The Born Identity

Call it a judicial man bites dog story. A 6-3 decision actually went the right way. Even though it should have been 9-0, we’ll take what we can get from this Court. The Fourteenth Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” And this time around, six judges agreed that the Constitution means what the Constitution says. “The ACLU’s Cecillia Wang, herself a birthright citizen born to Chinese parents, argued the birthright case in April before the Supreme Court. As she put it, the men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment deliberately chose to confer automatic citizenship on the child, not the parent, the idea being that ‘in America we do not punish children for the sins of their fathers, but instead we wipe the slate clean. When you’re born in this country, we’re all American, all the same.'” NPR: Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds. It’s nice to know some of those grounds are still above ground.

+ WSJ (Gift Article): “The decision rebuffs Trump’s bid to upend the deep-rooted understanding that virtually everyone born on American soil is automatically a U.S. citizen. That understanding, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, was enshrined in the Constitution in 1868.”

+ Back to our regularly scheduled 6-3 decisions: “The Supreme Court yet again loosened campaign finance restrictions on Tuesday by striking down limits on how much political parties may raise and spend on candidates. By a 6-to-3 vote along ideological lines, the court ruled the law, which had been enacted in 1974, violates political parties’ First Amendment rights. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion.”

+ SCOTUS “upheld state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams, in another setback for transgender people. The court’s six-justice conservative majority, which has repeatedly ruled against transgender Americans in the past year, ruled that state bans in Idaho and West Virginia don’t violate the Constitution. The court unanimously agreed that barring transgender girls and women also doesn’t run afoul of the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.”

+ NYT (Gift Article): The Major Supreme Court Decisions in 2026.