Full Doomer Mode

Scaredy

https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/05/politics/supreme-court-agrees-to-hear-birthright

They’re just gonna keep letting him do whatever the fuck he wants.

They just keep letting him get away with it. Soon America will completely turn into a fascist oligarch and there’s nothing we can do about it.

It’s time to give up.

I’m so fucking scared I actually might lose my life now for being pan + autistic in the next 2-3 years. They will face absolutely zero repurcussions for this.

We are stuck under a permanent fascist dictatorship forever. There is no light at the end of the tunnel this time. Our rights will slowly be stripped until we are all taken to labor camps. This is genuinely how I die and America falls into fascism forever.

Someone please talk me out of this. I am about to go on a huge spiral.

KatherineHoward

Scaredy hi there, human rights MA holder here to help a bit. I know most people responded to the birthright portion so I’m going to address the concerns with sexuality and mental health.

title VII protects individuals from being discriminated against based on sexual orientation and gender identity. This is a federal law.

Any violence/targeting/harassment of individuals based on sexuality are classified as hate crimes and are prosecutable under federal law as well.

The Supreme Court has several different rulings in place to protect LGBTQ+ rights.

For the portion about autism, there are plenty of legal safeguards to protect people with autism. 1999 Supreme Court Ruling Olmsted vs. L.C made it clear that any segregation of people with disabilities is unconstitutional and qualifies as extreme discrimination. This ruling provides people with the right to live, work, and participate in their communities without fear of reprisal or detainment. DOJ, DHHS both continue to enforce the Olmsted Act 💜💜

Scaredy

@Robert-Walker Please anyone help

Robert-Walker

Don’t worry the Supreme court is CERTAIN to decide in favour of birthright citizenship when it looks at he merits of the case. EVERY judge and EVERY court has decided AGAINST the government.

The only way the Supreme Court got to the other decisions was by specifically NOT looking at the merits and ruling on procedural grounds only. So this seems excellent news. Meanwhile the government action is completely blocked and can’t go ahead.

I will check with reliable sources to find out more.

aquahedgehog

They are HEARING the case. This does not mean they are deciding in Trump’s favor. I seriously doubt they will. And no matter what happens with this, it has nothing to do with labor camps or a permanent dictatorship. You are not going to die. America is not going to be fascist forever. Who has been telling you all of this stuff?

aquahedgehog

Let me try to explain what all this really means from a legal standpoint. I’m no expert, but I study this kind of thing a little in college, and being the daughter of a lawyer in Washington DC I’ve spent my whole life surrounded by people who know what they’re talking about when it comes to the Supreme Court! I actually texted my mom (who specializes in human rights law) to see what she knows about all this, so you can be sure you’re getting an expert opinion here 🙂

The Supreme Court cannot rule against the Constitution. Their job is to decide what follows the Constitution and what does not. All the judges who have looked over this case so far agree that the Constitution clearly states that everyone born in the United States is a citizen. However, the Trump administration is interpreting it differently. The Constitution says that to qualify for birthright citizenship, someone must be born in the US and “under the jurisdiction” of the US. The Trump administration is arguing that if your parents are not legal residents of the US, they are not under its jurisdiction, therefore you do not qualify as a citizen. So they made an executive order saying that in the future, only children of legal US residents or citizens will qualify for birthright citizenship. However, this order would NOT take away the citizenship of anyone who already has it.

But executive orders don’t have any power unless the courts allow them.

Most scholars, lawyers, and judges agree that the Trump administration’s interpretation of this passage in the Constitution is not valid. So all the courts have decided that the executive order doesn’t count. But, of course, the White House wants their executive order to be allowed, so they’ve taken it to the Supreme Court.

Some people have been surprised that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. But it’s really not that surprising, especially since it seems to have been their unofficial policy to hear any big cases like this the administration wants to be heard. However, this does NOT mean they will rule in favor of the administration.

For one thing, this Supreme Court isn’t the best, but most of the judges are still honest and they make their rulings based on what they believe is correct rather than just doing whatever the Trump administration wants them to. Do you remember last month when they refused to hear a case from someone who wanted to take away same-sex marriage rights? If they were all corrupted to just go along with whatever Trump wants, they wouldn’t have done that!

I don’t think this court wants to rule in favor of Trump. And even if they did want to, it would be very difficult for them to come up with a good argument.

People are scared because the executive order would be harmful to a lot of people, and because most people interpret it as unconstitutional. However, even if it were to be allowed, that would NOT mean Trump can do whatever he wants. It would NOT mean he could become a dictator. It would NOT make America fascist forever. People online are exaggerating because they’re scared. But none of the experts, lawyers, and professors I know think that any of those things are going to happen. There is always a light at the end of the tunnel. I say this as someone who’s also autistic and bisexual, so I’m in the same boat as you. But I am not afraid and you don’t have to be either.

