It was news when the big, bad wolf who is president subjected a convened Supreme Court to a first-ever front-row staredown.
More significant, however, was the moment he huffed and puffed out of the courtroom.
He did it just as counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union stepped up to provide what likely is a winning argument for the Birthright Citizenship clause in the 14th Amendment.
Not gonna hear it, snorted he.
Truth told, he started hitching his slacks in fury when Chief Justice Roberts shot down the solicitor general’s claim that a “new world” calls for discarding a 158-year-old right.
“It’s a new world,” Roberts said, but the “same Constitution.”
Don’t let that door hit that big behind.
You may wonder why of all the crucial court cases featuring this president, he inserted himself here.
It’s because hatred of “others,” in this case newcomers who lack a preferred color, is the life force of MAGA, which for now is the life force of the Republican Party.
There’s no secret why this president has called certain lands “shithole” countries. Use your color wheel.
No secret why this “Christian” president didn’t shed a tear torching 500 tons of low-cost USAID rations, meaning countless African tots would die. It’s a matter of pigment.
To those who dispute this, it only means you haven’t been listening to this administration’s rhetoric.
Consider what JD Vance said in a recent address to the pale dreamers of the Claremont Institute (see, “Project 2025”):
“America is not just an idea,” he said. “It’s a group of people with a shared history and a common future.”
Sounds so academic.
Between those lines is the same old “drug dealers, criminals, rapists,” and, “eating-the-pets” racist kibble that got Vance’s boss the Republican nomination thrice.
The standard anti-immigrant demagoguery.
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie provides an interpretation: Vance, his boss and their ilk advocate “tiers of belonging.”
These are the distinctions of the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, the Klan.
Dispense with that all-equal stuff of Declaration of Independence and whatever a “more perfect union” Lincoln was talking about.
Toward a perfect America, we need a gated community. And to get there we must drive away or marginalize those marked “different.”
Mass deportation and taking away birthright citizenship is a place to start. Oppressive race-based tactics by government agents is another.
To these discussions it’s useful to add the thoughts of Isabel Wilkerson. In her book, “Caste,” she writes with authority that race is not a biological thing but, in this land of ours, a social construct that serves to bolster a dehumanizing caste system.
She points out that caste systems in other cultures – India, for instance – have their own non-biological distinctions, meaning having nothing to do with color or appearance.
The one similarity, speaking of the 14th Amendment, is that people are born into their castes. They have no choice, no foundational idea protecting them — or a cherished document signed by patriots — to lift all up.
And so, China imprisons people born Uygur and North Italians demean those born south of them.
And so, in our diverse land of opportunity, “mass deportation” and “Build the wall” can generate political mileage for a virulent caste-ist politician on the rise.
And people of brown skin who have lived here peacefully and hyper-productively for years, can be treated by him and his supporters as miserable caste-offs.
We can’t deport the dark-skinned heirs of slavery’s horrors. That ship has sailed. We can, however, seek to discredit their leaders – MLK: “Communist agitator”; Barack Obama: “Can he prove his birthplace?” A black four-star chairing the Joint Chiefs? That’s a “DEI hire.”
The whole birth certificate thing — the big lie before the Big Lie — bought headlines for the man who today as chief executive rips the pope and shares images of himself as Lord and master — “massa” in plantation days.
Unfortunately for him, it seems likely the Supreme Court will leave birthright citizenship in the Constitution.
In a civil trial, it must be demonstrated that the complainant is harmed by what the suit would find actionable.
Nothing in the grand sweep of history indicates that citizenship by birth has harmed this land, except in the minds of those cloistered away from injury in their caste hideaways.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
