What Is Roberts Up To?

And why?

That image you've seen that makes the Obama Presidential Center look flanked by some kind of reflecting pool, as if on purpose to madden Trump, isn't, but a much more natural-looking feature, a piece of the Jackson Park Lagoons, part of the original design of the park by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (same architects as Manhattan's Central and Riverside Parks). Image by Obama Foundation.

I briefly entertained an idea that Trump might have heard rumors of a reflecting pool on the Obama Center campus and lost his mind in the desire to have his own, and that’s where his own pool project must have come from. That’s plainly not true, but I think it likely is true that he’s been driven wild with jealousy of Obama’s monument, which he’s been screaming about for more than a year:

“I mean look, President Obama — and if he wanted help, I’d give him help because I build on time and on budget — he’s building his presidential library in Chicago. It’s a disaster,” Mr. Trump said. “And he said something to the effect, ‘I only want DEI, I only want woke.’ He wants woke people to build it. Well, he got woke people and they have massive cost overruns, the job is stopped. I don’t know, it’s a disaster.... millions of dollars, like many, many — I mean, really, millions of dollars over budget,” and said the problems were because Pres. Obama “wanted to be very politically correct and he didn’t use good, hard, tough, mean construction workers that I love.”

There’s no evidence that he builds “on time and on budget”. Also, it’s so cute that he loves them because he believes they’re “mean”, though I don’t know how he could knos that. They’ve surely never been mean to him or more important his father; I mean they may have contemptuously ignored him on one project and another but they wouldn’t have wanted him to see them doing it.

Anyway, the success of Obama’s opening, with its entertainment by Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen, Bono and The Edge, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, Common, Eddie Vedder joining the Chicago-based cooperative Guitars Over Guns, and The Roots, while he couldn’t even get an appearance by the surviving half of lip-synch act Milli Vanilli, not to mention the audience that never showed up for his stupid-looking spectacle, may have really driven him to insanity.

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Photo by Bob Donnan/Imagn Images via FanSided.

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I’m obviously glad the Supreme Court found (in the opinion released today on Trump v. Barbara) that people born in the United States are citizens of the United States, as they basically always have been, and certainly have been since the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 (except when it seemed that might not be true for people of Chinese ethnicity, as could have eventuated in the last couple of decades of the 19th century, but didn’t), but a little annoyed, along with a lot of people who are, unlike me, experts, at the stinkbomb tossed into the mix by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who found that birthright citizenship indeed exists, but not by the constitutional mandate of the 14th Amendment—rather, he says it’s only a violation of the omnium-gatherum U.S.C. § 1401(a), passed in 1952, which attempts to sweeps up all the hard possible cases that the 14th Amendment doesn’t clearly cover (e.g., a foundling who was under the age of 5 when discovered on US territory becomes a citizen when he turns 21 if nobody has determined in the interim that he was born in some other country), setting up the possibility that some fool Republican congressmember will try to eliminate birthright citizenship through legislation and the Court could decide to put up with it, in spite of the 5-4 majority (Roberts, who wrote the opinion, Barrett, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) that just ruled the opposite way.

And of course I’d like to know why Roberts in particular did it, in defiance of Trump’s executive order from the very day of his 2025 inauguration, along with a couple of other decisions that Trump must hate, ruling that he can’t fire a governor of the Federal Reserve Bank without cause (i.e., because he wants to fire a Black woman, Lisa Cook), though they seem happy to have him fire practically anybody else in a senior agency position, and that he has to pay the $5 million he was sentenced to pay his rape victim, E, Jean Carroll, in their first trial (they haven’t yet ruled on the $83.3 million he owes her from the second trial), in the midst of a sea of awful reactionary opinions from this term. Is he trying to send some king of message to somebody? To Trump, or us?

If any of them were soccer fans, I’d have a theory. If the US men’s team has a fighting chance in the World Cup this year it’s likely because of the birthright citizenship guarantee in the 14th Amendment, which the Trump-Miller administration has been so determined to overturn.

