Sparks: Supreme court to release opinions with several high-stakes rulings to come including birthright citizenship - US politics live
Designing a republic requires that the fundamental definition of the citizen remains anchored in a structural mechanism of birth and soil, lest the shifting whims of a temporary executive dismantle the very foundation of the national union.
Observing the legal body politic from my breakfast table, I find that these judicial spasms over citizenship resemble a physician’s attempt to reclassify the blood type of a patient who has thrived on the original diagnosis for centuries.
If a man is born under the protection of our flag, and owes his primary allegiance to our laws, then no decree from a high bench can justly strip him of the title that his own birthright confers.
America is the only country where a man can be born, pay taxes, and raise a family for forty years before nine folks in black robes decide if he was actually there the whole time.
Seeking to define the borders of the soul by drawing lines in the dust only ensures that the wind will eventually blow the dust into the eyes of the judges.
Cataloguing the legal status of a population requires a fixed point of observation, yet this current judicial revision introduces a parallax error that threatens the entire recorded history of our civic measurements.
Putting a new lock on the door of citizenship will hardly keep the house secure if the judges inside spend their time arguing over who had the right to be born in the hallway.
Nothing is so fatal to the charm of a nation as the sudden realization that its most solemn constitutional promises were merely the opening lines of a very long and tedious legal joke.
Lying awake in this iron house, I hear the sharpened pens of the high court scratching away the names of those who believed the walls offered them a permanent home.
Men in heavy robes sit in a marble palace and use ink to tell a mother that the child she bore on this earth does not belong to the soil beneath its feet.
Attempting to restrict the flow of human potential by adjusting the legal frequency of citizenship is as futile as trying to stop the transmission of energy through a vacuum by changing the name of the ether.
We are told that citizenship is a designed privilege, yet history shows it is a trait that accumulates through the slow, unmanaged migration of populations responding to the pressures of their environment.
The law-writers talk about who belongs to this land, but they never ask the woman who labored in the sun to give her children a name that no gavel should be able to strike down.
It is a most enlightened arrangement that a child may be born a citizen on Monday and become a trespasser by Tuesday, provided the judges have finished their lunch and polished their Latin in the meantime.
The government is getting ready to explain that being born in America is a fine thing, provided you were careful enough to select the right parents before you made your grand entrance.
‘The Court will clarify the parameters of belonging’; notice how the noun ‘belonging’ is treated as a physical property to be measured by the very people who have already decided to foreclose on the house.
Counting the names on these dockets reveals that the law only rediscovers its appetite for strict interpretation when the faces in the ledger belong to those the mob has already marked for removal.