Jus soli

It is the first of its kind; it is an astonisher in legal history. It is a new wonder of the world. It is based upon falsehood¹ in the main as to the facts...

- Abraham Lincoln (July 10, 1858)

I'm as shocked as anybody that SCOTUS upheld - 5 to 4, which should've been 9 to zip in a rational world - the plain text and long-understood meaning of the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause.  I honestly wondered if corrupt Alito would convince his fellow MAGAts that Wong Kim Ark was "wrongly decided".  Nope, corrupt Roberts apparently wanted to avoid being worse than racist Roger:

In the odious decision of Dred Scott v. Sandford, this Court imposed the Southern States’ beliefs onto the Nation... Chief Justice Taney, writing for the Court, concluded that “the words ‘people of the United States’ and ‘citizen[s]’” had an unexpressed (and atextual) racial component—one that excluded all those descended from slaves... Even if Massachusetts or Connecticut chose to grant citizenship to the freedmen, they still could not participate in national affairs... They were “born in the country,” Chief Justice Taney acknowledged, and thus “did owe allegiance to the Government”—the precise criteria for citizenship at common law... But they were “not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.” ... For them, blood, not soil, was made the rule.

Good callback.  Speaking of Dred Scott, and since the Declaration of Independence is on everybody's minds:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among them is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood. But it is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration, for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted, and instead of the sympathy of mankind to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.

Yet the men who framed this declaration were great men -- high in literary acquirements, high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting. They perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used, and how it would be understood by others, and they knew that it would not in any part of the civilized world be supposed to embrace the negro race, which, by common consent, had been excluded from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery.

I mean...the thing is, Taney wasn't entirely wrong.  Most of the Founders were hypocritical pieces of shit, so he was just acknowledging what righteous Patriots like Tom Paine called out during the Revolution:

With what consistency, or decency they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretense of authority, or claim upon them?

Anyway, Happy 250th birthday, America; at least the rule of law still kinda sorta means something...

Selah.

1 - The falsehood Honest Abe was referring to was Dred Scott's premise that "the right of property in a slave" is enshrined in the Constitution (5th Lincoln-Douglas debate, October 7, 1858).  A little bit later, BTW, he essentially notes that elections have consequences.

PS - Couch fucker echoes Lincoln.