Robert-Walker

aquahedgehog Thanks yes on your last point. It’s not going to happen no way they could decide especially the federal law thing.

But suppose they did - then that would just make the US the same as the UK. The US is unusual in its interpretation of birthright citizenship. Most countries don’t have that.

This is the UK rule:

If you lived in the UK until you were 10 you might automatically be a British citizen. This can depend on if your parents were British citizens or ‘settled’ in the UK when you were born.

‘Settled’ means you are living in the UK without any time restrictions. This includes people who have one of the following:

‘indefinite leave to remain’

‘settled status’ (also known as ‘indefinite leave to remain under the EU Settlement Scheme’)

permanent residence status

‘right of abode’

If you’re not automatically a British citizen, you might be able to register to become one.
…

You were born on or after 1 July 2006

You’re automatically a British citizen if, when you were born, one of your parents was a British citizen or settled in the UK.

You can register to become a British citizen if, when you were born, neither of your parents were British citizens or settled in the UK.

You must not have spent more than 90 days outside the UK in each of the first 10 years of your life.

Explain on the form if there are special reasons that you spent more time outside the UK.

https://www.gov.uk/apply-citizenship-born-uk/uk-until-10

So - there’s nothing extraordinary or fascist about Trump’s executive order.

It just happens to be unconstitutional and illegal in the USA.

Robert-Walker

Yes checking the legal blogs they expect the obvious decision that the executive order is illegal. But there’s an extra tweak to it that gives the Supreme Court an easy way to decide that the order is illegal without having to rule on the constitutional question. .

The Supreme Court can bypass the question by instead looking at the Federal order that codifies the birthright citizenship clause into Federal law.

It uses pretty much identical text. But for originalists, as Federal law that was encoded at a later date it’s much easier to handle legally. They know what the words mean much better. They also have decades of

From Volokh Conspiracy - the Supreme Court is being asked to decide whether the executive order is consistent with both

the birthright citizenship clause of the US constitution
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt14-S1-1-2/ALDE_00000812/
And its codification into Federal law

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1401

This is what they are asked to look at:

The question presented is whether the Executive Order complies on its face with the Citizenship Clause [July 9, 1868] and with 8 U.S.C. 1401(a) [June 27, 1952], which codifies that Clause.

https://reason.com/volokh/2025/12/05/supreme-court-agrees-to-consider-birthright-citizenship-this-time-for-real/

That second question gives the Supreme Court an easy way out.

Volokh Conspiracy says they can just say that the executive order goes against the Federal law and leave it open whether the original Supreme Court decision on the 14th amendment could be challenged.

It’s the same wording but because it was enacted nearly a century later, then for originalists it’s far easier to know what the words meant. Also it’s been the law for three quarters of a century and by stare decisis [what has been decided remains decided] since it’s not been controversial in all that time then that’s a strong reason to accept the existing interpretation of the law.

QUOTE STARTS

Note that by incorporating the statutory question the question presented gives the Court a relatively easy way to resolve this case without resolving the constitutional question.

Whether or not one believes that the Trump Administration’s effort to narrow the scope of birthright citizenship is consistent with the original public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment (and I do not), it is difficult to argue that the Executive Order is consistent with 8 U.S.C. 1401(a) as it has been traditionally interpreted, understood, and applied. That is, even if one believes that constitutional birthright citizenship is narrower than the conventional understanding, or that Congress has the power to define it more narrowly by limiting the scope of who is born “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, Congress has not done so, and the Executive lacks any power to redefine the scope of birthright citizenship unilaterally.

But wait, some may argue, doesn’t the statute merely repeat the language of the Fourteenth Amendment? And doesn’t that mean they should mean the same thing? Yes it is the same language, but the public meaning of the statute, when enacted, need not have been the same as the public meaning of the earlier-adopted constitutional provision. Moreover, insofar as all three branches have consistently interpreted the statutory language to provide for the conventional, broad understanding of birthright citizenship, that interpretation would be entitled to statutory stare decisis even if one were to believe either that the Fourteenth Amendment did not provide for birthright citizenship as broadly as most assume or that Congress has the power to narrow the scope of birthright citizenship through legislation.

https://reason.com/volokh/2025/12/05/supreme-court-agrees-to-consider-birthright-citizenship-this-time-for-real/

This is about stare Decisis

https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/the-doctrine-of-stare-decisis/

So I don’t think anyone expects them to support the executive order, it’s more a question of which approach exactly they will use to say it is illegal or unconstitutional (or both).

Robert-Walker

Copying my comment from another conversation as it adds a few more points.

This is a positive thing that the Supreme Court has decided to take the case on its merits.

