Transcription
Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes.
The Supreme Court waited until the very last day of its term, the last day of June, to drop its decision in the biggest case of the year. A case in which the Trump administration was seeking to obliterate the constitutional order that our country erected after the bloodshed of the Civil War, when we defeated slavery and amended the Constitution to state explicitly that this country was based on the principle that all citizens are equal before the law, and that if you are born here, you are a citizen. No ifs, ands, or buts.
That vision of the country is the one that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and the MAGA movement are fundamentally committed to destroying. Openly, they keep saying it. And they made that clear on day one, January 20th, 2025. Just minutes after being sworn in, when Trump first signed pardons for all of the insurrectionists who had tried to violently overturn a democratic election four years earlier, an election in which he had, by the way, massively lost among non-white voters. And then, right after he signed those pardons, Trump signed an order claiming that some natural-born U.S. citizens shouldn't be. This order relates to the definition of birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment of the United States. That's a good one. Birthright. That's a big. I think we have good grounds, but you could be right. I mean, you'll find.
Well, today Trump found out, as the Supreme Court ruled that Trump's attempts to undo birthright citizenship are unconstitutional. A 5-4 decision on that question, in which all three liberal justices joined conservatives Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts. Writing for the majority, Roberts stated the 14th Amendment clearly means what it says. Quote, "Citizenship then and now was the right to have rights, to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today."
That was always what the court should have said to the Trump administration. Their case against birthright citizenship was always just an unconstitutional shot in the dark. A bad-faith, crankish reading of the 14th Amendment motivated by racism and xenophobia. The idea that you can have a country where you just set foot on U.S. soil and any child you have gets to be an American citizen and vote in our elections, collect our welfare, sit in our juries, sit in judgment of our fellow men and women is such an outrage to the idea of having a country. It defies subscription. I don't know what they're going to do, but here's what I can say. If this country does it one way or another, and birthright citizenship, this country doesn't have a future. Citizenship has to be sacred and precious.
I really struggle to accurately convey just how extreme, how unhinged, and how frankly racist that position is. But let me try. Stephen Miller's reading of the 14th Amendment had already been repudiated by the Supreme Court more than a century ago. It's a famous case. It was in 1898, the case of Wong Kim Ark, who was born in the U.S. to Chinese parents. That court, then operating in 1898, said if you're born in the U.S., you're a U.S. citizen. They looked at the plain text of the law and they found that. And they handed down that decision, get this, two years after upholding racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. Those justices, the ones who enshrined Jim Crow on the laws of the United States, they cemented separate but equal. But even they upheld birthright citizenship in a 6-2 vote because the language of the 14th was plain as day. That is how racist Stephen Miller and Donald Trump's argument is. It is more racist than a racist, reactionary court, the infamous Plessy court, was almost 130 years ago. Think about that.
And the other thing is, there hasn't been any real legal or historical shift away from birthright citizenship since then. There were a few, again, anti-immigrant cranks on the right, which you'll always find, turning out diatribes against anchor babies. But it didn't matter. And actually, Donald Trump courted them. And last year, remember, he finds himself back in office and he's got his handpicked 6-3 Supreme Court majority, where three of the justices were the ones that he elevated. And so he went to work pressuring them to reimagine the Constitution. In fact, to rewrite it, to essentially amend the Constitution by fiat in collusion with him and five votes. Remember that? He even went to oral arguments to physically intimidate them, to glower at them. It was a first for a sitting president. Now, it didn't quite work. He lost today. We all as Americans won. The court still did the right thing, but barely. I mean, by a shockingly narrow margin. By one vote in 1898, the margin was four votes. Today, by one vote, this court rejected what would amount to rewriting the Constitution on the fly. In some senses, overturning the victory of the Union forces and the multiracial coalition that refounded the country after that victory in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Essentially just taking white-out to an amendment that was bought with the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Civil War. It's jarring to think that the very right to have rights in America hinged this week on John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett. The lesson here is Donald Trump lost, thankfully. But this court, it has to be addressed. It has to be dealt with. And this movement, the movement that brought us to this point, has to be defeated thoroughly and completely because the goal is nothing less than uprooting the very foundational principles that make this country so special and so worth fighting for.
Today's decision. Chris, first of all, thanks for having me. And second of all, that was an excellent spiel on the 14th Amendment. You know, you hit the high notes. Yes, the decision in this case came out the way it should have come out. But first of all, it came out the way it should have come out. The way it should have come out last year when this case was Trump versus CASA. As you'll recall, the Supreme Court then used that case to address the issue of district courts granting and ordering nationwide injunctions, something they've long wanted to get at. And that required the refiling of a new case as a class action that became Trump versus Barbara. What I mean to say is that the court has slow-walked this. This was a case grounded in the actual words, not the penumbra, nothing that they. They had to interpret the actual words of the 14th Amendment and an over 100-year-old precedent by the court itself, which, as you pointed out, has never been broken or undermined in any way. And they took this long. This is not just the court deliberating and going back and forth and taking this long. This is the court allowing space to develop for the idea that this was a legitimate for the idea that this was a legitimate claim, when, as you say, this was a bit of constitutional gaslighting. But every time they do that, they give strength to the idea that they are making legitimate arguments on things like birthright citizenship. So, first of all, to sit there today and have the decision come out the way I wanted it to come out in terms of the judgment, but having it come out after over a year is just it was just absurd. A year and a half of leaving the country confused about the most important thing: who is an American? So I just thought that was grossly irresponsible.
