Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan — nominated to the high court in 2010 by then-President Barack Obama — took a moment on Tuesday to remember the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and had only kind words to say about him.
Kagan recalled her confirmation process, noting specifically how strange it was for a Republican to vote in favor of her confirmation when the nominee was chosen by a Democratic president — and vice versa — and said that Graham had approached the process with &#8220;seriousness&#8221; appropriate for the situation.
WATCH:
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Justice Elena Kagan on her 2010 confirmation hearing: &#8220;Many people have talked about how funny Senator Graham was&#8230;What I remember about that hearing was that somehow Senator Graham made me look funny, which is a harder thing entirely, by asking me what I had done on… <a href="https://t.co/U6IFdoGIwN">pic.twitter.com/U6IFdoGIwN</a>
— CSPAN (@cspan) <a href="https://x.com/cspan/status/2077039841267646902?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 14, 2026</a></blockquote>
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Kagan began by offering her condolences to Graham&#8217;s family and friends, adding that &#8220;the entire Court&#8221; wished them well.
&#8220;I&#8217;ll just say that I didn&#8217;t get many Republican votes when I was confirmed to the Supreme Court,&#8221; Kagan said with a smile, adding, &#8220;And that&#8217;s the usual state of things today.&#8221;
She went on to say that it was even more striking to see a Republican from a deep red state like South Carolina cast a cross-party vote for a nominee: &#8220;And yet, Senator Graham voted for me.&#8221;
&#8220;I vividly remember, because he was a vivid person, the conversation that we had in his office prior to my hearing,&#8221; Kagan said. &#8220;It was a long conversation; he took the opportunity to get to know me. He questioned me with great seriousness and great knowledge about my record. &#8230; And I still more vividly remember the conversations we had at my hearing itself.&#8221;
&#8220;In the last day or so, many people have talked about how funny Senator Graham was. I think Al Franken said that he was the funniest man in the Senate,&#8221; Kagan continued. &#8220;What I remember about that hearing was that somehow Senator Graham made me look funny, which is a harder thing entirely, by asking me what I had done on Christmas. &#8230; Many people said to me afterwards that exchange with Senator Graham was the moment my confirmation was sealed.&#8221;
Graham mentioned his vote for Kagan during his famous tirade at Justice <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/flashback-the-lindsey-graham-speech-that-turned-the-tide-for-brett-kavanaugh">Brett Kavanaugh&#8217;s</a> hearing. To Kavanaugh, he said, &#8220;When you see Sotomayor and Kagan, tell them that Lindsey said hello because I voted for them.&#8221;
He turned his attention back to the Democrats and said, &#8220;I would never do to them what you’ve done to this guy. This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics. And if you really wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn’t have done what you’ve done to this guy.&#8221;

Kagan, Barrett To Defend Budget As Hill Tensions Simmer

Obama-Appointed Justice Has Only Kind Words For Lindsey Graham

Brett Kavanaugh

Elena Kagan

Lindsey Graham

Media

Politics

Supreme Court

Justice Amy Coney Barrett delivered a chilling account to lawmakers on Tuesday on the threats she has faced after the infamous Dobbs leak.
Testifying before a House Appropriations subcommittee on the Supreme Court&#8217;s 2027 budget, Barrett revealed that her own children have been swept up in the wave of threats and harassment aimed at the nation&#8217;s highest court — from a bulletproof vest she had to explain to her young son to a terrifying swatting hoax that sent police cruisers swarming her street.
Roughly six weeks before her testimony, Barrett revealed, her family was targeted in a swatting attack — a false report of gunfire and yelling inside her home that sent a fleet of police cars racing to her door. One of her teenage sons opened the door to head out with friends only to find the street lined with squad cars, she said. Supreme Court police on scene were able to convince local officers that the call was a hoax before anyone tried to force entry.
Barrett said she and other justices have also received anonymous, intimidating deliveries sent under a specific name: Daniel Anderl, the slain son of federal judge Esther Salas.
Anderl, 20, was gunned down at the family&#8217;s North Brunswick, New Jersey, home in July 2020 by a gunman disguised as a FedEx courier. The shooter, lawyer Roy Den Hollander, had appeared before Salas in court and was believed to have been targeting the judge herself. Anderl answered the door and was killed instantly; his father, attorney Mark Anderl, was critically wounded. Den Hollander took his own life soon after, and investigators later discovered he&#8217;d been scoping out other female judges as potential targets.
The killing spurred passage of &#8220;Daniel&#8217;s Law&#8221; in New Jersey and the federal Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act, signed in December 2022, which shields judges&#8217; home addresses and personal data from public disclosure.
Barrett&#8217;s remarks also revived scrutiny of the still-unsolved Dobbs leak — the 2022 disclosure of Justice Samuel Alito&#8217;s draft opinion gutting Roe v. Wade, published by POLITICO weeks before the official ruling. The breach, the first of its kind in Court history, ignited protests outside justices&#8217; homes and led to a man&#8217;s arrest near Justice Brett Kavanaugh&#8217;s residence on attempted murder charges.
A probe that grilled nearly 100 court staffers came up empty in 2023; the FBI announced in 2025 it was reopening the case.
The leaker&#8217;s identity remains one of the Court&#8217;s most stubborn unsolved mysteries.