Earlier, it ignored the merits of the case and looked only at procedural things, whether judges can issue universal injunctions NOT birthright citizenship. That is why it seemed to support he government. But in reality it didn’t, because it left ways for courts to stop the executive order which they went ahead and did and it is now completely blocked and never came into effect.

So it was NOT a win for the government. See my:

https://robertinventor.substack.com/p/trumps-birthright-citizenship-executive

This time they are looking at the merits. But they took on a case that asks them to look at the 14th amendment, but also, at the federal law from the 1950s that wrote the 14th amendment into Federal law.

That is a far simpler situation for originalist justices legally, because it is the language of the 1950s instead of the 19th century. It’s been settled law since the 1950s. And the language is very clear.

It may suggest they want to deal with the whole birthright citizenship by looking at federal law rather than having to revisit the constitutional arguments.

Also we don’t have birthright citizenship in the UK. Indeed it’s quite rare. It’s not a requirement of a democracy that it has to have birthright citizenship.

There are only 35 countries with unrestricted birthright citizenship like the USA

Almost all are in the Americas, the Carribean or the Pacific. Then there are three countries in Africa, Chad, Lesotho, Tanzania,

North America

Canada, Mexico, United States

Central America

Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama

Caribbean

Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago

South America

Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela

Africa

Chad, Lesotho, Tanzania

Pacific

Fiji, Tuvalu

https://citizensinternational.com/75-countries-with-birthright-citizenship/

Also the Supreme Court Justices do NOT decide politically.

Legislators can make up their minds for political or personal reasons as representatives of their district.

Judges are not permitted to do this and if they find they have predecided a case because of personal or political reasons they have to recuse themselves.

I know people often claim that these decisions are political but when you look at them closely they are not.

Rather what happens is that in the USA the president gets to pick the justices. So

the president chooses justices whose decisions he likes.
but the justices have no loyalty to the president that picked them indeed they are required to not let their political views interfere with their judgements
justices FREQUENTLY make decisions unfavorable to the president or party that selected them

I go into details here:

BLOG: Supreme court justices in the US are originalists and don’t decide by personal beliefs
— but originalist decisions may tend to be more aligned with the values that Americans had long ago rather than present day values
You can read it here:
https://debunkingdoomsday.quora.com/Supreme-court-justices-in-the-US-are-originalists-and-don-t-decide-by-personal-beliefs-but-originalist-decisions-may-t

The many extraordinary decisions of the current justices are because they have an interpretative judicial philosophy that is originalist, structuralist and proceduralist.

The “liberal” justices see the constitution as a living document with the words changing meaning with new generations. That is more intuitive for most of us so their reasoning may seem to make more sense to us than the originalists.

But both are using an interpretative philosophy to decide the cases. They are not doing it based on personal opinions or political views.

Copied from:

https://ddebunked.org/d/784-supreme-court-racism/2

Mollie

My issue is there’s been so many “everyone says they would never rule against X” and this corrupt court says “hold my Trump pint of beer”.

aquahedgehog

Mollie What examples are you thinking of?

Robert-Walker

Mollie I don’t think the court is corrupt. But they have made many a series of very strange decisions recently. They are very “out there” when it comes to their legal analysis.

I’ve seen lots of comment from legal experts especially on it theory of what counts as harm for the government and for everyone else. Essentially if someone is potentially harmed by an executive order and they need to balance the harm with the harm for the administration they seem to assign near infinite harm to thwarting the government’s aims on the flimsiest of reasoning or none at all.

The government just needs to say it’s been harmed, for reasons it can’t disclose and the current majority in the Supreme Court accepts that. They accepted that reasoning even, remarkably, for the birthright citizenship order - by not “peeking” at the merits of the case. The government said it needs to put this order in place. Others say they can be harmed, but the Supreme Court said that the amount of harm to the government from being thwarted in its wishes overrides any harm from people who lose citizenship if it goes into force.

The majority were using the principle of sovereign harm from judicial overreach

It would be corrupt if they did that preferentially for Trump and wouldn’t do it for Biden for the same thing.

But it’s hard to know what they would have done if Biden had done the same thing as these are for things Biden would never have done. He never claimed irreparable harm for being thwarted in some executive order.

The most striking case was for the Birthright Citizenship.

Sotomayor:

QUOTE Simply put, it strains credulity to treat the Executive Branch as irreparably harmed by injunctions that direct it to continue following settled law.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a884_8n59.pdf

The majority separates the injunction from the underlying case saying that

since the government didn’t ask them to decide on the merits of their ruling on birthright citizenship
they can’t even peek at it to decide if the injunction is valid or not.

So they came to this conclusion of irreparable harm to the government because the government ordered them not to look at how it would be harmed.

