The Losers In The Birthright Citizenship Battle

And more fallout from a massive SCOTUS term

Jul 01, 2026

Mark Krikorian on the birthright citizenship case in Daily Wire:

The administration was never going to win the birthright citizenship case before the Supreme Court. Changing something as fundamental as our current practices regarding membership in the national community shouldn’t be changed by executive order.
But the real losers from Tuesday’s decision are the American people.
That’s because the high court didn’t just strike down Trump’s January 2025 executive order on “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Rather, by a 5-4 vote, it said that Congress did not have the authority to change our current practice of granting U.S. citizenship to almost everyone born here, even children born to tourists, foreign students, visa workers, or illegal aliens. This removes the issue from normal democratic politics.
The only way to reform the rules now is a constitutional amendment. But that requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures — so at a time when Republicans have a tiny House majority, and Democrats are sending literal communists to Washington, D.C., it’s a safe bet that this ruling will be with us for a while.
So what are the likely policy consequences?
First, the ruling gives added urgency to the administration’s rhetorical push for large-scale deportations. The Biden administration let in at least eight million illegal aliens, thousands of whom have had automatic U.S.-citizen children here, with more born every day. The fact of U.S.-born children gives illegal aliens no automatic right to stay, but it creates “equities” that make it politically more difficult to send people home.
This means the “worst of the worst” talk from the administration has to end, or at least be supplemented by aggressive, high-profile moves to force non-rapist illegals out of the country as well. This means dramatically stepped-up work-related enforcement needs to happen, now. That would involve raids of worksites, for sure, but also paperwork measures, what I call “briefcase enforcement,” involving not just DHS, but also the IRS and the Social Security administration.
Most illegal aliens aren’t dealing drugs or killing people — so why would they decide to self-deport if all the talk is about violent and dangerous illegals? There has indeed been some self-deportation, but the only way to scale it up is to make it impractical to live here illegally by locking illegals out of jobs, driver’s licenses, financial services (bank accounts, remittances, mortgages), etc.
In some of these areas, the administration has moved aggressively — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been especially active in his bailiwick. But flushing illegal aliens out of the job market has to be the main objective; it’s something the administration has been loath to do — and that impulse is coming from the top. Maybe this week’s setback at the Supreme Court will focus the White House’s attention on the urgency of worksite enforcement.
The citizenship ruling has implications for legal admissions, as well. One issue that has finally been getting attention is birth tourism. Thousands of foreign women every year come to the United States on tourist visas to give birth, and then return home with their newly minted-on-paper U.S. citizens. Those children are raised entirely abroad, with no instruction in American history or traditions, and certainly no patriotic education — in many cases, quite the opposite, since some of the top sources of birth tourists are communist China, Russia, Nigeria, Turkey, and elsewhere. Peter Schweizer, in his recent book “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon,” estimates there may be as many as 1.5 million paper U.S. citizens living in China as a consequence of birth tourism. I suspect the number isn’t that high, but there’s no question it’s a large-scale problem.
The State Department and ICE have already been cracking down on birth tourism networks here and abroad, but more is needed. Now that reform of our citizenship rules is off the table, pregnant women are going to have to be barred from traveling to the United States on tourist, student, or work visas.
That means, for starters, the State Department visa form needs to add a question asking whether the applicant is pregnant, which it does not do now. What’s more, the regulations governing visa issuance now handcuff consular officers in this regard. They read:
You must not ask a visa applicant whether they are pregnant unless you have a specific articulable reason to believe they may be pregnant and planning to give birth in the United States. … You must not, as a matter of course, ask all female applicants (or any specific sub-sets of applicants) whether they are pregnant or intend to become pregnant; you also may not require B NIV [tourist or business-travel] applicants to provide evidence that they are not pregnant.
This has to change.

A roundup of reactions to the SCOTUS cases:

Who Lost Faith In The American Dream?

Jenna Stocker in Daily Wire:

Happy 100^th birthday, Route 66! Yes, that scenic byway that runs from Chicago to Santa Monica, California – 2,448 miles of pure America — hit the centennial mark and looks pretty darned good considering it was marked for execution half its lifetime ago.
Instead of a death sentence, this vein that cuts through the heart of America persists, just as America has for 250 years: reinventing itself and rebelling against generations of nostalgia-bathed geriatrics to define its own purpose and future, brick by brick — or paved mile after paved mile.
Sure, there’s plenty of old-timey glory to be had, but this super roadway toward a sunset strip offers so much more: a glimpse into the past with the wheels always treading toward the future. And if you follow it west, it goes right into the horizon of a sun that never sets until you want it. And even then, perhaps it’s somewhere in the cool desert under a canopy of endless stars winking you a goodnight through the neon glow of a roadside motel or trippy little teepee. The Mother Road offers what Americans have always been looking for: adventure, discovery, possibility, and a path of unwritten rules (speed limit be damned). Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.
But this isn’t about Route 66. It’s about the type of country and the type of Americans it represents.
We are empire builders in every sense of the world, and if you’re ashamed of that, then you need to reassess your priorities, man. Because doggone, how could you not always be in love with the team that suffers the foolishness of the world and ends up shaking the whole thing down until it’s safe for the beaten and scared – or threats are at least behind us – and then carries on as if it was NBD? And all the while we’re blasting rockets into space, curing diseases, feeding the world’s hungry, writing great literature, creating great art, and writing the Great American Songbook. We build skyscrapers, railroads, fleets of aircraft, and TV dinners. We invented Hollywood, football, pantyhose, and pinup girls. We make muscle cars. We play golf on the moon.
What good is an empire if you don’t use it? Yet here we are – the U.S. of A. with our hotdog cookouts where men wear low-cut sneakers and grab beers from sweating coolers under the Maple tree, and wives in gingham and soft brown hair corral barefoot children, sticky from ice pops and marshmallows and lemonade made with too much sugar. Here is the Empire of the true believers: the road doesn’t start or end here. Each man knows from where he came and wishes to go. These are parents whose own childhoods were unburdened by the weight of the future and the fears of old men. Couples who fell in love with each other and the American Dream. When it comes to realizing that love — of God, family, and country — it cannot be held back. It’s akin to closing the back cover of a book that blew your mind, and the only thought that bubbles to the surface is, “This must be shared.” And so it is with building the American Empire.
Who has lost faith in the American Dream? When “proud” is a proxy for love, it’s easy to see who is invested in the long-haul, full-speed-ahead, ride-or-die America of the past, present, and future. If one man is making that drive by way of the Main Street of America or any other highway or byway, backroad or country road, in a Corvette alongside Tod Stiles or riding shotgun with Hunter S. Thompson, the Empire is unmistakable. It is belief in the project of America rather than the political projects subject to the whim of office-holding power. To Democrats, there is nothing to be proud of — nothing to love — when the levers of power aren’t being pulled by “your team.”
So it goes, why invest in the American Dream, become part of the Great American Project, the American Empire, if your entire viewpoint and love is dependent on political power? You don’t. You don’t see the point beyond one being wholly consumed by a constant feed of hateful slop, shoveled into every eye, ear, and mouth hole until the consumer is conditioned to crave it. For the leftist, the defiance and the satisfaction both depend on the project of destroying the American Empire rather than on recognizing its awesomeness.
We live in the most culturally and environmentally diverse nation, yet are largely unified under the principle of being, well, American. To paraphrase John Candy (R.I.P.) We like us — and we like being American. This is a land still waiting to be discovered and shared, and welcomed to, where you can stake your own little corner of it somewhere – practically anywhere. We are kind and without prejudice to strangers until the moment you badmouth the very things that make this the best place on Earth — our trust in goodness, and our ability to do good, if imperfectly. We unapologetic Americans don’t care about how others denigrate us to feel morally superior; that’s our superpower. The down-on-America types contribute nothing to this scenic adventure, but they do expose a shallow and unprincipled life by so easily and flippantly turning on a nation and its people who gave the world so much in exchange for the self-important applause of fellow pompous status-seekers.

Inside The Egg Price Fixing Scandal

WSJ:

On Dec. 19, 2022, executives from America’s three biggest egg producers got on a call. The subject: how to keep the price of eggs high.
With Christmas a few days away, the chief executive of Arizona-based Hickman’s Egg Ranch had an idea for how to push an industry benchmark for eggs higher, according to the Justice Department.
If Hickman’s and other big egg companies all bid aggressively for eggs on a wholesale market exchange, they could raise a key pricing measure that influences the prices shoppers pay in grocery stores.
“As a group we need to bid like they vote in Chicago, early and often,” an alleged co-conspirator said, according to a federal court complaint made public this week.
The complaint, filed in Iowa federal court, described a yearslong effort by a handful of major egg producers to manipulate a little-known process that helps determine what Americans pay for eggs. From 2022 to 2025, antitrust enforcers said, executives of Cal-Maine Foods, Hickman’s and Versova spoke by phone and exchanged messages to coordinate bids and trading.
The effort occurred during a period when eggs were scarce, consumers paid more for cartons than ever before, and President Trump raised the issue on the campaign trail. Egg producers have blamed a historic avian flu outbreak that decimated the hen population.
Following the Hickman CEO’s late-2022 message, Cal-Maine, Versova, and Hickman’s collectively submitted dozens of bids to a wholesale egg marketplace known as the Egg Clearinghouse, the Justice Department alleged. Over several days, executives exchanged a flurry of messages and entered more bids. The price benchmarker, Urner Barry, then raised its egg price quotations for “white, large, shell eggs” across all regions.
On Dec. 22, 2022, the Hickman’s CEO sent his fellow executives an Urner Barry report saying that egg prices were hitting records, according to the complaint. He added: “Great job in the northwest today!”
Glenn Hickman, who was CEO of Hickman’s Egg Ranch up until selling the company late last year, declined to comment.
For consumers, egg prices at the time were already surging to record highs. An avian influenza outbreak had killed tens of millions of chickens and turkeys, and wholesale prices of Midwest large eggs hit $5.36 a dozen in late 2022. Egg prices climbed further in 2024 and 2025 while outbreaks continued, prompting panic buying and purchasing limits at supermarkets and egg surcharges at restaurants.

✍️ Feature

Niall Ferguson: Why Britons Regret Brexit

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🗳️ 2028

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🎭 Culture & Hollywood

🪶 Quote

“Measures of the most stupendous magnitude – measures which affect the lives of millions, born and unborn – are now before us. We must expect a great expense of blood and treasure to maintain them. Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of light and glory; I can see that the end is worth more than all the means.”

— John Adams, July 1, 1776

The Transom

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