Barrett Tells Congress Of Chilling Threats Against Her

Amy Coney Barrett

Death Threats

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) passed away on Saturday, and as the news circulated into the Sunday morning hours, friends and colleagues shared stories about his life and career. One moment stood out above many, however, appearing in dozens of tributes to the South Carolina lawmaker: his passionate and unwavering defense of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Graham was serving as the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman when Kavanaugh was nominated to fill the seat vacated by retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. He presided over the ensuing battle — which played out in a series of ugly and contentious hearings — after Democrats on the committee blindsided everyone with an 11th-hour sexual assault allegation against the nominee.
On September 27, 2018, Graham made it clear that he had had enough.
WATCH:
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&#8220;Are you aware that at 9:23 on the night of July the 9th, the day you were nominated to the Supreme Court by President Trump, Senator Schumer said 23-minutes after your nomination, &#8216;I will oppose Judge Kavanaugh&#8217;s nomination with everything I have, I have (sic) a bipartisan — and I hope a bipartisan majority will do the same. The stakes are simply too high for anything less.&#8217; Well, if you weren&#8217;t aware of it, you are now,&#8221; Graham began his questions to Kavanaugh. &#8220;Did you meet with Senator Dianne Feinstein on August 20th?&#8221;
&#8220;I did meet with Senator Feinstein,&#8221; Kavanaugh confirmed
&#8220;Did you know that her staff had already recommended a lawyer to Dr. Ford?&#8221; Graham asked, referencing Kavanaugh&#8217;s accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
&#8220;I did not know that,&#8221; he replied.
&#8220;Did you know that her and her staff had this — allegations for over 20 days?&#8221; Graham asked, suggesting that Feinstein had sat on the accusation until she believed it could do the most damage.
Kavanaugh said he had not been aware of that.
Turning to the Democrats on the committee, Graham unloaded both barrels: &#8220;If you wanted a FBI investigation, you could have come to us. What you want to do is destroy this guy&#8217;s life, hold this seat open and hope you win in 2020. You&#8217;ve said that, not me.&#8221;
&#8220;You&#8217;ve got nothing to apologize for,&#8221; he said to Kavanaugh.
&#8220;When you see Sotomayor and Kagan, tell them that Lindsey said hello because I voted for them,&#8221; He turned his attention back to the Democrats. &#8220;I would never do to them what you&#8217;ve done to this guy. This is the most unethical sham since I&#8217;ve been in politics. And if you really wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn&#8217;t have done what you&#8217;ve done to this guy.&#8221;
To Kavanaugh, he asked: &#8220;Are you a gang rapist?&#8221;
&#8220;No.&#8221;
&#8220;I cannot imagine what you and your family have gone through,&#8221; Graham continued.
To the Democrats, he lashed out: &#8220;Boy, you all want power. God, I hope you never get it. I hope the American people can see through this sham. That you knew about it and you held it. You had no intention of protecting Dr. Ford; none.&#8221;
&#8220;She&#8217;s as much of a victim as you are. God, I hate to say it because these have been my friends,&#8221; he said to Kavanaugh. &#8220;But let me tell you, when it comes to this, you&#8217;re looking for a fair process? You came to the wrong town at the wrong time, my friend. Do you consider this a job interview? &#8230; Do you consider that you&#8217;ve been through a job interview?&#8221;
&#8220;I&#8217;ve been through a process of advice and consent under the Constitution, which &#8230;&#8221; Kavanaugh began, but Graham interrupted.
&#8220;Would you say you&#8217;ve been through hell?&#8221;
&#8220;I — I&#8217;ve been through hell and then some,&#8221; Kavanaugh conceded.
&#8220;This is not a job interview,&#8221; Graham said. &#8220;This is hell.&#8221;
&#8220;This — this &#8230;&#8221; Kavanaugh struggled for the right words.
