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Unsurprisingly—and even worse—Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson elides important historical and practical context in her separate concurrence to sharply attack Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissent.

Today, billions of people around the world would seek to come to the United States absent significant immigration limits. Tens of millions have entered illegally in recent years, and an entire industry has emerged enabling foreigners to travel to U.S. territory specifically to deliver a child who automatically gains citizenship. These modern realities create powerful incentives and enforcement challenges that simply did not exist in 1868.

In that context, it is fair and reasonable to conclude that the original public understanding of the 14th Amendment was centered on securing citizenship for freed slaves and their children after the Civil War and Dred Scott v. Sandford. The framers had no concept of birth tourism or the need for strict, large-scale immigration controls.

Background

In 1857, Dred Scott v. Sandford denied citizenship to Black Americans. The Civil War (1861–1865) produced horrific casualties—roughly 620,000–750,000 dead, a scale equivalent to millions in today’s population—to end slavery. Congress responded with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared that all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power (excluding Indians not taxed) were citizens, with the primary aim of protecting freed Black Americans. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, embedded this principle in the Constitution—“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens…”—to safeguard it against future repeal, legislation, or executive action.

In 1898, United States v. Wong Kim Ark addressed the citizenship of a child born in the U.S. to Chinese parents who were permanently and legally domiciled residents. The Court held he was a citizen, frequently referencing the parents’ domicile. It did not involve or address birth tourism or children of temporary visitors or illegal entrants.

The 2026 Decision and Jackson’s Concurrence

In Trump v. Barbara, five justices ruled that the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause includes birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens. Four justices ruled it did not.

Justice Jackson wrote a separate concurrence primarily to criticize Thomas. She used unusually inflammatory language, accusing his dissent of being “even worse” for supposedly eliding the “anticaste, antisubordination reset” purpose of the Reconstruction Amendments and contradicting his general commitment to a “colorblind” Constitution. This personal and rhetorical escalation was unnecessary. The majority opinion already addressed the constitutional question. Jackson’s concurrence added little new legal analysis while turning a serious interpretive disagreement into a pointed personal rebuke.

Thomas’s dissent, while lengthy and vigorous, engaged the historical record on the Clause’s focus during Reconstruction. Reasonable originalists can debate how the 1868 understanding of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” applies to today’s vastly different world of mass migration and deliberate birth tourism. Jackson’s framing downplays those changed circumstances and the framers’ narrower remedial focus.

The concurrence was not needed to resolve the case. It served mainly to signal broader ideological disagreement in unusually sharp terms.

Brivael Le Pogam-

The Road to Hell is Always Paved with Good Intentions

When I see the younger generation demanding more and more Marxism, more socialism, more State, more “planning” to fix a world they’ve been taught to hate—I don’t feel like snickering. I feel like screaming.

Because I recognize the opening chapter of a story whose final page I know all too well.

That story, a man wrote in 1944, under the bombs. Friedrich Hayek. The book: The Road to Serfdom. And he dedicated it—read carefully—“to the socialists of all parties.” Not out of contempt. Out of affection. Out of urgency. Because he had seen, with his own eyes, an entire Europe tip over the edge.

Remember this, it’s the heart of it all: totalitarianism never starts with monsters. It starts with good people.

It starts with idealists who want the common good. Generous young people who can’t stand injustice anymore. Soft, consensus-driven parties that promise to fix everything if you just give them a little more power. The problem isn’t their intentions. The problem is the mechanism they set in motion.

Here’s that mechanism. Follow it, it’s relentless.

To plan an economy, you need a single decision where there were once millions of free choices. So you have to concentrate power. But no society ever agrees on a single plan—everyone has their own ends, their dreams, their priorities. The planner then hits a wall: disagreement. And disagreement becomes an obstacle to eliminate. You start by persuading. Then by coercing. Then by silencing. Not out of sadism—out of logical necessity. The plan demands that you crush what resists it.

And then comes Hayek’s most chilling chapter: “Why the Worst Get on Top.” In a system that demands total power, it’s not the best who win. It’s those who are ready for anything. The scrupulous man hesitates; the man without scruples acts. The collectivist machine, whatever its colors, mechanically selects the brutes.

Look at Germany. You’ve been told Hitler fell from the sky, an anomaly, an accident of evil. That’s false, and it’s dangerous to believe it. What Hayek understood was that Germany had spent half a century abandoning classical liberalism—the individual, rights, the market—in favor of the cult of organization, the collective, the State that knows better than you. The left and the right already shared the same premise: the individual must submit to the nation’s plan. Hitler didn’t have to build that machine. He found it already assembled, warmed up, ready. He just had to grab the wheel.

That’s the warning. Totalitarianism isn’t an ideology. It’s a structure. You can fill it with red, brown, any generous color you like. Once you’ve accepted that the individual must bend to the collective, that property is just a revocable privilege, that the freedom to trade, to speak, to innovate stops where “the common good” decreed from above begins—you’ve laid the tracks. The train, it’ll come on its own.

And it always comes with the world’s best intentions. Every step toward the abyss is justified, reasonable, compassionate. One more tax for the poor. One more control against the bad guys. One less freedom, but “just that one.” No one chooses servitude. You slide into it, one good intention after another.

So I’m tossing this bottle into the sea. To you who are twenty and on fire with passion. Your revolt against injustice is beautiful—keep it. But for the love of God, learn history. Read Hayek. Read what the 20th century really was, not the caricature they’re feeding you. The tens of millions of deaths it left behind weren’t killed by sadists from another world, but by systems built, at the outset, on dreams of justice.

Freedom isn’t the problem to fix. It’s the treasure they’re convincing you to sell off cheap.

Wake up.

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Capitalism is not merely “who owns the stuff and chases profit.” At its core, it is the free-market system of private property, voluntary exchange, and competition that harnesses the dispersed knowledge, local insights, and self-interested decisions of millions of producers and consumers. This decentralized process outperforms any central authority at discovering prices, allocating scarce resources, and driving innovation and abundance.

Socialism, whether framed as “the people owning the means of production” or gentler democratic variants, still requires centralized control—through government or collective mandates—to override individual property rights and market signals. This inevitably ignores incentives, distorts information, and produces shortages, stagnation, and coercion. Real-world examples abound: the Soviet Union’s collapse, Venezuela’s economic ruin, and even China’s need to introduce market reforms to escape poverty. No socialist system has ever delivered sustained prosperity; it only allocates scarcity while eroding freedom.

Capitalism feeds the table. Socialism empties it.

https://www.newsweek.com/data-vs-drama-the-20-year-legacy-of-al-gores-climate-warnings-opinion-11967262

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Ensuring the integrity of voting is essential for public confidence in our federal elections. One important question is the potential extent of non-citizen voting.

Estimates indicate there are up to 12 million undocumented adults in the United States who are largely outside the active federal immigration tracking system and that use false, borrowed, stolen, or fraudulent documents for employment, identification, and daily life.

In several states, individuals are automatically registered to vote when obtaining or renewing a driver’s license unless they explicitly opt out or self-identify as a non-citizen. Additionally, certain states automatically send mail-in ballots to all registered voters and permit third-party ballot collection (sometimes called ballot harvesting), with varying levels of restrictions.

States with automatic mail ballots include: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and others with broad policies. Several of these also allow third parties to return ballots on behalf of voters.

Given the combination of a large undocumented population with questionable documents, automatic registration mechanisms, widespread mail-in voting, and ballot collection practices, there is a plausible pathway for non-citizens to end up registered and casting ballots — whether intentionally or through error.

While some claim this issue has been thoroughly investigated and that audits show non-citizen voting is extremely rare, those studies have a fatal flaw: They only compare voter rolls against federal databases of known legal immigrants or naturalized citizens. They ignore undocumented individuals who are not in those systems and who may be using fraudulent identification.

A relatively straightforward solution is a well-designed pilot study. Select one or more precincts with a priori risk factors (high immigrant concentrations, automatic registration, mail-in voting). Draw a statistically significant random sample of registered voters or cast ballots, then commit sufficient resources to thoroughly verify citizenship and eligibility.

The study would not be used to prosecute or punish individuals. Participants could receive incentives for cooperation. A sample of approximately 3,000–5,000 voters in a high-risk district like California’s 40th Congressional District would provide a meaningful signal about whether non-citizen voting reaches around 1% or higher.

The cost would be modest compared to the value of credible, transparent data on election integrity — data that could either confirm concerns or reassure the public.

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