MOLLIE HEMINGWAY, THE FEDERALIST: This is an absolutely important and devastatingly bad decision for the future of the country. This decision that John Roberts authored is bad on the level of Dred Scott or Roe v. Wade.
It’s that bad. Previously, we had a policy of saying if you have parents who are here illegally and you’re born here, you might be considered a citizen. But today is the first day that the constitutional right.
Justice Alito had an excellent dissent as well. He said he thinks this is one of this was a very important decision and very wrongly decided. He goes through in an originalist manner, meaning what was the original meaning of the 14th Amendment and looks at how the majority how this Roberts decision came to its reasoning.
And it’s frankly, pretty absurd. Justice Thomas also did a great job. The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says you can’t deny citizenship on the basis of race. That’s what it was for. There were people who were trying to deny citizenship to children of formerly enslaved people. And that’s what the 14th Amendment was for.
It was never saying you don’t get to have any say in who’s a citizen. And you look at how it’s not just this case. It’s so many things, anything that Americans try to do to restore their borders, to determine who gets to come here.
You have rogue lower court judges just throwing it out and saying you don’t get to say this cuts to the issue of sovereignty, who we are as a people, whether we will even exist in a few decades. So this is a very important decision. And unfortunately, you know, for an otherwise pretty good term, a really bad end to it, to that.