&#8220;This is going to destroy the ability of good people to come forward because of this crap. Your high school yearbook — you have interacted with professional women all your life, not one accusation,&#8221; Graham continued. &#8220;You&#8217;re supposed to be Bill Cosby when you&#8217;re a junior and senior in high school. And all of a sudden, you got over it. It&#8217;s been my understanding that if you drug women and rape them for two years in high school, you probably don&#8217;t stop.&#8221;
&#8220;Here&#8217;s my understanding, if you lived a good life people would recognize it, like the American Bar Association has, the gold standard. His integrity is absolutely unquestioned. He is the very circumspect in his personal conduct, harbors no biases or prejudices. He&#8217;s entirely ethical, is a really decent person. He is warm, friendly, unassuming. He&#8217;s the nicest person — the ABA,&#8221; Graham continued. &#8220;The one thing I can tell you should be proud of — Ashley, you should be proud of this — that you raised a daughter who had the good character to pray for Dr. Ford.&#8221;
Graham then turned his ire on his own party, warning them not to fall prey to the spectacle being put on for them: &#8220;To my Republican colleagues, if you vote no, you&#8217;re legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics. You want this seat? I hope you never get it.&#8221;
&#8220;I hope you&#8217;re on the Supreme Court, that&#8217;s exactly where you should be,&#8221; he said to Kavanaugh. &#8220;And I hope that the American people will see through this charade. And I wish you well. And I intend to vote for you and I hope everybody who&#8217;s fair-minded will.&#8221;
Graham&#8217;s position — and his outrage — were abundantly clear, but throughout the process he was still able to keep his legendary sense of humor. During one hallway chat with reporters, for example, a protester interrupted the gaggle and called for Kavanaugh to take a polygraph.
&#8220;You&#8217;ve humiliated this guy enough, and there seems to be no bottom for some of you,&#8221; Graham said of Kavanaugh — and the ongoing witch hunt targeting him — a woman behind him interrupted to demand the Supreme Court nominee take a polygraph.
Without turning to acknowledge her, Graham quipped, &#8220;Why don&#8217;t we dunk him in water and see if he floats?&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Never forget Lindsey Graham’s amazing sense of humor—during the heated Kavanaugh confirmation fight:
Protester: Kavanaugh should take a polygraph.
Sen. Lindsey Graham: &#8220;Why don&#8217;t we dunk him in water and see if he floats?&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/ynTRuOavho">pic.twitter.com/ynTRuOavho</a>
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) <a href="https://x.com/SteveGuest/status/2076268089595900108?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 12, 2026</a></blockquote>
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Dr. Christine Blasey Ford And Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh Testify To Senate Judiciary Committee

FLASHBACK: The Lindsey Graham Speech That Turned The Tide For Brett Kavanaugh

Judiciary

Donald Trump says he will “immediately” ask the Supreme Court to rehear the birthright citizenship case, calling the ruling a &#8220;miscarriage of justice.&#8221; 
In a Truth Social <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116886461770041376">post</a> on Wednesday, the president wrote, &#8220;I will be asking for a Rehearing by the United States Supreme Court, IMMEDIATELY. This miscarriage of justice will destroy America if they don’t change their absolutely insane decision.&#8221;
The Supreme Court <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/supreme-court-rules-against-trump-in-birthright-citizenship-case">ruled in June</a> that children born in the United States are subject to its jurisdiction and are citizens at birth. “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,&#8217;” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. “We keep that promise today.”
Trump’s <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/08/trump-supreme-court-birthright-citizenship-rehearing.html">executive order</a>, signed on January 20, 2025, aimed to eliminate immediate birthright citizenship for children whose parents are illegal immigrants or who are living in the U.S. on temporary visas. The Supreme Court ruled that birthright citizenship is protected by the 14th Amendment. 

