Birthright on Trial: The View from Section F2
Our dispatch from inside the Supreme Court for this morning's oral arguments.
PRESS BOX, SUPREME COURT —The place looked like the waiting room of Olympus. Marble, silence, power. Everyone wore the uniform—dark suits, grave ties, faces frozen into masks of reverence. It was cold, like the morgue. You could feel your pulse in your teeth.
From my seat in Section F2, the view was lousy—a red curtain pinned with the Court’s golden scales blocked half the room. Even here, amid the gospel of American law, your view depended on luck.
The chairs were hard, the kind that punish posture and remind you you're not supposed to get comfortable. An intern next to me scribbled like her life depended on it, which, given the law school admissions game, it probably did. A security officer nearby kept looking at her like she was hiding something. Maybe a bomb. Maybe a future.
The Justices marched in, and everyone stood. It felt like a church without a god. Then came the government’s lawyer, John Sauer—crooked back, raspy voice, and the look of a man already halfway down the gallows.
The Case: A Birthright on the Line
The question before the Court was whether kids born here—on this side of the border—deserve citizenship under the 14th Amendment. Trump’s people said no. Four district courts said otherwise. Sauer was here to argue not just that the president was right, but that the courts were wrong to stop him—at least for everyone not named in the lawsuit.
He wasn’t just quibbling legal procedure. He was walking into the ring with the Fourteenth Amendment itself, trying to beat it senseless with original intent. In his telling, the Amendment covered only freed slaves, not the children of undocumented immigrants. Or, as he put it, not "gypsies."
Yeah, he said that.
The courtroom didn’t gasp. It didn’t need to. The air pulled back like a recoiling fist.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor jumped in before Sauer could even warm up. “My understanding,” she said, dry as a gavel, “is that the President is violating four Supreme Court precedents.” She wasn’t asking. She was delivering the first body blow.
Sauer tried to pivot—said they were here to talk injunctions, not the meat of the order. He wanted to slice the issue up like a roast: technical here, existential over there.
Sotomayor wasn’t buying it. “So if a president banned all guns tomorrow,” she asked, “do courts have to wait for each person to sue individually?” He mumbled. Sipped water. Looked like he wished the floor would open.
Then came Kagan. Then Barrett. Then Jackson. They came one after the other, fast and surgical, asking the questions Sauer must’ve prayed wouldn’t come. How would people sue? Who would sue? What if they couldn't afford to sue? What if there were hundreds of thousands of them?
He had no answers. Just bureaucratic platitudes and sweat.
“Would hundreds of thousands of people have to file lawsuits?” Sotomayor asked again, like she couldn’t believe she had to say it out loud. Sauer looked like he wanted to disappear into the woodwork.
Barrett, almost gentle, asked if he even understood the questions. Laughter bubbled from the press seats, the kind that carries no joy.
Then Sauer dropped the real gem. He claimed the 14th Amendment was only meant for African American slaves. Not "gypsies." Not "illegals." Not anyone the framers didn’t explicitly namecheck in 1868.
It wasn’t an argument. It was a tell.
Kagan, sharp as a needle, shot back: “Every court has ruled against you. Why are you even here?”
Sauer called it hypothetical.
“This isn’t hypothetical,” Kagan snapped. “It’s your loss record.”
Gorsuch and Kavanaugh tried to throw him a rope, but the courtroom had turned into a legal swamp—thick with jargon, devoid of oxygen. Reporters dozed off. One woman just stood up and left. I took her seat. Best view of the day.
Then Jackson came in for the finish: “Your argument makes our justice system a catch-me-if-you-can,” she said. “How is that the rule of law?”
It wasn’t a question.
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A Second Act, But No Relief
Jeremy Feigenbaum, the Solicitor General of New Jersey, stepped up next. Calm. Clean. Ready. He shredded the administration’s position in a few neat cuts. But the Justices, now warmed up, grilled him too. Even the good guys don’t get off easy in this place.
Justice Alito finally asked the big one: “Should we decide this Birthright Clause?”
The CASA lawyer urged caution, begged for time. National injunctions, he said, are necessary when the Constitution’s at stake. But Sauer came back to the podium, repeating his refrain like it was gospel: the 14th Amendment was meant for slaves. Not these people. Not now.
That was the story he came to tell, and he told it again and again, like a prayer no one believed.
Then Roberts slammed the gavel like it owed him money, and just like that, it was over. The room exploded into motion. Reporters sprinted for the exits. The clerks disappeared like fog. Outside, the microphones waited, hungry for spin.
The Stakes, Still Hanging
What went unsaid hung heavier than anything Sauer said aloud. If the Court sides with the government, hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born kids could be cast into the void—stateless, futureless, all because their parents didn’t have the right papers. And if the Court narrows injunctions, that void could stretch even wider, one case at a time.
They might dodge the question entirely. Kick the can. Punt like cowards. That’s what they do best.
No hints came from the bench. No grace notes. Just the usual fog of legalism and power. The kind of thing that gets called neutrality but smells like fear.
June will bring the ruling. Or not. Either way, the machine grinds on. And the rest of us are left squinting through the marble, trying to make sense of the mirage they call justice.