Trump Attends Supreme Court Birthright Citizenship Hearing

President Trump Attends Supreme Court Arguments Involving His Birthright Citizenship Order — Source: Al Drago / Getty

Look, we all knew from President Donald Trump’s first day back in office, when he signed an executive order to limit birthright citizenship, that his war on birthright citizenship was just an extension of his white nationalist, vehemently xenophobic war on immigration in general.

The president is a racist bigot, who hates Black and brown foreigners, as do his cultists and constituents, and that’s all there is to the MAGA agenda.

So, it should surprise no one that now that the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear the Trump administration’s anti-birthright citizenship case on Wednesday, and according to the New York Times, Donald Trump himself showed up to the court on Wednesday morning to hear the arguments challenging his executive order.

Trump officials are citing the wisdom of Jim Crow-era white supremacists to justify ending the constitutional protection, even as the president invokes the “BABIES OF SLAVES” in relaying his understanding of the true intent of the Fourteenth Amendment.

According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration is following the playbook of Alexander Porter Morse, a Confederate officer during the Civil War and a Louisiana attorney, who argued for legalized segregation in the landmark 1896 Supreme Court case that established the “separate but equal” doctrine and Jim Crow laws.

From the Post:

The Trump administration has tapped Morse as an authority in its push to upend long-settled law that virtually everyone born in the United States is a citizen.

Over a century ago, Morse was among a trio of thinkers who spearheaded a failed effort — steeped in anti-Black and anti-Chinese racism — to erase birthright citizenship. The Trump administration is reviving their arguments to make its case today, some legal scholars say.

The administration is citing arguments “built on a racist foundation,” Justin Sadowsky, an attorney for the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance (CALDA), wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief.

Lucy Salyer, a University of New Hampshire history professor who has written on Morse and others, said she was struck that the Trump administration had chosen to elevate those figures and their ideas: “If you know the history and the broader context of what they were trying to achieve, it does ring alarm bells.

Asked why it was relying on the words and ideology of an impassioned racist and segregationist to make its case, the Trump administration didn’t deny citing Morse and his compatriots, but instead pointed to a brief in which it wrote, “This Court has repeatedly cited their work in other contexts.”

In other words: Sure, we’re invoking a white supremacist of yesteryear to bolster white supremacy today, but this sin’t the Court’s first white supremacist rodeo, so why are you even trippin’?

But please, tell us more about how Trump isn’t racist, nor is his administration.

Speaking of Trump, while his officials are touting the framework of an anti-Black racist, the president is taking a different approach by reminding Americans that birthright citizenship was intended to correct the evils of slavery, a subject Trump would sooner ban into un-woke oblivion rather than discuss in any other context.

“Birthright Citizenship is not about rich people from China, and the rest of the World, who want their children, and hundreds of thousands more, FOR PAY, to ridiculously become citizens of the United States of America,” Trump posted on Truth Social Monday. “It is about the BABIES OF SLAVES! We are the only Country in the World that dignifies this subject with even discussion. Look at the dates of this long ago legislation – THE EXACT END OF THE CIVIL WAR!”

Trump also used the same “babies of slaves” verbiage that he used last year, when speaking about his objection to brown people being naturalized just because they were born here.

While it is true that the Fourteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution in 1868 as an effort to protect recently freed enslaved people from deportation, it also gives U.S. citizenship to all children born in the country, and it wouldn’t be the first time legislation or court decisions were expanded to include other people and circumstances. For example, the Trump administration has often cited Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — which was intended to protect Black people from government-sanctioned second-class citizenship — in pushing legislation to fight fictional anti-white discrimination since the very start of the president’s second term.

Besides all that, it’s just interesting that Trump would even mention the “babies of slaves” as his administration continues its efforts to remove or defund Black history, and purges Black history exhibits from national parks and federally-controlled museums. Hell, under Trump, the U.S. recently became one of three nations to decline to sign a resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans to be “the gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs.”

Leave it to a demonstrable white nationalist to offer impromptu slavery lessons when it’s convenient for his current agenda.

“The World is getting rich selling citizenships to our Country, while at the same time laughing at how STUPID our U.S. Court System has become (TARIFFS!),” Trump’s post continued, referring to his economy-eroding tariff agenda being struck down by the Supreme Court last month. “Dumb Judges and Justices will not a great Country make!”

No, no — it’s definitely smart to publicly call Supreme Court justices “dumb” two days before those same justices are scheduled to hear your birthright citizenship case. That’ll win them over.

The only thing worse than a racist idiot is a racist idiot who has been elected to the White House twice.

Sad.