The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that President Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens violates the Constitution — and the establishment press celebrated by smearing the three justices who actually engaged with the original meaning of the text.

The stakes are straightforward: if being born on U.S. soil to parents who are here illegally automatically grants citizenship, then the border is never truly enforceable and the cheap-labor lobby always wins. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion rejecting Trump's Executive Order No. 14160, issued on his first day back in office. Justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented, arguing that the 14th Amendment's phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" excludes persons born to parents not under complete U.S. political jurisdiction.

The Boulder Daily Camera, reprinting a New York Daily News editorial, called Trump's order "idiotic" and "xenophobic" and said the three dissenting justices should be "put to shame." The editorial accused them of "twisting the words to suit their own ends" — without once grappling with the actual textualist argument.

Here is the argument the press refuses to make: The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, after the Civil War, to guarantee citizenship for freed slaves. Its framers understood "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" to mean persons owing complete political allegiance to the United States. Illegal immigrants are subject to U.S. law in a narrow sense but owe no political allegiance — they are citizens of another country, present in violation of U.S. law. That distinction is the entire originalist case, and it is not frivolous.

The Camera editorial cites the 1898 Wong Kim Ark decision as having settled the question for 130 years. But Wong Kim Ark involved the child of legal Chinese residents — not illegal border-crossers. Conflating the two is either sloppy or deliberate. The editorial dismisses the originalist reading as the "pet project of cranks" and says "friendly legal scholars rushed to backfill legal rationalizations" only after Trump took up the cause. Translation: no constitutional argument that threatens the open-borders consensus will be taken seriously, no matter its merit.

The pattern extends beyond the courtroom. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the Trump administration is rushing to install new exhibit panels at the President's House in Philadelphia, replacing displays about slavery that the National Park Service dismantled in January. At least 50 exhibits have been pulled from more than 30 national park sites as part of the administration's effort to remove displays that "inappropriately disparage Americans past or living." The Inquirer frames this as "whitewashing" — the same reflex that drives the birthright citizenship coverage. Any attempt to revisit how America's founding documents and history are interpreted gets branded as extremism rather than engaged on the substance.

Trump is now calling on Congress to end birthright citizenship by legislation, as the Camera itself notes — though whether that's constitutional without an amendment is the very question the press won't debate honestly.

The Constitution won this round, the press cheers. Whether the Constitution as written — not as the commentariat wishes it read — ever gets a fair hearing remains the open question.