Trump&#8217;s post followed viral images of a <a href="https://x.com/nicksortor/status/2074973721853567201?s=20">billboard</a> near the border advertising &#8220;birth packages in South Texas,&#8221; which directed viewers to the website “<a href="http://havemybabyintexas.com/">havemybabyinTEXAS.com</a>.”
“Signs and Billboards are being put up all over our Southern Border, and Mexico, advertising BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP, with ‘Deliveries starting at $4000,’” Trump said. “Billions of Dollars will be illegally made by this SCAM, with Citizenship going to anyone willing to pay.”
The <a href="https://www.uscis.gov/family/family-of-us-citizens/bringing-parents-to-live-in-the-united-states-as-permanent-residents">law</a> also permits the entire families of these citizens into the nation, something Trump asserted is “not sustainable.” 
The Supreme Court has not granted a rehearing in an argued case since 1965. It has reversed itself on rehearing only once, in a 1957 <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/354/1/">case</a> over the court-martial of two American civilians overseas.
Trump’s move is a long shot, but many on the Right argue it&#8217;s necessary to advance the President&#8217;s immigration agenda. D. John Sauer, the 49th Solicitor General of the United States, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/01/trump-birth-tourism-supreme-court">said</a> that “no one knows for sure” how rampant birth tourism is. The Center for Immigration Studies said that there are 20,000 to 26,000 births by women on tourist visas annually.

Supreme Court Backs Birthright Citizenship In Blow To Trump

Trump Refuses To Let Birthright Citizenship Fight End

birth tourism

birthright citizenship

Joking with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) at the White House on Monday, President Donald Trump was asked whether Cruz belonged on the Supreme Court.
Trump stated, “In fact, somebody said, ‘Would you ever appoint him to the United States Supreme Court, because he’s a brilliant lawyer, Ted?’ I said, “Well, he’s the only one I can think of that&#8217;s gonna get 100 votes. All Republicans will vote for him. All Democrats will vote for him, because they want to get him the hell out of the Senate!’ If I was having a hard time with getting the votes I would appoint Ted Cruz, I’d get 100%. Guaranteed.”
The truth is no laughing matter.
Although Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito are rock-ribbed originalists and staunchly conservative, Thomas turned 78 in June, and Alito is 76. If Trump wants to preserve the Court&#8217;s conservative stamp, he may need to find replacements for one or both before leaving office. With the GOP holding only 53 Senate seats, the majority could easily evaporate.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Donald Trump: If I appointed Ted Cruz to the Supreme Court, he&#39;d get 100 votes.
&quot;He&#39;s the ONLY ONE I can think of that&#39;s gonna get 100 votes.&quot;
&quot;ALL Republicans will vote for him. ALL Democrats will vote for him, because they want to get him the hell out of the Senate!&quot; <a href="https://t.co/Y8hvrzp3LS">pic.twitter.com/Y8hvrzp3LS</a>
&mdash; Townhall.com (@townhallcom) <a href="https://x.com/townhallcom/status/2074128308816490598?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 6, 2026</a></blockquote>
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&nbsp;
Cruz, the first Hispanic senator from Texas, graduated from Princeton University before earning his Juris Doctor from Harvard. After serving as a policy advisor in the George W. Bush administration, he was appointed by then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott as the state’s solicitor general, a role he held until 2008. Cruz worked in private practice until winning his Senate seat in 2012, then winning reelection in 2018 and 2024.
During his tenure as Solicitor General, Cruz successfully defended the Ten Commandments placed on the Texas State Capitol grounds and successfully defended Texas against reopening the cases of 51 Mexican nationals who were convicted of murder in the United States.
In September 2020, after President Trump named him to a group of potential Supreme Court nominees, Cruz was <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/14/ted-cruz-supreme-court/">asked</a> by Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, “Do you want the job?”
“I don’t,” Cruz replied. “It is deeply honoring, it’s humbling to be included in the list … but it’s not the desire of my heart. I want to be in the political fight.”
In 2016, he also <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2016/05/13/cruz-not-interested-us-supreme-court/">dismissed the idea</a>, saying, “That is not a desire of my heart. I am committed to the fight of ensuring we have strong principled constitutionalists on the court, but I believe that I can do a great more good fighting across the political spectrum.”