QUOTE STARTS

Finally, the Government must show a likelihood that it will suffer irreparable harm absent a stay. Nken, 556 U. S.,at 434–435. When a federal court enters a universal injunction against the Government, it “improper[ly] intru[des]” on “a coordinate branch of the Government” and prevents the Government from enforcing its policies against nonparties …

The principal dissent disagrees, insisting that “it strains credulity to treat the Executive Branch as irreparably harmed” by these injunctions, even if they are overly broad.

That is so, the principal dissent argues, because the Executive Order is unconstitutional. Thus, “the Executive Branch has no right to enforce [it] against anyone.”

The principal dissent’s analysis of the Executive Order is premature because the birthright citizenship issue is not before us.18 And because the birthright citizenship issue is not before us, we take no position on whether the dissent’s analysis is right. The dissent is wrong to say, however, that a stay applicant cannot demonstrate irreparable harm from a threshold error without also showing that, at the end of the day, it will prevail on the underlying merits.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a884_8n59.pdf

So that’s how they ended up deciding as they did.

It seems rather to be an extreme deference to the INSTITUTION of the president.

I go into it more here:

https://robertinventor.substack.com/p/trumps-birthright-citizenship-executive

I’d like to see an analysis by human experts of why the Supreme Court has such extreme deference to the office of the president.

So far I’ve not been able to find anything - though I expect it will eventually get into text books.

Meanwhile all I have is Perplexity AI which is very useful at fact checking legal questions but it is sometimes rubbish at its own reasoning. Because chatbots don’t reason, just complete patterns.

But there is so much legal text they tend to be somewhat better at completing patterns in this than in fields with very little text on the internet.

So please don’t put much weight on this but it may give a flavour of why it can happen.

First, the majority in the Supreme Court Justices are formalist, textualist, structuralist and originalist.

If Perplexity AI got this right, the conservative justices made this strange decision that the executive is irreparably harmed by being frustrated from an unconstitutional action based on

originalism
constitutional avoidance
judicial minimalism
formalist separation of powers
the principle of sovereign harm from judicial overreach

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/scbd-analysis-of-why-in-terms-wI45jstRTeKz8hC0wPg5kQ#1

It’s short summary (under “steps” in its second response) is:

Perplexity AI: The majority was able to see irreparable harm from blocking an executive order they deemed unconstitutional by focusing on the procedural and jurisdictional limits of judicial authority—specifically, the scope of equitable relief—rather than on the substantive constitutionality of the order itself, reflecting a legal interpretative philosophy rooted in formalism and constitutional avoidance that emphasizes strict adherence to statutory authority and historical judicial limits to prevent judicial overreach.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/scbd-analysis-of-why-in-terms-wI45jstRTeKz8hC0wPg5kQ?1=d#1

After a long analysis the chatbot concludes:

Perplexity AI: The Court’s reasoning thus exemplifies how formalist constitutional interpretation can produce outcomes that appear to favor government power while actually reflecting deeper commitments to institutional roles and textual fidelity. The irreparable harm finding flows not from sympathy for Trump’s policies, but from principled application of separation of powers doctrine that would apply equally to future administrations seeking to protect executive authority from judicial overreach

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/scbd-analysis-of-why-in-terms-wI45jstRTeKz8hC0wPg5kQ?1=d#1

I would be very interested if anyone knows of a similar analysis by a human rather than a chatbot.

So - I am not able to evaluate this. But it seems on the face of it plausible enough it might be partly on the right tracks, in places. But what’s right and what isn’t I have no idea.

There are many other examples especially the shadow docket - where the Supreme Court has stopped many attempts by Justices to block various actions by Trump. There, there’s no explanation they just make the decision.

Here is an expert saying this needs an explanation.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/supreme-court-must-explain-why-it-keeps-ruling-trumps-favor

Robert-Walker

So anyway when it comes to the merits of the case for Birthright Citizenship - then the Supreme Cour twill surely decide like everyone else that it is illegal (under federal law) and unconstitutional

It only came to the previous decision by following the government’s instruction not to peek at the merits of the underlying case. While the liberal justices said they should peek at the underlying merits even though it was not what they were asked to decide.

Now that it will look at the merits it is sure to say the order is unconstitutional or at least illegal.

MGA

For what it’s worth, the U.K. does not have birthright citizenship. Immigration is a big issue for us, but birthright citizenship is not.

Make of that what you will…

Mollie

That’s exactly it @Robert-Walker why do they keep giving more and more power to the Presidency when we’re supposed to have checks and balances. Now they are poised to.let the Executive Branch fire whomever they want.

What if we get a competent maniac in Office? Also I don’t want any President, Dem or not, to have all this power.

The government should not be able to claim harm because doesn’t get it’s way, when that way is Unconstitutional. Then SCOTUS rolls over. Stephen Vladeck has mentioned how it seems they give Trump leeway (yes it could be due to the Presidency) when they don’t give it to others.