Bob MaistrosThank goodness President Donald Trump, with two new executive orders, has re-elevated birthright citizenship to the top of the news cycle. Because it was the subject of one of two overly overlooked late-June Supreme Court outrages that should shake and rattle Americans.
Cynical financialists and opportunistic Democrats love to prattle about the “TACO Trade:” supposedly, “Trump Always Chickens Out” on market-alarming moves.
Well, maybe. But it’s now clearer than ever, after the Supremes’ bumble-and-stumble collapse at its term’s finish line, that Chief Justice John Roberts doesn’t only “Always Chicken Out” on tough calls – he all too often sells out the American people.
On Obamacare, which Roberts saved from a Commerce Clause violation by magically transforming its individual mandate penalty into a tax.
On DACA – the Obamanation illegally protecting illegal alien children of illegal aliens. A Roberts opinion held that Trump’s executive order violated the Administrative Procedures Act in reversing the Obama executive order establishing DACA that lower courts had already found to violate the Administrative Procedures Act. (Got that?)
On Grand Theft Election 2020 challenges: the Court punted repeatedly despite clear, outcome-determinative violations of the constitutional requirement that state legislators establish how presidential electors are selected.
Bringing us directly to the end of June, when on one controversial practice driving that purloined vote – allowing late-arriving ballots – the Court (with the Chief in the majority) mysteriously discovered that “Election Day” means “Election Whenever.”
And to “birthright citizenship,” where in Trump v. Barbara the Roberts-Always-Sells-Out Court interpreted the 14th Amendment phrase “subject to the jurisdiction of” the United States to mean “thumbing one’s nose at” the United States.
This despite the obvious common-sense solution emphasized by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in their dissents: confirming children’s citizenship only when at least one parent has established a domicile – legal permanent residency.
Children of green-card holders? Well, if you must. Children of birth tourists or illegals traversing the border to deliver an instant citizen at taxpayer expense? A hard no.
A position obvious not only to any first-year law student but, as Thomas fastidiously demonstrated, the amendment’s drafters and champions, contemporaneous and subsequent Attorneys General, state legislatures, eminent scholars and – naturally – the Supreme Court on two prior occasions.
Not to mention: none other than the late, arch-liberal Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid(!), who once upon a time introduced legislation to memorialize this very position.
In his Barbara dissent, Alito laid bare the majority’s true motivation: “We should not adopt an erroneous interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment simply out of fear of the consequences of ‘rocking the boat’ or as a reaction to current immigration policy.”
Meaning: Chicken Roberts cobbles a majority canoodling with the Court’s radical leftists whenever he is scared witless of being ousted from the popular girls’ table of elite opinionmakers.
Like on the first black president’s crowning legislative accomplishment. The late Justice Anton Scalia lamented that Roberts’ “interpretive jiggery-pokery” in two Obamacare cases “will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.”
Quipped the legendary jurist: “We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.”
Or the plight of “Dreamers” whose stories are cherry-picked to make them seem more sympathetic than and superior to native-born Americans.
Or birthright citizenship, any rationale for which, as illustrated by Thomas, has always rested more on snooty Swamp consensus than legal analysis.
Or concerns – always claimed to be “without evidence” despite mountains of evidence – about election integrity.
Meanwhile, each Roberts “Chicken-Out” decision has yielded catastrophic consequences. Such as skyrocketing Obamacare premiums – up an eye-watering average of 58% this year – even as outcomes plummet and insurers and hospital conglomerates rake in billions.
The fruits of DACA: chain-migration multiplication, with at least 240,000 U.S. citizen children born to 450,000 residents busy with more than dreaming.
But rarely have diktats been proven as foolhardy as fast as the birthright blunder and Election Day error. Mere hours after the former, reports surfaced of Texas hospitals advertising birth tourism packages – meaning more of the anchor babies already accounting for a stunning 10% of all U.S. births.
The Election Day absurdity was actually exposed before the decision was published. Justice Samuel Alito’s horror scenario played out in real time in June’s Los Angeles mayoral mayhem: a substantial Election Day deficit improbably overcome at the last hour by a surge of late-arriving ballots favoring the trailing candidate.
The source of all this carnage – and the thread, beyond cowardice, connecting Roberts’ Chicken-Out/Sellout jurisprudence? A spiraling surrender of American voters’ sovereignty.
The Obamacare decisions have yielded an essential federal takeover of healthcare: according to the Paragon Health Institute, some half of health care spending now comes directly from the government. Obamacare’s intentional(!) provider consolidation cratered consumer choice.
Voters’ sovereignty over borders and polity was relinquished in Barbara, which transfers power over fiscal integrity, public safety, affordability and educational quality to anyone waddling over the Rio Grande or jetting into a remote U.S. territory to drop a child.
Worst of all, the Roberts Court’s “see-no-evil” approach to brazen extraconstitutional conduct in 2020 and latest engraved invitation to further chicanery has hollowed out the very core of American small-r republicanism: governments “deriv(e) their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Not from cowardly justices engaging in “interpretive jiggery-pokery” to enrich “Big Health” at consumers’ expense. Not from nervous jurists imposing administrative-law double standards, or discovering the precious right to citizenship in a wack application of the duty British subjects owed to medieval kings, to protect a favored class siphoning resources from citizens’ governments.