Pam Bondi Swears In Kash Patel As FBI Director

Why Donald Trump Says Ted Cruz Would Be Easiest Supreme Court Nominee

Congress

Donald Trump

Executive

SCOTUS

Ted Cruz

Every Supreme Court term produces headlines. This one produced structural change — the kind that will shape how power works in Washington, D.C., in statehouses, and in your own community for years to come.
Start with the case that mattered most: Trump v. Slaughter. For 90 years, Congress could shield the heads of “independent” agencies — the Federal Trade Commission, and by extension dozens of similar bodies — from being fired by the president except for cause. The Court ended that, ruling that if an official exercises the president’s executive power, the president can remove him. In practice, that means voters who elect a president now have more say over the sprawling bureaucracy that regulates everything from consumer products to labor disputes, rather than leaving that power with unelected commissioners serving staggered terms.
A companion case, Trump v. Cook, carved out an exception for the Federal Reserve — Fed governors can be fired only for cause, a 5-4 compromise that Justice Barrett, in dissent, called out as arbitrary and going beyond what the Court needed to decide the case.
Women’s sports had one of their best days ever at the Court. In cases out of West Virginia and Idaho, all nine justices agreed that Title IX — the law that opened the door to girls’ athletics in the first place — doesn’t force states to let biological males compete on girls’ teams. A narrower 6-3 majority held that constitutional equal protection likewise allows states to protect female athletes. That means the 27 states that already protect single-sex sports are on solid legal ground, and cases are already wending their way to the Supreme Court asking whether equal protection and Title IX actually require the other 23 states to do so.
The Second Amendment kept winning, too. In Wolford v. Lopez, the Court struck down a Hawaii law that weaponized trespass law against concealed-carry permit holders: Instead of assuming that a valid permit holder could enter a business with his weapon unless told otherwise, Hawaii required businesses to explicitly invite him in first. The Court said that the law effectively criminalized ordinary daily life for lawful gun owners — a ruling that should also doom copycat laws in California and other blue states. In a separate case, the justices unanimously held that the government can’t strip someone’s gun rights merely because he’s an occasional marijuana user, absent any sign he’s actually dangerous.
The First Amendment had an outstanding term as well. The Court struck down Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy” counseling, ruling that a state can’t let therapists affirm a client’s gender identity while banning them from helping a client move the other direction — that’s the government picking sides on a viewpoint, not regulating conduct.
Elsewhere, the Court protected a New Jersey pregnancy center’s right to keep its donor list private from a hostile state subpoena, and struck down limits on how much political parties can coordinate spending with their own candidates. The campaign finance ruling is the latest in a series of cases reaffirming that free speech includes the right to political speech, and it will likely shift fundraising and election spending back to the parties and away from outside groups and Super PACs.
The term also delivered a landmark election law decision: Louisiana v. Callais. The Court held that a Voting Rights Act lawsuit can’t succeed just by pointing to a correlation between race and party in a district — plaintiffs now need real evidence of intentional discrimination. The Court put that reasoning to work almost immediately in an emergency order reinstating Alabama’s congressional map, an order that invoked the “colorblind Constitution” — language borrowed from the first Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, and now, for the first time, adopted by a majority. In practice, this makes it harder to scurrilously repackage partisan gerrymandering claims with racial language. One disappointment: the Court left in place the counting of late-arriving mail ballots, though it noted Congress could set a firmer national rule if it chose to.
Immigration cases mostly went the government’s way, with the Court reading several statutes in commonsense, textualist terms — including a ruling that someone who is stopped at the border hasn’t yet “arrived in” the country, reaffirming that courts can’t second-guess the president’s determination not to exempt Haitian and Syrian immigrants from removal, and another making it easier to remove green-card holders who commit serious crimes. The exception was the birthright citizenship case, where the majority applied the traditional, broad meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause to cover the U.S.-born children of both illegal immigrants and temporary visitors. As an originalist matter, it was a difficult case, with both sides grappling with the historical evidence. Justice Thomas’s 91-page dissent masterfully presented a narrower view of the Clause, but even the dissenters concluded that the president’s executive order likely went further than the Constitution permits.
On the business side, the Court made it harder for trial lawyers to drag oil companies into friendly state courts over decades-old wartime production, ruling that those suits belong in federal court — a real check on the climate-litigation industry that’s grown up around this kind of lawsuit.
Not every case broke along predictable lines. In a dispute over the president’s tariff powers, originalist justices ended up on both sides — a useful reminder that originalism is a method, not a rubber stamp, and methods sometimes produce results conservatives don’t love.
The term produced a few decisions that disappointed the president or conservatives, but, taken as a whole, it stands as one of the most significant terms in memory for bringing the Court back to an originalist understanding of the Constitution. Presidential removal power, women’s sports, the First and Second Amendments, immigration enforcement, climate and election litigation abuse — the Court engaged all of it and got the lion’s share right. That’s not a disappointing term. That’s a historic one.
***
Carrie Severino is the president of the Judicial Crisis Network. Follow her on X <a href="https://www.twitter.com/@JCNSeverino">@JCNSeverino</a>

