It Should Have Been 9–0

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I’m standing in a diner parking lot in the middle of nowhere, Michigan. It’s hot as hell, I just walked out of breakfast with my family, and I’m about to go kayaking with my kid — which, for the record, matters more than anything I’m about to write. But I can’t let this one go. Not today.

Because today the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, and I’m grateful they did. I mean that. It’s the right call. But here’s the thing nobody wants to sit with: it should have been nine to nothing.

This was the easiest, plainest ruling any of these nine people will ever make. The 14th Amendment says what it says. A first-year law student gets this one right. A kid in a middle school civics class gets this one right. The final vote was 6–3 — six justices upheld birthright citizenship, with Chief Justice Roberts writing the majority in genuinely beautiful language:

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land’ [...] We keep that promise today.”

Great. Mean it. So why couldn’t they all sign onto that sentence?

Because three of them — three — couldn’t get there. Three justices looked at the plainest words in the Constitution and dissented, essentially arguing that the President of the United States can narrow them by decree.

That is complete and total horseshit.

Brett Kavanaugh joined the majority to strike the order down — good, credit where it’s due — but he dissented in part, and *how* he got there is the whole tell. Kavanaugh rested his vote on a federal law, not on the Constitution. Read that again. He would not say that the Constitution *itself* guarantees birthright citizenship. He needed a statute to lean on. And a right that only stands because Congress propped it up is a right that stops standing the day Congress — or a president strong-arming Congress — kicks the prop out. So count it honestly: Three justices flat-out dissented, and a fourth voted the right way for the most dangerous reason on the menu. The vote was 6-3. The rot is deeper than the scoreboard.

Just Imagine if Joe Biden was President and signs an executive order tomorrow that says, “There’s no Second Amendment anymore. Nobody owns a gun, and I’m sending federal agents to come collect them.” Imagine the meltdown. Imagine these same justices “discovering” the limits of executive power in about nine seconds flat. They would never let a Democrat do what they’re carving out room for Trump to do. Never.

So no, I’m not spiking the football over a 6–3. I’m telling you what the 6–3 reveals. Three justices would have let a president rewrite the Constitution outright, and a fourth thinks he can in principle. When four people on the highest court in the land are unable or unwilling to fully commit to the idea that a president can’t erase the Constitution with a Sharpie, the court isn’t a court anymore. It’s an operation.

This was never just one ruling

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Because the same day, they gutted what’s left of our campaign finance laws — opening the door to complete and total coordination with party committees.

I’ve worked in this space for two decades. There used to be rules. Lines you couldn’t cross. Now? Everybody’s self-governing, which is a polite way of saying there are no rules at all. No guardrails. No checks on consolidated power.

And guess who that helps? It helps the billionaires. It helps Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and every oligarch who’d rather buy an election than win an argument. Every one of these rulings does the exact same thing — it puts a little more distance between you and your own elected officials. Between you and your own power.

That’s the throughline. That’s the project. Birthright citizenship was the headline. The fine print is everything else.

Meanwhile NPR runs a story that Chief Justice Samuel Alito is finally retiring, then yanks it back an hour later, and now the whole internet is swimming in garbage information and nobody knows what’s true. For the record — selfishly — I hope Alito stays. I hope he’s arrogant enough to cling to that seat the way Thomas seems determined to, so a Democratic president gets the pick. But that’s a sideshow. The main event is the rot.

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Don’t let them sell you the false equivalence

Here’s the one that’s got them all mad at me. Justice Sonia Sotomayor — a fantastic justice — received something like $4,000 in Bad Bunny tickets from a record label which has the rapper as one of its clients. And Republicans are out here clutching their pearls, trying to tell you that’s the same as Alito and Thomas taking lavish, all-expenses-paid vacations from billionaires like Paul Singer. People with actual business in front of the Court.