Secondly, as I think you also were pointing out, this case was not unanimous. This should have been a 9-0 decision. This was a slam dunk. It wasn't. It was a, you know, five, four, maybe six, three decision. And it matters. It matters that this was a split decision because once again, it gives legitimacy to the idea that birthright citizenship can be overturned. The fact that there was, there are these dissenting opinions from Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch, and Justice Thomas, some of whom joined one another, but each of whom felt they needed to write their own dissenting opinion. And then a concurring and dissenting opinion from Justice Kavanaugh, who agrees with the judgment. But, and this was very obvious at oral argument as well, Justice Kavanaugh, who loves the world of politics, believes that Congress has the right to do what the president tried to do. The president can't overcome birthright citizenship by EO, but Justice Kavanaugh believes that by statute, Congress can. And that little space was important for him to leave to the political process. And of course, earlier today, we heard Trump already in announcing his intention to exploit that space.
Yeah, let me just, in case people are confused because they read that it was a six-three decision. The main holding, which is that they struck down the executive order, was a 6-3 decision. But on the narrow question of, is it constitutionally the case as grounded in the 14th Amendment that all citizens born here are citizens? It was narrow. And this is because Kavanaugh says, in my view, the executive order does not violate the 14th Amendment, but the order does contravene a federal statute because there's a statute also passed. Congress could enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birth birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country. But Congress has not yet done so. And then, as you note, on cue, Trump says, "The Supreme. We can easily make it up in Congress through legislation with the support of the president. That has been interred during this process. No long and unwieldy constitutional amendments necessary. Congress should start today to work on ending expensive and unfair to our country birthright citizenship. They will have my complete and total support. We should note that what Trump is saying there is wrong. That's not actually the holding. That's Kavanaugh's."
I think it's not the holding, but not actually the holding. But again, it keeps this conversation going. It keeps it in the political realm as though it is not an absurd and ludicrous and anti-constitutional ideology. And this is how you go about trying to do a kind of paper insurrection, you know? A political insurrection rather than a violent physical one, which is that you just keep wearing at that rock, you know, trying to undermine the principles that have been created, what it took for the 14th Amendment to stand for. And this is why I love Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's concurrence in this case because she just wipes the table on the history of what this was supposed to be about. Our Constitution is not colorblind. The framers of the 14th Amendment were involved in a very race-conscious project, and that project was to remove caste and subordination from who could be an American and who could be a first-class citizen. So it's important that she goes into that history. I love that she cited in one of her footnotes the brief that I wrote along with Professor Guy Uriel Charles at Harvard Law School, aided by our students. But that she really goes into the history to make clear this was never a race-free, a colorblind project. They were very intentional about creating a multiracial democracy. And the more the forces on the right try to move us away from knowing that truth, knowing the truth that over 150 years ago, the framers of our second founding wanted this to be a multiracial democracy and created a constitutional infrastructure that would allow it to become a multiracial democracy. The more people are removed from that knowledge, the more they will believe that when they see black people fully integrated into our society, when they see people who come here and who have children who are born here being U.S. citizens and, as Stephen Miller railed about, you know, making judgments about us and voting in our elections, the more they will think that the the ideas that resist that are actually legitimate ideas and not fundamentally anti-constitutional ideas. And I think that's what this has been about. This has been about creating a space for that.
And just to, you know, to take a step back, too. I mean, again, we're in this sort of text, the Constitution. And I was going to read a portion of the debate in 1866 where someone says, well, what about the gypsies that are invading Pennsylvania? They say, well, the only invaders I know in Pennsylvania were the Confederate Army. And we're trying to prevent that from happening again. So, again, they knew. They knew. Like, what about the Chinese in California? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. They also had their prejudices. Right. Exactly. And but but but just take a step back here. It's like it's so striking to me, and this is not a novel insight, but like the thing that I've cherished the most about this country that I think is so beautiful is the thing they hate the most. I mean, for me, it's like, yes, this principle, whoever you are, we're all equal, and that this is enshrined, and that we've created a republic. We founded kind of a second republic based on that after the bloodshed of the Civil War. And that that's the thing that they hate the most. And that they've got, they've got haters on the Supreme Court. I mean, if you read that Alito dissent, like he hates that principle. Yeah, but. That's fundamentally un-American. And when it, to me, listening to Stephen Miller today, it was hearing someone who wants to be in another country. There are many countries, the old countries of Europe from which his family and many others in the cabinet came, where countries like that were countries where you were German because your father was German or Polish because your father was Polish. That's not what this country set about to do. And so I think when you hear them speaking, and I really mean this, it's very important to understand. It is counter to the project, the idea of America. And because we're celebrating our 250th anniversary, this is why it's so important not to just focus on the first founding of the country in 1776 and our Constitution in 1789, but also to make sure that you include the second founding because this country has evolved. And that second founding is. They had seen how race could tear us apart and break us apart and threaten the nation. And they created an infrastructure to to ensure that there would be glue to hold us together. And what these folks are trying to do right now is to break us back apart. So it's a very, very dangerous project. I'm glad the Supreme Court decided what they decided today. I'm profoundly disturbed that it was as close as it was.