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The Supreme Court Term That Handed Originalists One Of Their Best Years Yet

DW Opinion

Election Laws

executive power

First Amendment

Louisiana v. Callais

Second Amendment

Title IX

Transgender Athletes

Trump v. Cook

Trump v. Slaughter

Wolford v. Lopez

Dismantling The Disastrous ‘Birthright Citizenship’ Decision

Clarence Thomas

Samuel Alito

Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld birthright citizenship, which was a legal abomination. But that does not mean that America is doomed to a future of open immigration.
To understand what we can and should do, we have to understand what went wrong with immigration in the United States.
The answer is not Supreme Court decisions. What went wrong with immigration in the United States was the elected branches of government: legislative and executive policy.
Over the decades, our legislators and presidents have let in tens of millions of people who should not be in the country. That needs to stop, and some of it needs to be reversed.
So let&#8217;s start with a question: if we want to understand America&#8217;s immigration policy, where exactly do you think it broke down?
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2457?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
The percentage of immigrants of the total U.S. population from 1850 to essentially 1930 was well north of 10%, quite high.
Very few people think about immigration in that period as breaking America. It obviously created significant social problems, but nobody tends to think of that period in American life between 1850 and 1930 as a time that wrecked what America was.
And then the share of immigrants in the U.S. population dropped sharply between 1930 and essentially 1970. Then it spiked again.
If you look at the immigrant share of the U.S. population, it was 9.7% in 1850. In 1890, it rose to almost 15%. People don&#8217;t tend to think of this as a bad time for America because of immigration. Yes, there were social concerns, but overall, in retrospect, we don&#8217;t see this as a time when America was “being hollowed out.”
From 1930 onward, that percentage declined sharply from well north of 10% to 4.7% in 1970. And now it has spiked up again to roughly 14% as of 2022.
So what changed? We tend to think of immigration as a massive problem, but we didn’t think of immigration as a massive problem in 1900 when the percentage was about the same.
We need a quick history lesson here on the nature of American immigration. What changed is the nature of American immigration, not the sheer number.
America is a land of people who came to settle an unsettled wilderness, and they came from Europe, in large measure. There were no welfare programs. They didn&#8217;t come here to take advantage of existing welfare programs.
In 1850, the top five foreign-born populations were Ireland, Germany, the U.K., Canada, and France.
Move forward to 1880, and you can see that the pattern remains the same, except for massive Chinese immigration to the West Coast. But even that massive Chinese immigration to the West Coast was not in the top five in terms of foreign-born population. In 1880, when a substantial percentage of Americans were immigrants, the top five foreign-born populations were Germany, Ireland, the U.K., Canada, and Sweden.
Move forward again: 1910. In 1910, the top five foreign-born populations were Germany, Russia, Ireland, Italy, and the U.K. — still mostly European immigrants.
Move forward to 1990: Things have shifted quite a bit. It turns out that number one with a bullet is Mexico. A huge, huge percentage of immigrants were now coming from Mexico. In 1990, 4.26 million immigrants were from Mexico. The next highest number was 910,000 people from the Philippines.
You may notice that neither of those countries is European.
740,000 from Canada, 740,000 from Cuba. Germany clocked in at a very low number five.
So the source of the immigration had radically shifted.
Now move forward to 2022. What you can see is that the entire country was blanketed with immigrants from India, China, the Philippines, El Salvador, and Mexico. In 2022, the top five foreign-born populations by country of origin were: 10.6 million immigrants from Mexico, 2.83 million immigrants from India, 2.23 million from China, 2.01 million from the Philippines, and 1.42 million from El Salvador.
That is a giant shift in the nature of the places people are coming from. To pretend that gigantic numbers of Mexican immigrants are going to be the same as gigantic numbers of German, Irish, or British immigrants is silly. The same thing for India, the same thing for China.
That is not a case against any individual immigrant. It is just a fact. When you import large numbers of people from cultures that don&#8217;t cohere with the core culture of the United States — which is an English/Protestant culture from the beginning — then it&#8217;s going to be harder to integrate those people.
