President Donald Trump walks by Supreme Court Justices as he arrives on the House floor to give his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) It’s a strange feeling to experience tremendous relief and great alarm at the same time.
That’s how I felt about the Supreme Court’s ruling on birthright citizenship, the final decision of a particularly destructive term for the court’s malignant majority.
I was relieved that the court rejected President Trump’s attempt to rewrite the Constitution by executive order. It would have been a giant leap down the road toward full-fledged dictatorship.
And I was alarmed that four justices were willing to go along with a ridiculous reinterpretation of a core constitutional principle that has been recognized since the 14th Amendment was passed after the Civil War. Conservative writer Jonathan V. Last wrote that the birthright citizenship ruling “wasn’t a win for constitutionalism” but “a warning.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called out the “ultimate irony” that “for all the talk about the detestable Dred Scott decision” — the notorious 1857 Supreme Court ruling that Black people could not be U.S. citizens — the Trump administration and the justices supporting it “propose a return to its core tenet,” which is “that for certain people, being born on American soil will not suffice to confer citizenship.”
While rejecting Trump’s order was the only defensible outcome, it was hard to be overly confident that the right-wing majority would do the right thing.
After all, they had just thrown out a century of legal precedent and bipartisan governance to do away with checks and balances established with the creation of independent agencies. That ruling twisted history and law beyond recognition to advance a major goal of the right-wing legal movement and Project 2025. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, the “egregiously wrong” decision shifts “tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the president’s hands.”
That would have been an irresponsible ruling at any time, but it’s catastrophically reckless right now. The power of the presidency is in the hands of an authoritarian. And his disregard for the law was already supercharged by a previous ruling giving him virtually unlimited immunity for lawbreaking he commits as president.
I don’t think it’s widely understood just how devastating the independent agency ruling could be in the hands of Trump, who can now expand the weaponization of government against his enemies virtually without limit. Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought will have greater power to implement his sadistic desire to traumatize and fire federal workers and limit the government’s ability to regulate corporate misconduct.
America and Americans will be less safe, less protected from polluters and predators and more vulnerable to the whims of a patently unwell president.
It is a sad irony that the Supreme Court’s granting of more king-like powers to Trump comes just as the U.S. is commemorating 250 years since the Declaration of Independence asserted that Americans will not be subjects of a tyrannical monarch.
The devastation wreaked by the Supreme Court majority in recent years, including its assault on voting rights and civil rights, and the close call on a citizenship case that the court shouldn’t even have considered, have made it urgently necessary to address the corruption of the court.
Our system of checks and balances is failing because people with power are failing to do their duty. The Roberts Court has broken new ground in deciding so many extremely consequential cases on its stealth docket, with secret votes rather than open argument. Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck told ProPublica that the pattern shows “a court going out of its way to enable Trump,” which he called a “real blow to the court’s credibility.”
Trump’s popularity is plummeting, weighed down by his boundless corruption, his indifference to Americans’ hardship and his fixation on building monuments to his own ego at taxpayers’ expense.
Recent primary elections and current general election polls show a lot of momentum for progressive politicians and platforms. But the change that Americans are hoping for will be squelched by a dishonorable court unless those same politicians are committed to reform.
There is momentum building for a set of three reforms that are backed by a broad pro-democracy coalition. This includes: an 18-year term limit on Supreme Court justices, an enforceable code of ethics for Supreme Court justices and an expansion of the size of the Supreme Court under the next pro-democracy president.
The goal is to restore balance and accountability to a Supreme Court whose right-wing majority is squandering its legitimacy to advance a harmful political agenda.
That prospect may alarm the conservative operatives and billionaires who bought themselves a court thinking they could shut down progressive change for a generation. But it promises relief to all of us who want the court to fulfill its constitutional duty to uphold the law and be an instrument of justice for all.
Svante Myrick is president of People For the American Way.
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