00:00I'm a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, and there's one huge downside to the Supreme
00:03Court's important decision today, holding that birthright citizenship is a fundamental
00:07right under the Constitution.
00:09It should have been unanimous, but it was not.
00:12In fact, it was five to four.
00:14The opinion for the court was written by Chief Justice Roberts, and he was joined by the
00:18court's three liberals, as well as by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
00:22Four conservative justices dissented.
00:24Four justices of the Supreme Court wanted to take away a right going back to the 14th
00:29Amendment and truthfully beyond that, affirmed by the Supreme Court since 1898, that says
00:34that if you're born in the United States, you become a citizen.
00:37I think we can now call those four justices the Four Horsemen.
00:40That's the nickname that was given in the 1930s to the arch conservatives who tried to block
00:44wage and hour and all kinds of other progressive legislation.
00:47Today, that's Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch.
00:52On issue after issue after issue, they are adopting positions that are not consistent
00:57with their jurisprudence that's supposed to exist, which is supposed to be originalist,
01:01but instead are adopting positions that are consistent with contemporary conservative
01:06political ideology.
01:08Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett are not going down that same road.
01:12They are profoundly conservative people.
01:14They voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Voting Rights Act, all kinds of things that I think
01:17are absolutely terrible from a logical and constitutional perspective.
01:20But that said, Roberts and Barrett will follow their conservative jurisprudential principles
01:26to the conclusion that Donald Trump is wrong when Donald Trump is, in fact, constitutionally
01:31wrong.
01:31What's going on here is that the Constitution says explicitly that all citizens born in the
01:36United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens.
01:40And the extreme conservatives following Donald Trump want to try to say that despite those
01:45words, somehow there's a way to say that if you're not in the United States legally, you're
01:49not under the jurisdiction of the United States.
01:51Under the jurisdiction means to any lawyer that the laws apply to you.
01:56And if you're here in the United States, the laws apply to you no matter what your citizenship
01:59is.
02:00The four horsemen are supposed to be originalists.
02:02So when they flatly avoid the text of the Constitution and go against what is a very clear
02:07piece of history, you can conclude that they are being driven by ideological concerns that
02:12go beyond their jurisprudence, that go beyond their conservative principles.
02:16It's easy to think that all conservative justices are the same just because people like me disagree
02:20with a lot of their judgments.
02:22That is not the case.
02:23There is a difference between following conservative principles the way the late Justice Antonin Scalia
02:28did and following the conservative political ideology of the current Trump era.
02:32In his dissent in the birthright citizenship case, Justice Alito said he thought it was one
02:36of the most important cases in the history of the court.
02:38Well, it is, just not in the way that he thinks.
02:40It's historically important because the Supreme Court did the right thing.
02:43But it's also going to be historically remembered because four justices, the four horsemen,
02:47went in a direction that would have potentially led us to repudiate one of our most fundamental
02:53constitutional principles written right there in the 14th Amendment, the idea that everyone
02:57born in the United States is a citizen.