Give me a break. I said it on Twitter yesterday and I’ll say it again: when Benito has a case in front of the Supreme Court, then I’ll be worried about her tickets. Ban all of it — I don’t think any justice should be taking that stuff. But don’t you dare tell me a concert ticket and a billionaire buying influence over the people deciding his lawsuits are the same animal. They are not.

The right has built a whole religion around the Founders. They love to scream about the Founders. They do. “Oh, the Founders intended this. Oh, the Constitution, blah, blah, blah.” They don’t give a damn about the Founders. If they did, we wouldn’t have a court where three of the current justices worked on the Bush v. Gore side that stole the 2000 election from Al Gore. We wouldn’t have a ruling that hands a president near-total immunity for crimes he commits in office. What world is that justice? Where did the Founders intend that?

They gutted the Voting Rights Act. They made gerrymandering easier than it’s ever been. They kicked reproductive freedom back to the states, and more than half of states turned around and stripped women of rights they’d had for 50 years. And people are literally dying because of this. This isn’t a philosophy. It’s pure, outright power and corruption wearing a robe and wielding a gavel.

And make no mistake about where it’s headed: a permanent oligarchy. The Epstein class. A political class that does nothing, that doesn’t give a damn about you or me, locked into power for a generation. If Trump gets to appoint more of these justices — if he builds a majority that genuinely believes a Republican president can rewrite the Constitution by decree — then the president gets to do whatever the hell he wants. He basically already can.

You are less free than you were. Less safe. Less powerful. That’s not opinion. That’s the scoreboard.

So here’s what we do about it:

The Republican Party is gone — it’s the party of Donald Trump now, and it exists to give him and his people unprecedented power. The only way they win is by cheating, and they will break every rule that’s left to do it. The mid-decade gerrymandering. The SAVE Act. All of it.

And here’s the hard truth for my own side: we cannot keep playing by a different set of rules than these people. We’re the party that’s supposed to care about ethics and morality and doing it right — and that instinct is inherently good, but it’s getting us slaughtered against an opponent that has no instinct at all except winning. Honor doesn’t mean bringing a pamphlet to a knife fight.

So when we have the power, we must use it — relentlessly. We expand the Supreme Court. We restore some basic semblance of justice and dignity and fairness to it. Not “reform” — though I support reform — but expansion. We put serious people on it. People who take the job seriously, who’ll have a real debate about what the Constitution actually says and how it protects our freedoms, instead of operatives running cover for a party that has lost it’s soul.

And the good news? More and more people get it. Pete Buttigieg gets it. Jon Ossoff gets it. J.B. Pritzker gets it. AOC gets it. There are real fighters out there, and there are more of them every single day. So when we get the chance, we don’t flinch and we don’t apologize for it. We bury these guys politically — for a generation. To save the middle class. To save our democracy. To save the country.

That’s the assignment.

But here’s the most important thing I’ll say all day. My son is out by the shoreline right now, beckoning me to get in the kayak. And I’m going to go.

Not because the fight doesn’t matter — it matters more than almost anything I can name. I’m going because the fight is long, and the people on the other side are counting on exactly one thing: that we burn out. That we get cynical, throw up our hands, and decide it’s all hopeless and rigged and there’s nothing we can do. That’s the whole play. Every ruling we just talked about is designed to make you feel powerless so you stop showing up. Don’t give it to them.

So I’m going to go be a father for a few hours. Get on the water with my kid, and remember in my bones exactly what I’m fighting for. And then I’m coming back and getting right back to work — and I want you to do the same.

That’s the model. Love the people in front of you. Then fight like hell for them. And for the country they’re going to inherit. Both. Always both. Burn clean, not out — because a movement of exhausted, cynical people loses, and a movement of clear-eyed people who refuses to stop leaning into moments of joy — no matter how big or small — is unstoppable.

We expand the Court. We build a new party. We swing the pendulum back on these guys so hard they don’t know what hit them. And we do it as whole people — because that life on the water, with the people you love, is the thing we’re trying to protect.

Now go get in the fight. Then go get on the water.

God bless you guys. Love you. Happy Fourth.