Say what you will about Trump (though it’s all been said before) – that he’s a tinpot totalitarian, pathological liar, corrupt grifter, convicted criminal, global laughingstock, and a snowflake whose skin is thinner than parchment. But sometimes we forget he’s also a man-child with some long-held convictions.
Exhibit A – on display at the Supreme Court the other day – is his lawless quest to blow up a constitutional right that has been embedded in our founding document for the last 159 years: the principle of birthright citizenship, which traces back to English common law, and which has twice been upheld by the high court, in 1898 and 1982.
If you’re born in America, you’re a citizen. Period. The Fourteen Amendment decrees, in straightforward prose, that “all persons born” on our soil “are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” And if that’s not clear enough, the 1898 Supremes said that birthright citizenship covers all children “born within the territory of the United States…of whatever race and color.” It’s the “race and color” part that Trump hates most. The urgent question today is whether facts and precedents are stronger than his xenophobic primal scream.
The con Trump’s currently trying to pull in the courts is fiendishly clever; like a termite, he’s gnawing away at the judicial woodwork that has long provided ballast to our democracy.
That’s his end game. To win it, he has weaponized the phony birthright issue.
When Trump returned to office four months ago (thanks a lot, 77 million voters), he immediately signed an executive order ending birthright citizenship. It ended nothing. It was immediately challenged in federal court – and three federal judges in three district courts blocked Trump’s order, via what are known as “nationwide injunctions.” That’s where things currently stand.
Trump’s lawyers and sycophants insist that because the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted in 1866 in order to grant citizenship to former Black slaves, it therefore could never have anticipated that the 21st-century children of undocumented immigrants would be born here.
The flaw in that argument should be obvious. If an ironclad constitutional amendment can be dismissed as archaic and out of step with modern times, then shouldn’t that also apply to the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, which was tailored for the owners of muskets? I bet the MAGAts wouldn’t abide that.
But at a May 15 Supreme Court hearing, the constitutionality of birthright citizenship was not the issue per se. Trump is pissed that roughly one third of his 143 executive orders are tied up in federal courts, challenged on constitutional grounds. Trump’s lawyers therefore told our top nine jurists that federal judges in the lower courts should not have the power to thwart the king’s will. Basically, the lawyers insisted that the Supreme Court alone should have the power to rule on his executive orders.
How fiendishly clever indeed.
If that were to happen – if lower federal judges were rendered powerless and their nationwide injunctions granting immediate relief were swept away – the human beings targeted by Trump’s executive orders would be screwed for the foreseeable future. Millions of targeted people would have to wait months or years for the high court to rule – and, in the meantime, Trump’s orders will have taken effect.
If the Supreme Court sides with Trump’s lawyers (a ruling is likely in June), it’ll be one more step towards totalitarianism. In the words of Stephen Valdeck, a Georgetown law professor and incisive court-watcher, the erasure of national injunctions “would be a self-inflicted judicial wound, one from which the legal system, and perhaps the rule of law itself, will not quickly recover.”
If the Supremes erase the three national injunctions that have been issued against Trump’s birthright citizenship ban, chaos will ensue at ground level. We know this because Thursday’s high court hearing exposed that scenario.
Brett Kavanaugh asked what would happen if the executive order took effect and magically denied citizenship to immigrant babies born here. How would the MAGA regime handle that?
D. John Sauer replied: “We don’t know. Federal officials will have to figure that out. Hopefully, they will do so.”
Translation: The regime has no plan.
If Trump successfully persuades the highest court to erase those injunctions, the judiciary’s ability to curb his totalitarian ambitions may be irreparably damaged. Which is precisely what he wants.
His courtroom maneuvers may seem abstruse, but that’s where the termites are gnawing our essential woodwork. We cannot afford to allow our eyes to glaze over.
As Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-century essayist, once warned, even civilized societies can fall apart when “reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodates to darkness.”
Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]