Johnson Follows Kavanaugh’s Lead, Says Congress Will ‘Deal With’ Birthright Citizenship
This is your TPM evening briefing.
Johnson Acknowledged That Kavanaugh Did Not Have Majority With Him
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) agreed to try to find a congressional path forward for the right-wing’s fever dream of ending birthright citizenship after a divided Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked President Donald Trump’s attempt to do so by executive order. Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh, in particular, left open the door for Congress to act in his concurrence — and Johnson suggested he would, before he even had a chance to read it.
Reacting to the news in real time moments after the Supreme Court knocked down Trump’s order based on the Constitution’s birthright citizenship clause, Johnson agreed that Congress should correct what the high court did not.
“Well, I need to read the opinion, okay? But I — obviously you can say that’s a textualist, originalist view, however, I do think this has been grossly abused in recent years,” he said, elevating popular right-wing birthright citizenship grievances about “birth tourism” and suspicions about the allegiances of children of non-citizens, which Justice Sam Alito also aired in his dissent.
“Birthing tourism, they call it: a trend where people come and you just come on to the soil and have your child and then they’re able to avail themselves of the welfare state and everything else,” he said. “It’s been abused. It’s one of those things that was intended to serve a noble and important purpose and has been thwarted and overused and abused, and so I’m sure that we’ll continue to look at that.
Johnson, however, acknowledged that Kavanaugh did not have the majority with him — Congress alone could not fix through laws what five justices found to be unconstitutional.
“I’m sure that the conclusion from this opinion is you have to amend the Constitution to fix that,” he said, which would be, he conceded, a “challenge.”
“We’ll see,” he concluded.
“I will say I’m very disappointed in that outcome. I think it subjects the country to serious challenges going forward, and we’ll have to deal with it as Congress,” he said.
As my colleagues Kate Riga and Josh Kovensky reported today, in his concurrence, Kavanaugh suggested that Trump’s order violated the law, but not the Constitution. It raises an obvious option: changing the law.
Unfortunately for conservatives heartened by Kavanaugh’s reading, a majority of justices did not agree.
Eager to not paint the ruling as another blow the high court has dealt to his agenda in the last few days of its term, President Trump posted a screed on Truth Social exulting the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday in Slaughter, which gave the president power to fire civil servants from independent agencies.
Tucked into the lengthy post was a directive to Congress that Johnson had seemingly already accepted without being asked: “We also had the birthright citizenship loss, which we will work with Congress to correct.”
Far-Right Influencers Salivating for Even Harsher Immigration Crackdown in Wake of SCOTUS Ruling
The response from the far right to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Trump’s executive order has been nothing short of hysterical, with White House deputy chief of staff for policy, and the Trump administration’s resident nativist, Stephen Miller calling it “one of the most destructive and outrageous decisions in the long history of the Supreme Court.”
Republican members of Congress are already calling for legislation that would block the children of undocumented immigrants from receiving birthright citizenship.
Other far-right MAGA influencers are melting down, using the ruling to call for an (even further) escalated crackdown on Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda. Right-wing influencer Matt Walsh suggests using “whatever force is necessary.”
‘A Win for Billionaire Donors’
The Supreme Court also on Tuesday further loosed campaign finance restrictions that have been in place since after Richard Nixon resigned. In a 6-3 vote along ideological lines, the high court overturned a 2001 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act as constitutional. That law placed limits on how much money political parties can raise and spend on its candidates. It is expected to give candidates direct control over huge, new sums for their races.
Vice President JD Vance and the National Republican Senatorial Committee had challenged the law as unconstitutional. Trump’s DOJ argued that while the law was designed to prevent corruption, it has not prevented it. Here’s some of the backstory, per NPR:
This decision overturns a 2001 Supreme Court case that declared the limits on party spending to be constitutional. It’s the latest in a series of rulings since then that have unraveled campaign finance regulations.
The saga began in 2010, when the court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have a First Amendment right to unlimited spending on elections. The following year, the court dismantled Arizona’s public election financing scheme, which gave money to less-funded candidates in order to equalize spending between politicians. And in 2014, the court struck down limits on how much money an individual can donate in national elections. All of these decisions were ideologically split votes, just like Tuesday’s ruling, and in each case, the court overturned the regulations for burdening the First Amendment right to spend on elections.
The decision is expected to be beneficial to Republicans who tend to have more large singular donors versus Dems, who tend to have more small-dollar donations. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee bashed the ruling and their Republican colleagues: “Republicans’ scheme to overturn campaign finance law is a clear and blatant effort to rewrite election rules for their own benefit and spend more money from billionaires to prop up their candidates.”
TPM Has Covered a Lot Today. Here’s What You Should Read
I’ve already flagged Kate Riga and Josh Kovensky’s coverage of the Supreme Court birthright citizenship decision above, but here are those links again:
Kate: Supreme Court Upholds Birthright Citizenship
More from Kate here as well: Supreme Court Lets Red States Force Trans Girls to Play on Boys’ Teams
Meanwhile, Emine Yücel was tuned in to Russ Vought’s testimony before the House Appropriations Committee’s Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee today, during which he barely tried to give assurances that his office wouldn’t again try to stamp out Congress’ authority to appropriate federal spending: Vought Claims OMB Won’t Try to Force Congress to Approve More Rescissions This Year — But Leaves Door Open
Morning Memo: MAGA Melts Down at SCOTUS Over Its Insufficient Voter Suppression
And then, this morning, John Light expands on Josh Kovensky’s exclusive reporting yesterday on the right-wing blogging background of one of the prosecutors tasked with operationalizing NSPM-7 for the DOJ: Trump’s Directive to Crack Down on Dissent Gets a Task Force
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
White House Religious Liberty Commission Releases ‘Embarrassing’ Report
What I’m Reading
🙄 Gavin Newsom urges a national ‘billionaires’ tax’ while fighting one in California
Trump Urges Congress to Take Up Birthright Citizenship. Here’s Why It’s Unlikely.
House floor is frozen after GOP holdouts reject Johnson’s election-bill plan