SCOTUS Citizenship Decision Demands Legal System Overhaul

The Roberts Court just handed down a majority birthplace citizenship decision on the legal level of Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade. No judge who calls himself an originalist, textualist, or in any way claims dedication to American rule of law could support the 5-4 majority in Trump v. Barbara.

As the dissents and much other scholarly work show plainly and definitively, the 14th Amendment simply does not say that anyone who happens to be born on U.S. soil thereby magically becomes a U.S. citizen. “Subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” It’s not legally or verbally complicated.

It’s also not philosophically complicated. The American founders and the 14th Amendment framers’ understanding of citizenship has always been rooted in the consent of the governed, in an explicit rejection of the medieval subjectship Chief Justice John Roberts employed as the basis for his anti-American ruling. While Kavanaugh’s compromise position has legal and prudential merit, there is simply no legal, cultural, practical, or philosophical justification in legitimately American jurisprudence for Roberts’ majority.

The simplest way to know that’s true, for judges who can’t think their way out of a Washington Post editorial-lashing, is if you’re ruling with Ketanji “I don’t understand” Brown Jackson and against Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, you’re wrong.

That a court with six Republican-appointed justices could hand down such a patently un-American, anti-Constitutional decision is an indictment of America’s rogue legal system. It only accents the scores of horrific decisions coming daily out of the federal judiciary in the age of Trump that Roberts has abandoned his duty, as chief magistrate, to curb.

It’s past time that elected officials of the party that claims to love the Constitution and its principles made substantive reforms to a legal system that seems incapable of producing three or four other justices — let alone a federal bench — worthy of Thomas’ and Alito’s legacies out of the 350 million people in the greatest country in the world.

The second Trump administration has made some small progress in this direction by pushing big law firms to dollop a soupçon of pro bono work on non-leftist causes, and canceling federal contracts with firms that helped foment the Spygate coup. Both of these, however, have been under inevitable litigation. They also don’t go anywhere near far enough.

Many other things can and must be done to redress the existential crisis that is an American legal profession increasingly dedicated to anti-Constitution law. Like many problems with domestic communism, many of the legal profession’s evils germinate in publicly subsidized educational institutions. Luckily, those are controlled by elected officials.

Here, Republican-run states that wish to demonstrate seriousness about Republican officeholders’ professed love for American principles can take big action. So can the Trump administration, for it can — and should — ditch the leftist monopoly that currently controls virtually all of U.S. legal education, the American Bar Association.

In concert, Republican states and the Trump administration must stand up one or several competing, federally approved law school accreditors and post-graduation professional associations. The Federalist Society should be able to field at least one of these new accreditors, and Republican states, perhaps through the Republican Attorneys General Association, should field another. Monopolies drive up costs and drive down quality, so the ABA shouldn’t be replaced by another single entity.

Once the ABA has replacements, those replacements should begin threatening the ability of law schools to accept federal student loans if the schools’ curriculum or teachers push unconstitutional race and sex discrimination (commonly known as “DEI”). They should do a reverse “march through the institutions” to eradicate and punish race and sex Marxism in any and all taxpayer-funded “education” institutions. Put Chris Rufo on the accreditation board; he’ll know what to do.

A component of dethroning the ABA needs to be replacing it and state licensing boards’ control of the legal profession. Both work to make the profession more leftist while often failing to uphold their supposed reason for existing, which is to disbar criminal and immoral lawyers. Their corruption is why leftist pressure campaigns can use these entities to bankrupt any lawyers who dare defend a conservative, from John Eastman to Ed Martin to Jeff Clark to garden-variety lawyers in Wisconsin. This Stalinist show-trial-enabling ecosystem needs to be erased. Just pretend it’s two weeks from getting a nuke!

Many Republican-run states also allow bureaucrats to create lists of judges for officeholders to pick from when nominating, which obviously tends to reward and promote cowardly and weak judges rather than judges who courageously defend traditional American rule of law. That practice needs to end, yesterday. Judges like the 9th Circuit’s Lawrence VanDyke need to be promoted, given law school fetes and visiting professorships, and all the other honors currently purposefully denied to effective constitutionalists in law.

Republican-run states also need to raze and replace state law schools. Law school faculty trend communist. It is completely unacceptable and un-American to keep any communists on public payroll. If they have to dissolve their law schools to get rid of tenured communists, state lawmakers should be prepared to do so. They can simply revoke the charter of the current school and immediately institute a charter for a replacement that obtains its appropriations, buildings, and other assets but not liabilities such as law professors who teach future judges and lawyers to hate America.

Conservative lawyers, judges, and legal organizations also need to step up their vetting game. Numerous Federalist Society law student members have told me the organization regularly elevates people not dedicated to constitutional law who pretend to be such to obtain the Society’s professional opportunities. The same is true of judicial clerkships and fellowships within the conservative legal movement. Obviously that needs to end.

Judges and those in a position to promote any lawyer also need to follow Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito’s lead in diversifying their legal staffs beyond Ivy League law graduates. Those schools still do graduate a sprinkling of quality people each year, but enrolling in majority-anti-American legal training should be disincentivized as strongly as possible. Young people go to those schools because the name brand gives them career opportunities, not because those schools offer the best legal education.

Ivies and other top law schools such as Chicago and Notre Dame need to also be put on notice that their practice of hiring and promoting overwhelmingly leftist professors puts them at risk of losing federal funds. The grounds? Diminishing the quality of the legal education they give their students.

It’s legal education malpractice to refuse to expose law students to the legal traditions and philosophy that a) created our country’s legal system and b) more often than not win in today’s Supreme Court. No school that does this deserves accreditation, and the accreditors and the federal government backing them need to make that expectation known.

These individuals and institutions need to follow 5th Circuit Judge James Ho’s test of whether an applicant has personally suffered in defense of a classic understanding of American law. Everyone vetting lawyers and judges for jobs and promotions should be looking for concrete evidence of what it has cost an applicant to stand for his country’s historic way of life.

In a profession as Marxist as law, any genuinely constitutionally minded applicants should have ready answers. Those who just know keywords like “textualism” to drop in interviews should be filtered out, and those who have fought faithfully in the arena should be promoted. This is how republic-loving lawmakers and their staff should evaluate judicial applicants, the lawyers they hire as counsel, and frankly anyone they hire at all.

Yes, these are strong measures. Those are required at this late hour.

This nation has tens of millions of anchor babies and their descendants, up to one-quarter of the next generation. Millions more could be created tomorrow given how many foreigners are here illegally and legally. Under birthplace citizenship, all fraudulently obtain not just lifetime welfare but also voting abilities. That’s well more than enough to tip elections not just into the future but going back decades.

Those in leadership positions who are not ready to defend the country in response to this reality should resign, or be forced to.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist and the researcher and host for The Federalist’s forthcoming lawfare podcast series, “Overruled.” Her latest book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include the NEW “300 Classic Books for Ages 9 to Adult,” and the bestselling “Classic Books For Young Children.” An 20-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.