And certainly not from election officials provided carte blanche to collect, count and likely, concoct ballots until voter-rejected candidates claw over the top.
“Here, sir, the people govern,” the nouveau historical celebrity Alexander Hamilton once insisted. With the expiration of that phrase’s operability in the waning days of June – thanks to Chicken Roberts and his cowardly cohort – the American people face the frightening prospect that their republic has also reached its expiration date.
Bob Maistros, a regular contributor to Issues & Insights, is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist, and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.
Views expressed by guest contributors to Issues & Insights are their own and don’t necessarily reflect the views of the I&I Editorial Board.
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The Democrats and the legacy media are quietly running a psychological warfare operation to make everyone focus on the small potatoes of ballot fraud. The really meaty issue is the corruption of the voting process itself by lawfare.
The US Supreme Court must bear the ultimate responsibility for allowing state courts to rewrite state election laws, despite the Elections Clause of the US Constitution clearly stating that “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature”.
Most ‘blue’ states allow ballots to be delivered by methods that are deliberately designed to be as insecure and hard to trace as possible – ballot harvesting and drop boxes are the preferred methods. State laws that clearly require ‘legible postmarks’ have been effectively rewritten by lawfare.
The generic penalty for any sort of ballot fraud is up to one year in prison and a $1000 fine, per count. The penalty for mail fraud involving a ballot is up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, per count.
Using a drop box instead of a mail box reduces the potential prison time for ballot fraud by 95%, and the potential fine by more than 99%.
Postal inspectors, the oldest branch of federal law enforcement, have no jurisdiction over pieces of paper with no postmarks. The most effective cops are sidelined by this legal maneuvering. The entire federal court system is effectively sidestepped when their own cops aren’t on the case. State and local officials are often corrupt and depend on election fraud to keep their own jobs, so there is no effective enforcement of the election laws.
It’s also hard to trace fake ballots added after Election Day when there are no postmarks. The USPS digitally photographs all non-bulk mail, and postmarks are permanent date stamps. Drop boxes have no such security measures, and the cheaters wear gloves in order to leave no fingerprints when they put fake ballots into drop boxes.
For more details, go to Substack and search for “Same stuff, different year: How the Democrats plan to steal the 2024 election”. Keep the quotation marks when you search for the article. I hope that I won’t need to write a new article in 2026.
Yours is the clearest yet most significant analysis of the design to kill of America election integrity so as to install the Democratic Party as the only party to control every state government it can and ultimately to perpetuate its deep-state entrenched control of the National government by giving us ideologues of the left instead of representatives (House and Senate) of the people. The Republican Party is just in it for their share of the money. I hope someday they meet the same fate as the Whig Party. Congratulations to you. I hope your essay gets reposted everywhere possible.
The Democrats facetiously claim that they want to eliminate ballot fraud.
Those are their words.
They have used lawfare to reduce the penalties for ballot fraud by 95% for potential prison time and over 99% for potential monetary fines, remove the most effective ballot security precautions, take the best cops completely off the case, sidestep the federal court system, and place the winners of dubious elections in charge of investigating fraud in those elections.
Those are their deeds.
This is how Biden became President.
This is how the two final candidates for mayor of Los Angeles are both leftist Democrats, even after large parts of the city burned because nobody was minding the store.
Judge them by their deeds, not their words.
You are 100% right about Roberts, but you politely left off the usual end to the epithet “chicken****”. I have been saying for more than 40 years that the Supreme court of the United States has done more damage to the political and social fabric of this country that all avowedly antipathetic forces put together.
And the do-nothing Republican Party has been happy to look the other way.
Presumably, Chief Justice Roberts sees himself as the doctor of his court.
Only in these 2 cases (and obamacare) though I’m sure he’d see that while his operation was a success the patient (America) died.
Courts giving bad rulings give birth to the people ignoring the courts and the law. The judicial branch is poised to be the first branch to fail.
I sure hope you are right, Cheryl.
Roberts is compromised and or corrupt, as with many others. Ronny Reagan really was the one that kicked off the illegal immigration SS* with the 1986 AMNESTY of millions upon millions of illegals. Now the Establishment has to twist the laws to keep the cheap labor and votes coming.
I used to have admiration and respect for SCOTUS as a kid when I growing up. Things have changed over time and I view SCOTUS today as nothing more, and nothing less, than a score keeper for either party. Chief Justice Roberts, the home plate umpire if you will, renders his opinion on cases based upon which way the political head winds blow. He does not want to render an opinion that is based on the Constitution, but merely on how he perceives other justices will go along with his idea on how the verdict should be rendered. I have absolutely no confidence in our federal government to do what is right. I am reminded of what the late comedian, George Carlin, once said in one of his comedy skits and that is, “it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” I have no doubt that politicians, justices, lobbyists and others are bought and paid for to do what is in their best interest, not for the best interests of the American people.
Jon Roberts has been blackmailed from the start. His two kids are both illegal aliens from Ireland. He does what his deep state masters tell him to do. He should be impeached, removed from his office and imprisoned for life. All of his decisions should be reversed and reviewed.