The Patriot Post® · SCOTUS Weighs Some Huge Cases

These days, it seems that every election is The Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes. Similarly, given the Left’s penchant for lawfare, it seems that each Supreme Court term is also of monumental importance.

This year, with the exception of their recent and glorious Louisiana v. Calais decision, the justices have saved the best for last, with rulings expected in the coming weeks on birthright citizenship for illegals, the states’ ability to keep trannies out of women’s sports, Trump’s ability to fire deep-staters and fed governors and his ability to remove “protected” status from certain illegals, and whether “Election Day” is really election day.

Of all these, the biggie is Trump v. Barbara, which is the birthright citizenship case. We’ve spilled plenty of ink on this matter over the years, and we all know that the framers of the 14th Amendment, which is at issue here, would be slack-jawed by how their words and their meaning have been twisted over the past 150 years or so, and the grave damage that has resulted.

Briefly put, these framers meant to ensure the rights of former slaves; they never meant to invite an invasion of our country.

If anything can be gleaned from the oral arguments of a few months back, the High Court appears deeply skeptical of the Trump administration’s argument. But I have a cockamamie theory: Maybe, just maybe, the Court’s conservatives are playing possum. Maybe, in the wake of the Dobbs leak and subsequent near-deadly fiasco a couple of years ago, the conservative justices intentionally appeared skeptical of overturning birthright citizenship because they didn’t want a riot, didn’t want leftists to, well, murder them. And maybe, just maybe, they surprise us by doing the right thing. (Hey, a guy can dream, can’t he?)

Alas, even Donald Trump thinks the writing is on the wall, having predicted that the Court will be “ruling against us on Birthright Citizenship, making us the only Country in the World that practices this unsustainable, unsafe, and incredibly costly DISASTER.”

As Samuel Kimzey writes at The Federalist, nothing less than our national sovereignty is at stake here:

A Supreme Court decision against Trump on this issue will be a major blow, and yet there are still many departmentalist methods of attack for the Trump administration to advance his position. Nevertheless, it would be immensely helpful for the court to uphold President Trump’s order on this issue, even if much work remains to be done to restore the founders’ understanding of American citizenship.

Again, though, Section I of the 14th Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside.”

And here I ask again: What part of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” don’t these learned people understand?

CBS’s Melissa Quinn provides a helpful — if left-leaning — run-down of the cases. Among them are Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot, both of which involve Trump’s efforts to get rid of so-called Temporary Protected Status, a statute that was signed into law in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, mostly to protect refugees from then-war-torn El Salvador.

As Quinn deceptively reports, “As part of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, the Department of Homeland Security has moved to rescind temporary legal protections for people from more than a dozen countries. The Supreme Court is currently weighing efforts to end the program known as Temporary Protected Status for more than 356,000 immigrants from Syria and Haiti.”

So, you see, this is Trump’s “immigration crackdown,” not his illegal immigration crackdown or, even more precisely, his effort to uphold the duly enacted immigration laws of the United States.

Today, though, TPS seems like another diabolical means through which the Democrat Party can mint new Democrat voters by claiming that they’re fleeing strife in their home countries. (Hey, what country doesn’t have a little strife?) Think about it: There’s a natural stickiness to illegal immigrants — meaning the longer they’re in the country, the tougher it is to remove them. And so, by giving these illegals this “Temporary Protected Status,” the Democrats can handcuff Trump or any other Rule of Law president and thereby run out the clock on his ability to remove illegals for the remainder of his term.

This decision is a big deal, because it’ll have implications for more than one million immigrants from the 13 s**thole countries from which Trump has sought to end this Democrat voter-manufacturing scam.

Another crucial case involves election law — specifically, mail-in ballots and whether they can arrive after Election Day. As Quinn reports, “Fourteen states and the District of Columbia accept late-arriving mail ballots, and 29 states and D.C. allow at least some military and overseas ballots to be received after Election Day. But in the case before the Supreme Court, the Republican National Committee argued that these so-called grace periods conflict with federal statutes that set Election Day as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.”

In short, is Election Day what its name says it is?

But, as Quinn predictably puts it, “Mr. Trump frequently rails against mail voting, claiming [wait for it!] without evidence that it invites election fraud. His administration backed the Republican National Committee in the case and urged the Supreme Court to invalidate Mississippi’s grace period.”

The High Court will also hear a campaign finance case, brought in 2022 by then-Senate candidate JD Vance and others, that argues the federal government has no right to limit how much money a political action committee can spend in coordination with the candidates it favors. Here, I can’t help but wonder: What part of “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” do Democrats still not understand?

So-called campaign finance reform was a pet project of the late Senator John McCain — so much so that he coauthored the dubious McCain-Feingold bill, a speech-suppressing statute signed into law by George W. Bush in 2002.

Say what you will about that Trump-deranged octogenarian Mitch McConnell, but he was dead-on about this issue, and his 2003 Supreme Court challenge to it — McConnell v. Federal Election Commission — was the first salvo in the war to undo McCain-Feingold’s onerous restrictions on speech.

Democrats are now the Party of Money, so they should be happy if the Supreme Court sides with the Trump administration in this case. But the rest of us should also be happy, lest the federal government think it has the right to control our political speech.

Finally, the Supremes will decide United States v. Hemani, which centers on a dope-smoking Texan named Ali Hemani, who was charged with a felony for having a gun while being an unlawful drug user. Among Hemani’s supporters are the once-proud American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association.

Gnarly, dudes. Talk about strange bedfellows.