Obviously, the Supreme Court’s ruling on anchor babies in Trump v. Barbara is ridiculous. Chief Justice John Roberts, along with the Papist nut and the three witches, has apparently decided the “FREE MONEY” sign on our border was not good enough. We need to give the third world an even bigger incentive to flock here. Henceforth, we will lure illegal aliens with the guarantee of American citizenship for any kids they give birth to on U.S. soil. Welcome Hamas! (And you thought Democratic primaries were already wild!)

Inasmuch as no one on TV seems to have bothered reading the opinions, here are a few highlights.

1) Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissent is a tour de force. It will go down in history with Justice Benjamin Curtis’s dissent in Dred Scott and Justice Frank Murphy’s dissent in Korematsu. (It’s also a good primer for snowbirds, who plan to avoid state taxes by moving to Florida, on the vital importance and clear legal meaning of “domicile.”)

By contrast, Roberts’s opinion for the court will go down with Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, finding that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination against transgender employees — a ruling that was so embarrassing it was immediately ignored by everyone, including Gorsuch. That was clear this week, when, for the fourth time since Bostock, the court rejected similar claims by transgenders.

2) I’m sorry to mention that, inasmuch as Gorsuch was on the right side of the anchor baby case. Which reminds me, could the conservatives confidently informing us that anchor babies are required by the constitution (Bill O'Reilly, John Yoo, The Wall Street Journal, etc.) cite a single other case with Roberts on one side and Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the other, where Roberts was right? How about that terrific Obamacare ruling, deeply grounded in the text of the constitution?

3) Thomas’s central point — appalling to liberals, but true nonetheless — is that the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to overrule Dred Scott, which held that Black Americans were not citizens and therefore could not sue in federal court.

Black slaves and freedmen alike, Thomas writes, “were unambiguously Americans. They were not foreigners. They were not aliens. They owed no foreign allegiance.” He quotes Frederick Douglass’s plea for the citizenship of blacks: “We address you not as aliens nor as exiles … We are Americans.”

In response to Thomas’s manifestly obvious point that the Fourteenth Amendment was “enacted … with the one pervading purpose of securing equal citizenship for the freed slaves,” the great legal scholar Justice Ketanji Jackson ripostes: “The teacher who scolds a student for bullying a classmate hopes the student learns the broader lesson of treating everyone with kindness, not just that one kid.”

3) In his 91-page dissent, Thomas cites 42 legal cases, 19 historical letters or diplomatic dispatches, 6 formal Attorney General opinions and 11 statutes, including The Civil Rights Act of 1866, The Expatriation Act of 1868 and the Naturalization Acts of 1790, 1795 and 1802. All directly on point.

This, Roberts calls “scant evidence.” Whereas he cites a mighty three cases for his majority opinion: an inapposite one from Britain; the opinion of a New York assistant vice chancellor in an 1844 inheritance dispute in New York (BIG, if true); and one, Wong Kim Ark — the “strongest support for today’s decision,” as Alito put it — using dubious dicta from a wandering opinion that primarily relied on the parents having been “legally domiciled” in the U.S. when the child was born. Not to be confused with, “living here illegally.” (Or “wintering in Palm Beach.”)

It’s as if Roberts didn’t realize the case was about kids born to illegal aliens.

5) Roberts’s weirdest citation is to an 1872 letter from Attorney General George Williams describing Francois Heinrich, a child born to Austrian parents while they were “temporarily residing” in New York City, as having been “originally clothed with American nationality.”

Wow, great quote. But one thing Roberts neglects to mention — it falls to Thomas to do so — is that the child’s claim to American citizenship was then promptly denied by Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, who proclaimed Heinrich “an Austrian subject …not an American citizen.”

6) Alito’s dissent includes a lengthy description of the border states’ many attempts to deal with the crisis of illegal immigration, but being repeatedly thwarted by the federal government — including the Supreme Court, “from the comfort of chambers more than 1,000 miles from the southern border.”

Here’s one I did not know from the Biden years: After Border Patrol officers ripped down the barbed wire fencing Texas had erected on the border, “federal officers installed a climbing rope on the Texas side of the river.”

A climbing rope for illegals!

7) Alito demolishes Roberts’s argument that “the British rule of birthright subjecthood” was, with minor exceptions, “transplanted intact to American soil.” As indicated by the devastating phrase “birthright subjecthood,” the British rule did not concern “citizenship” at all:

“There was no such thing as a ‘citizen’ of England, Scotland or Ireland. The inhabitants of the British Isles were the King’s ‘subjects’ [and his] authority was understood to come from God. … The Declaration of Independence emphatically rejected the British theory of government. It proclaimed that governments "deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed,‘ not divine right.”

As Alito says, how ironic that Roberts makes this profoundly ahistorical claim only days before we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our Declaration.

It’s one thing for Roberts to forget the Civil War. Liberals do that all the time, quickly turning the 14th Amendment into an instrument for the advancement of gays, immigrants, lesbians, the disabled, etc. — wait, what were you saying about slavery? But to forget the American Revolution sounds more like galloping Alzheimer’s.

In light of the court’s majority opinion requiring the country to commit suicide, how about we agree to take all of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East in exchange for deporting Roberts?

COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTER