Taking the birthright citizenship case was a corrupt decision

Chief Justice of the US John Roberts (R) must have decided he's OK being second only to Roger Taney in presiding over a Supreme Court not just athwart history, but obviously on the wrong side of it. Taney had Dred Scott and Prigg; Roberts already had Citizens United and Heller, and now has Slaughter and too many others to name.

Yesterday the Court added Trump v Barbara to its sad history. Yes, yes, they voted 6-3¹ to uphold the plain text and legislative history of the 14th Amendment. But at least four of them voted to hear it. Four of them. I'm almost certain Roberts wasn't one of them, because there was no controversy here.

Then again, this Court has simply made up entire principles of law that appear nowhere in the Constitution, so why would this be any different?

And let's talk about the three-and-a-half dissents that the batshit wing of the Court wrote. I'll let Josh Marshall summarize:

The dissents — and Kavanaugh’s concurrence — lay the groundwork for a world in which a future Supreme Court strips the Constitution of birthright citizenship. Doing so would contradict decades of practice and interpretation, revising a fundamental constitutional principle established in the wake of the Civil War.

To get there, Thomas and Alito cast citizenship as a zero-sum game. Both dissents are full of talking points popular on the right: complaints about birth tourism, suspicion of the children of non-citizens. At one point, Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, attributes the practice of birthright citizenship to two Democratic Presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Bill Clinton.

But to him, it’s fundamentally an issue of the citizenship of some Americans being devalued by the idea that it can be obtained as a matter of birth.

Alito conceded that his concern is about the consequences of birthright citizenship. It can lead to “grotesque results,” he argued. “While foreigners who wish to immigrate lawfully must sometimes wait for many years, a child born here to a birth tourist is automatically a citizen.”

It’s a complaint familiar to those who have followed right-wing media and commentary in recent years. There, there’s a separate category of citizen: “Birthright citizens,” people born to undocumented or non-citizen parents who did not hold a green card. Alito cast their status as citizen as an act the Supreme Court took on Tuesday, not a longstanding feature of the Constitution.

This is all "Great Replacement" bullshit, of course. But as Marshall says, "Tuesday’s decision doesn’t spell the end of the issue. Rather, it’s the start of a new campaign." And until we clean out the reactionaries on the Court, we can't correct the judicial errors they have made and desperately want to continue making.