The travesty of last week’s Trump v. Barbara decision on birthplace citizenship is further highlighted by the fact that the five-vote majority consisted of nominally conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining with all three liberal justices.
While Roberts authored the majority opinion, social-justice warrior Ketanji Brown Jackson could not restrain herself from penning her own 20-page concurrence to specifically target the erudite dissent of Justice Clarence Thomas. Jackson provides no serious intellectual response to the scholarly treatise Thomas produced, yet it is illuminating for other reasons. Recall this is the same woman who, her prestigious position on the court notwithstanding, in December 2024 performed onstage in a Broadway musical all about feminist and LGBT “empowerment.”
Our “theater-kid occupied government,” to borrow the hypothesis popularized online by John Doyle, routinely attains to new heights of absurdity, as shown in Jackson’s antiracist screed. Jackson’s concurrence is packed with language that reeks of her pervasive critical-theory framework, which sees all of history as a struggle between “oppressors” and “oppressed.”
Upon reading through it, one is shocked by the ubiquitous presence of CRT buzzwords and phrases such as “antisubordination reset,” “universalist approach,” “universalist vision of belonging and citizenship,” “racial reckoning,” “anticaste engine,” “equal dignity,” “shared humanity of all people,” “perfect equality of every human being,” “inequitable result,” and “universalist, antisubordination command.” These phrases could easily have been plucked seamlessly from the writing of Ibram Kendi or from the many amicus briefs filed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Ironically, when typing this article, Microsoft Word’s spell check did not even recognize “antisubordination” and “anticaste” as dictionary words. That didn’t seem to stop Justice Jackson.
In Jackson’s opinion, she views the 14th Amendment coming upon the heels of the Civil War as a “remaking of the soul of a Nation beset by rank, entrenched race-based prejudice and inequity.” Thus, to interpret the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment as only applying to citizens, or even only to those permanently domiciled here, is to revive the discriminatory, racist older America.
She deliberately takes issue with Justice Thomas’ argument that the citizenship clause was only meant to grant citizenship to freed slaves and was not intended to apply to foreigners on American soil who owe allegiance to a foreign government. As she puts it, “The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.”
To interpret the citizenship clause as it was meant by its framers would be unacceptable. Who cares if illegal aliens from Latin America or Chinese birth tourists are subject to a foreign power? If America seeks to very reasonably exclude them from birthplace citizenship (consonant with the original meaning of the 14th Amendment), that is an exclusionary rejection of the radically inclusive vision Jackson would impose on the Constitution through her distorted reading. In her grand narrative of moral absolutes, echoing the 1619 Project, America’s story is a narrative of oppression, slavery, exploitation, and genocide; America’s only admirable features are its leftist crusades against oppression. America is only worthy to the extent it atones for its past sins by endless programs of antidiscrimination and reparations for the oppressed.
Furthermore, there is no evidence in her 20-page concurrence that Jackson sees or posits any limitation upon American citizenship. She sees the 14th Amendment as a rejection of any kind of discrimination whatsoever, giving us a “universalist, antisubordination command” based upon the “shared humanity of all people.” Anyone who happens to be born on American soil can be an American citizen, no matter how absurd the consequences. But why stop there? Isn’t it exclusionary to limit it to American soil? Why should the 8 billion people of the globe have to get to American soil to be born American citizens? Why can’t we just have global American citizenship to atone for America’s past sins of racism, colonialism, sexism, and so on?
An all-too-typical conservative response to witnessing the unintelligent antics of Jackson is to laugh it off with, “What a ridiculous example of what happens when you pick a judge solely based on her skin color and sex rather than her merits! Heck, she doesn’t even know what a woman is!” While such mockery is duly warranted, it’s misleading. Jackson is a very effective leftist jurist whose ignorance of law, the Constitution, and originalist interpretations is an aid to her side, not a hindrance. She openly flies her colors, does not conceal her intentions, and always manages to rule in favor of Democrats in her votes on the court.
More importantly, her writing provides a great reminder that if ever the Democrats are permitted to regain the Senate and the presidency, they will not hesitate to abolish the filibuster and pack not just the Supreme Court but the federal judiciary more broadly with an infinite number of “judges” whose legal opinions will be indistinguishable from the antiracist, globalist, histrionic slop Jackson issued in this latest decision. The fact that the Trump administration has already faced such relentless opposition from within the judiciary, most especially from the federal district court judges, is because Obama and Biden appointed so many such types already, including a startling number of foreign-born judges. This will be the future of the judiciary and thus the country if the right is not able to successfully appoint their own fighters to the courts and also retake power from the judiciary.
One advantage that comes from such a theatrical display from Jackson is that it serves to further delegitimize the institution of the Supreme Court and the judiciary. The courts hold sway over the nation because people believe them to be a legitimate source of political power and esteem. To the extent they abase themselves through naked displays of woke hatred for America, the Constitution, and American citizens, they will continue to expose their illegitimacy. Exposing the fraud of the courts and the legal system is a key step to building political pushback and making long-overdue reforms.
In this regard, the absurdity of the court’s acquiescing in the most liberal stance on birthplace citizenship possible — affirmed proudly by Jackson’s voice — is just one more sign we must revive departmentalism and stop treating the courts generally with a godlike reverence and deference.
