I often despair of the legacy media’s coverage of Trump 2.0. They continue to pretend that these are normal times and that an insane, incoherent, and incompetent president is normal. Then there’s the coverage of the Supreme Court. They continue to call the MAGA Six conservatives. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Repeat after me: Don’t call them conservatives.

This self-quote comes from a post I wrote after the Callais opinion came down:

Judicial conservatism centers on deference to precedent and the democratically elected branches. For example, Justice Felix Frankfurter was a man of the left but he was also a judicial conservative.”

You know what that makes the MAGA Six: Reactionary political hacks.

Trump vs. Barbara, hereinafter the birthright citizenship case, is an appalling reminder that the tone of the late term was dominated by two crackpots: Clarence Thomas and Sam The Sham Alito. They were on the losing side BUT this was a case that should have been UNANIMOUS or not heard by SCOTUS at all. The language and legislative history of the 14th Amendment are clear: its framers intended for birthright citizenship to be UNIVERSAL. Much to Justice KBJ’s disgust, Thomas insists that it was intended to apply to only Black people. That is a delusional lie told by a corrupt political hack.

I prefer to write about Supreme Court cases after the dust has settled. This case exemplifies why. The legacy media characterized it as a 6-3 defeat for Team Trump, when at best the split is 5-3-1. The real vote breakdown is  5-4, which was called a scandal by Slate legal eagle Mark Joseph Stern. I concur.

Brett Kavanaugh’s bizarre concurring opinion proves that he still likes beer. Justice Bro’s theory of the case is statutory, not constitutional, which is ridiculous. It’s a constitutional amendment for fuck’s sake. He sent a signal to MAGA world about how they could pass muster. It was quickly taken up by Speaker Yellowbelly DBA Mike Johnson. Fortunately, they don’t have the votes in Congress or on the Court but it reminds me of Robert Jackson’s legendary line in Korematsu: It’s a loaded weapon. It must be countered by radical reform of the Court itself.

Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion is fine and dandy. It hits all the right notes but Justice KBJ’s concurrence is written for the ages as she takes on the mendacious and specious arguments offered by Thomas:

Freed slaves, she noted, did not receive “new status” from the 14th Amendment. Instead, they were U.S. citizens simply because they were born in America, according to Jackson.

 

“Justice Thomas’s telling elides the entire point of the Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.”

Jackson’s opinion is a typically well-written history lesson aimed at the factually challenged among her colleagues. They won’t listen because they’re too far gone. The ultra-MAGA Four swim in the fetid waters of the right-wing media. It’s where this crackpot theory of the 14th Amendment was spawned and spread like a particularly virulent form of cancer.

The American right hates the 14th Amendment. It has been used to expand the rights of citizens and protect us from governmental overreach. I’ll let the good people at the Thurgood Marshall Institute explain:

One less well-known aspect of the Fourteenth Amendment’s role in American law is how the Supreme Court, over time, understood it to mean that states must also give people the protections found in the Bill of Rights. Before the amendment’s adoption, those protections — like the 8th Amendment’s prohibition against inflicting “cruel and unusual” punishments — only applied to the federal government.

 

But the Fourteenth Amendment changed the landscape. Since the amendment’s text prevented states from denying the people “due process of law,” the Supreme Court also interpreted that to mean states couldn’t strip people of other important constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech (1st Amendment) or the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures (4th Amendment). One by one, as cases came before it, the high court relied on the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to “incorporate” the different parts of the Bill of Rights to the states.”

Incorporation of the 14th Amendment’s due process clause also gave us the right of privacy, which fueled the Griswold and Roe cases. The latter was overruled by Dobbs; the former remains in jeopardy as long as SCOTUS remains unreformed.

The Supreme Court precedent on birthright citizenship is United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which upheld birthright citizenship in 1898. It was the same court that upheld separate but equal in Plessy v. Ferguson. Ironies abound.

Thanks to Team MAGA, our political landscape is loaded with crackpots. This national epidemic of crackpottery has liberated the SCOTUS crackpots. Thomas and Alito feel comfortable letting their freak flags fly. They feel invincible and above reproach. That needs to change when Democrats control Congress and the White House. I’ll leave the details to others but radical change is needed to preserve and protect the constitution from the MAGA Six. The judicial arrogance, it burns.

The last word goes to Nick Lowe: