Funny how this works. The Supreme Court tells Donald Trump he can’t end birthright citizenship by executive order. Six justices, including two he put on the bench himself, strike it down 6-3 on June 30. Trump says he’ll demand a rehearing, posts that the ruling will “destroy America” if they don’t reverse it. And then the July 27 deadline comes and goes. No petition. Nothing on the docket. Crickets.
So what does he do? He issues new executive orders on August 6. Same goal, different packaging. This time he’s targeting “birth tourism,” children of diplomats, kids born to alleged members of “terrorist organizations,” and certain people born in U.S. territories. Same legal arguments the Supreme Court already rejected. Same Fourteenth Amendment he already lost on. And the same groups are already back in federal court filing motions to block him.
Now ask yourself: who benefits from this theater?
Trump gets to tell his base he’s still fighting. The ACLU gets to send out another fundraising email about how they “stopped him.” The NAACP, the Asian Law Caucus, Democracy Defenders, the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. That’s a lot of organizations with a lot of salaried lawyers who all need a reason to exist next quarter. Aarti Kohli of the Asian Law Caucus said the White House is “just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.” She’s right about the throwing. She just left out who’s catching.
Shealeah Craighead (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsHere’s what nobody in the establishment press wants to talk about. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion. Roberts, the man who has spent his entire career making sure the federal government never loses a real fight, suddenly discovered the Fourteenth Amendment means what it says. Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s own pick, joined him. Brett Kavanaugh agreed the order couldn’t stand but found a different excuse, citing a federal statute with nearly identical language. Two Trump appointees voting against Trump’s signature day-one executive order. You don’t have to be a dot-connector to find that curious. You just have to be awake.
Only Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissented. Three justices willing to say the president should be allowed to try. The other six? They circled the wagons. The Constitution, not the president, determines who is a citizen. That’s what Roberts wrote. Beautiful sentiment. Coming from a man who has spent two decades expanding executive power every time it mattered and contracting it when it didn’t, it lands a little differently.
The Barbara lawsuit puts it plainly: “If the President issues 100 orders seeking to create new exceptions to the sacred guarantee of the Citizenship Clause, all 100 will be equally illegal.” The lawyers wrote that like it’s an argument against Trump. Read it again. It’s an argument for why this will never end. One hundred orders, one hundred lawsuits, one hundred rounds of billing. The machine feeds itself.
Trump attended the oral argument in person. He sat there in the courtroom while Cecillia Wang argued for the plaintiffs and his own Solicitor General John Sauer argued for the administration. He watched himself lose a case he bet his legacy on. Then he went home and issued another order anyway.
Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia CommonsYou can call that defiance. You can call it stupidity. Or you can call it what it looks like from where I sit: a man who knows the game never actually ends, because the people running it don’t want it to.
The little guy watches this and thinks he’s seeing a fight. He’s seeing a show. Both sides go home with their budgets intact and their donors satisfied. And the Constitution? The Constitution is just the prop they both point at when the cameras turn on.
Trump lost. The ACLU won. And nothing changed for a single person in this country except the lawyers who got paid to argue about it.
Ask yourself who benefits. Then stop asking, because you already know.
Rachel Malehorn (CC BY 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons