastrophes are “a hoax, a scam” and he is giving corporations the green light on dangerous pesticides (especially deadly to little children) which increase the risk of cancer and other lethal diseases. When you lie every talking hour of the day, as Trump does, the truth and facts have no relevance.
6. Trump is self-servingly wrecking the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Further cutting its tight budget via the GOP in Congress, the IRS has a grossly inadequate number of experts skilled in detecting complex corporate tax schemes and evasions totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in TAX ESCAPES per year.
One of those Escapes is the coerced deal Trump imposed on the IRS to give him and his avaricious family immunity from past and contemporary audits and enforcement, worth a gold mine to the bragging tax dodger-in-chief. He has wrecked public trust in his politicized IRS, on which voluntary compliance by American taxpayers is based.
7. Trump has grievously brought out the worst from the Congress, finishing off what is left of the separation of powers, turning Speaker Mike Johnson into a panting lap dog and Senate Majority Leader John Thune into a more staid but ready heel-clicker. Trump has opposed any public hearings and investigative oversight of the Executive Branch, including an inquiry into his illegal firing of 17 inspector generals required to root out waste and fraud from their departments.
In his first term, Trump defied over 125 Congressional subpoenas – an impeachable offense if ever there was one.
8. Trump brings out the worst from major corporations. His dictates—allowing corporations to cheat, steal, harm, pollute, and violate with impunity almost any federal laws, most of which Trump has shelved by taking the federal cops off the corporate crime beat—could fill a large book.. This is especially the case in lifting controls over poisonous corporate pollution and letting large companies decide for themselves how little or no tax they pay to Uncle Sam from their massive profits. Why not? He preaches what he practices as he amasses an ever-greater personal wealth using the White House as a profiteering office for profiteering.
9. Worsening the architecture of the White House and nearby Washington, D.C., are major preoccupations of this egomaniacal dilettante. He illegally tore down the East Wing and is building, without Congressional permission, a huge, garish ballroom to go along with other planned desecrations, such as the 250-foot-high arch. As architect critic Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post writes, he has turned “the reflecting pool from a serene oasis to a police zone,” bungling millions of dollars.
Day after day, thousands of National Guard soldiers are wondering what they’re doing aimlessly patrolling downtown Washington to fill the whims of Trump’s false claims about their ending street crimes in the national capital.
10. The Trumpeteer has brought out the worst in the mainstream media, giving preferential access to uncritical reporters, and restricting or prohibiting access to reporters who are steadfast and straightforward. Trump maliciously sues to extort money from networks like CBS and ABC, while approving mergers and acquisitions of media properties by Trump funders and flatterers expected to censor in his favor.
11. From the people, he has celebrated vice over virtue, greed over charity, obscenity over decency, violence over peace, police and ICE brutality over more effective standards of prudence and restraint by law enforcers. As an open, brazen liar, a delusionary braggart, and peddler of empty promises, Trump has troubled parents who see their youngsters mimic his abuses and foul talk.
12. He pardons hundreds of convicted violent criminals and other fraudsters and says he will pardon more crooks, even urging them to continue their lawless ways because he will pardon them if they are caught. As a convicted felon himself, he knows a criminal when he sees one. .
13. Trump has violated seven of the Ten Commandments and is almost never seen in Church, yet Trump manages to bring out the most extreme hypocrites from the leadership of organized religion, who support his violent, aggressive wars and alliances of mass murder, larger military budgets, and his waiver of prosecuting corporate crooks, because they like his anti-abortion stance.
Twice, he has assailed Pope Leo, who is insisting that Christianity be a religion of love, compassion, and peace.
14. His most fervent mission is to provoke biases and bigotry against recent immigrants and asylum seekers among millions of his voters who believed his lies about these desperate people, fleeing with their children from oppressive regimes and oligarchies long supported by the U.S. government in Central and South America.
Using words like “invasion,” “rapists,” “criminals,” he succeeded in defaming the overwhelming law-abiding and hard-working people harvesting our crops, caring for our little children and elderly, and cleaning up after us every day to feed their families.
Largely unrebutted by a cowardly Democratic Party, Trump’s fabrications threw his MAGA supporters into a frenzy, which he fed daily, obscuring his own employment of hundreds of low-paid, undocumented construction workers in New York and his servants in New Jersey.
Every society has its cruel, greedy, and bigoted inhabitants. Trump grossly exaggerated troubled conditions in the US to embolden these miscreants, then heralded them, gave them access to the White House and Mar-a-Lago, helped them get media coverage, and sell their books. Trump then intimidated or prosecuted those who exercised their freedom of speech rights to criticize or counter Trump’s depraved and baleful lackeys.
He has regaled Silicon Valley’s corporate digital child molesters, taken their campaign donations, flattery, and investments at the expense of curtailing the daily harm they are directly marketing to tens of millions of vulnerable children.
Presidents of our country, with their “bully pulpit” and vast media coverage, set examples in many ways for families. They can bring out the kindness and idealism of many Americans, as did President John F. Kennedy in 1961 when he and Congress launched the Peace Corps. Or they can exhibit to the world the cruelty and viciousness of the Trump/Musk illegal rampage that started with closing the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). With the rupture of the flow of critical medicines, food, medical supplies, and clean water to those in need, the Trump/Musk Axis sealed the fate abroad of millions, mostly infants, children, and mothers, over the next several years, according to expert estimates. (See USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.)
Long after Trump is impeached and removed from office, his hateful, vengeful drive to bring out the worst from our country will linger and fester. Until, that is, the forces behind expanded goodwill and fair play, peace and justice manifest themselves at the polls, the civic and political arenas, and the civic education and experiences within our repurposed elementary and secondary schools.
History repeatedly teaches us that principles of peace, justice, and opportunity always enjoy overwhelming public support when polled compared to ideologies of corruption, violence, and greed.
So, it is entirely in our hands to bring these preferences into the daily reality of the people, their children and grandchildren, and future generations who deserve better.
David Edwards
June 30, 2026
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito (from Creative Commons)
A Fox guest called Justice Samuel Alito an "anchor baby" on live television Tuesday, but the attack is almost certainly false.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that day to uphold birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump's executive order to restrict it. Alito was one of three justices who dissented.
Charles Kuck, an immigration attorney with Kuck Baxter Immigration, was on LiveNOW from Fox, a sibling channel of Fox News, discussing the ruling when he made the claim.
"So, yes, I get where the opponents of this are coming from, but somebody pointed out to me something really interesting today: Justice Alito, who wrote his own dissent in this case, is, in fact, an anchor baby," Kuck said. "His parents were not U.S. citizens when he was born, much like Ted Cruz and other prominent Republicans who are immigrants or the children of immigrants. This amendment is what really makes us America."
In his dissent, Alito argued that children born to noncitizen parents are automatically claimed as nationals by their parents' home country, making them "subject to a foreign power" rather than the United States.
Alito's father arrived in the U.S. from Italy as an infant in 1914. By the time his son was born in 1950, he held a master's degree from Rutgers and worked as a public high school teacher in New Jersey, a job that has long required U.S. citizenship.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was born in Calgary, Canada, to a mother who was already a U.S. citizen.
Kuck made clear he supports the ruling itself.
"So I, for one, applaud the Supreme Court. I wish it were a 9-0 decision, but we'll take what we can get," he insisted. "Now the law is clear, and we can move on, hopefully, to fixing our broken immigration system instead of arguing about a constitutional amendment that was settled 160 years ago."
Secretary of State Marco Rubio does fit the definition of "anchor baby" that Kuck used.
Rubio was born in Miami in 1971 to Cuban immigrant parents, according to Newsweek. His parents didn't become U.S. citizens until 1975, four years after he was born.
Daniel Hampton
June 30, 2026
Supreme Court Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas wait for their opportunity to leave the stage at the conclusion of the inauguration ceremonies in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, D.C. Chip Somodevilla/Pool via REUTERS
Justice Clarence Thomas's eyebrow-raising birthright citizenship dissent on Tuesday became the topic of discussion on MS NOW, with one anchor describing it as "astonishing" and legal analyst Lisa Rubin calling it "disappointing."
"Astonishing may be the wrong word; I think disappointing maybe another word," Rubin said, telling viewers the dissent was "certainly predictable, based on oral argument."
The exchange came moments after the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara, a 6-3 ruling that struck down President Donald Trump's executive order. The anchor had turned to Rubin to unpack Thomas's "astonishing" reasoning. Rubin's answer reframed the dissent as a letdown, but unsurprising.
What disappointed her was the line Thomas drew, and where it came from. Rubin said Thomas was "picking up a thread that Solicitor General John Sauer left for him," and later that he was "taking the bait" — drawing a distinction between Black Americans and the children of what he called "foreign temporary visitors." In his dissent, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, Thomas argued the 14th Amendment was written to confer citizenship on the children of slaves, not on temporary visitors' children, reaching back to the Dred Scott decision and quoting Frederick Douglass to build it.
She predicted it would not land with the people it claims to honor.
"This is a distinction that large swaths of the civil rights movement will not accept," Rubin said, pointing to decades of shared organizing between the NAACP and immigrant rights groups.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by the court's three liberal justices and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, holding that children born in the United States to parents here unlawfully or temporarily are citizens at birth. Justices Thomas, Samuel Alito and Gorsuch dissented.
The decision ends a fight that immigration scholars had long argued rested on a shaky reading of 14th Amendment history.
Nicole Charky-Chami
June 30, 2026
RAW STORY
President Donald Trump looks on after signing an executive order on vehicle repairs in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., on June 29, 2026. REUTERS/Aaron Schwartz
The internet criticized President Donald Trump's response on Tuesday to the Supreme Court ruling that upheld birthright citizenship and rejected the president's executive order.
Trump posted a bizarre — and apparently sarcastic — statement on his Truth Social platform following the ruling.
"I would like to congratulate President Xi, and the Great Country of China, on their massive Birthright Citizenship WIN!" Trump wrote.
Media and political commentators responded to the president's remarks.
"Sour, miserable, and un-American, even by the denatured standards of this president," Tom Nichols, staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote on X.
"He should resign if he doesn't like the Constitution he swore to uphold. UnAmerican!" Peggy Gabour, progressive political commentator, wrote on X.
"Translation: 'I’m super jealous that a dictator got permission to flush human rights down the toilet and I didn’t,'" Patric Reynolds, comic book artist and political commentator, wrote on Bluesky.
"Sorry, but isn’t Trump born of an immigrant?" The political account Mary Shelley’s Fluoxetine wrote on Bluesky.
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