Not that the team has a player who’s one of those dread “anchor babies” of rightwing nightmares, whose mother smuggled him into citizenship in a Florida birth tourism hotel (I believe those rooms are usually for moms from China and the former USSR who are not that unlikely to show up as Mar-a-Lago guests); Folarin Balogun’s Nigerian parents intended for him to be born (in 2001) where they lived, in London, after flying home from a casual visit with relatives in New York in his mother’s seventh month of pregnancy, but the airline wouldn’t let her on the London flight without a doctor’s letter, and so he was born in Brooklyn instead, and lived there, an unexpected little US citizen, for his first two months.

After going through Arsenal’s training system at the Hale End academy in London and experiencing international play in both the UK and US youth leagues, he began a remarkable professional career in France (Reims) and then Monaco (where he signed a £40 million contract after scoring 22 goals in his first season), and then in 2023, eligible for three different national teams, he chose the land of his birth (among other things, recruiters took him to a Knicks game in Florida, but I think I’ve seen it alleged that his mother played an important role in the decision).

In their opener against Paraguay, he scored two goals in the first half, in what turned out to be a 4-0 victory. In the match against Australia, his contribution was also awesome, bouncing a shot off the foot of Australia’s Cameron Burgess to make it an Australian own goal for the US in the 11th minute (replicating a feat by midfielder Weston McKennie in the Paraguay match) in a 2-0 victory qualifying the US for the Round of Sixteen after only two games played, which is historic. So thanks, 14th Amendment! But I don’t think that’s why Roberts did it.

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I feel like I discovered for myself the fact that the United States had always had birthright citizenship from the moment of inception, except for two categories of people who posed difficulties—the native Americans whose communities had been there for thousands of year before the advent of the English, and the American-born descendants of the enslaved West Africans who began to be imported here, free or themselves enslaved. Other than that the immigrants at the time of the Revolution were largely from Britain (English, Scots, Irish including Ulster Irish) or Dutch or German, and all their children born on American soil enjoyed unquestioned status as subjects of His Majesty the King by birthright, which changed to citizenship in the new nation when it was founded in 1776. (I imagine there were lots of other nationalities, like Italians represented by Mozart’s Viennese librettist, both a Jew and a Catholic priest, Lorenzo da Ponte, first professor of Italian at the forthcoming Columbia University.)

Roberts in his opinion is aware of this history and takes it a step further back, to English common law:

Under the English common law, children “born within the [sovereign’s] dominions” owed a natural “allegiance” to the sovereign who protected them at birth, 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 354, 356 (Blackstone), regardless of how “momentary and uncertain” their presence, Calvin’s Case, 7 Co. Rep. 1a, 6a, 77 Eng. Rep. 377, 384. Such children were therefore “natural-born subject[s].” Doe v. Jones, 4 T. R. 300, 308, 100 Eng. Rep. 1031, 1035. The same rule applied to children born of parents subject to expulsion. See, e.g., 4 Blackstone 166. The rule’s exceptions were narrow: children born in lands the sovereign did not control, children born in areas temporarily outside the sovereign’s control, and children of foreign ministers (by a fiction of extraterritoriality)

He almost seems to be making fun of the Justice Alito of the historically garbled Dobbs opinion, Eliminating the king, the framers replaced “subjects” by republican “citizens” on the Roman model and set up the probably exceptions to the rule: native people who were the subjects of sovereign states within US territory, and children of diplomats who were immune to US law (as they still are, ignoring their parking tickets). Nothiung whatever about “illegal immigrants”, a category that didn’t yet exist, and wouldn’t. except for the Chinese immigrants, for years to come. But it’s a good opinion, something we’re not necessarily used to from Roberts.

My thought? That he doesn’t care about Trump at all, or with some quiet distaste. But he does care about the reactionary agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy and aggressive deregulation and the use of huge amounts of money to win difficult campaigns, as he has been since the 1980s. He’s mostly just hoping Trump will go away.