Add to that the fact that from the very beginning, our immigration programs were rooted in the idea that there was no welfare; you came here for the adventure. You came here because you wanted a better life, not because you wanted welfare benefits.
Once you add welfare benefits on top, the kinds of people who are coming here change.
This is the difference between opening a Michelin-star bakery — where your clientele is going to be a certain type of person — and opening a donut shop, and you put in the window “free donut”: there will be a different type of person who shows up to the donut shop.
If you look at the history of American immigration, you can see why there was a gigantic wave of immigration and then a dip: congressional action.
It is not as though Congress has not acted before. In 1882, Congress passed what was called the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1880, China was the number one source of immigration, raising concerns in Congress. Thus, in 1882, they passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which actually barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States for 10 years and was later extended to bar Chinese immigrants from naturalization entirely.
By 1910, there was an incredible uptick in immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. So the Immigration Act of 1917 was passed, creating a barred zone extending from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, from which no immigrants were permitted, and instituting literacy tests for people entering the country.
In 1921, the Emergency Quota Act was the first federal law to set numerical limits on immigration. The goal was to keep people coming in at very low levels from countries we had already allowed entry.
In 1924, the National Origins Act, the Immigration Act, tightened it still further, intentionally barring immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and banning virtually all immigration from Asia. You see a giant drop in the share of immigrants in the American population between then and essentially 1965.
And then something seminal happened: the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which radically changed the nature of immigration in the United States. We went from a bunch of European immigrants to a bunch of immigrants from places like El Salvador, Mexico, China, and the Philippines, etc.
That act was pushed by Senator Ted Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson and repealed the quota system entirely. That meant a radical uptick of immigrants from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and South America. It had a no-discrimination clause that said no person could be discriminated against in the issuance of any visa because of race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or residence.
Previously, we had two types of visas: permanent and temporary. We had limits on temporary visas. But that was jettisoned under the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.
It also created a seven-tiered preference system designed to reunify families of U.S. citizens and legal residents. This created massive illegal immigration because there was a cap that was placed on Western Hemisphere immigration, but there was no guest worker program. Instead, people started crossing the border en masse and just staying.
Add on top of that the gigantic welfare systems that were created by LBJ&#8217;s Great Society programs and the accessibility of those welfare systems to illegal immigrants, and you get the free donut shop, where you have people coming across the border because the benefits here are great. You&#8217;ll not just get a better job; you will also have access to American systems.
Everyone wants to get in; the United States is a great place.
But you will draw a different type of clientele depending on whether you&#8217;re the free donut shop or the Michelin-star restaurant.
When you change the math, when you pay people, when you give them free money so they don&#8217;t have to integrate, they don&#8217;t have to assimilate by nature, and you change the system pretending that all cultures are equally capable of mass migration to the United States, you end up with the current system of immigration in the United States.
You&#8217;ll notice that throughout this litany of immigration history, the vast majority of this action is either bad congressional or presidential action — such as Joe Biden opening the border and widely refusing to enforce immigration law — or judicial actions that are likely reversible at the Supreme Court level today.
So what is the solution? 
Number one, you can enforce immigration law; it is the job of the executive branch. You don&#8217;t need an invalidation of birthright citizenship in order to enforce immigration laws. It is illegal to immigrate illegally.
Number two, you can get rid of the possibility of government dependency for illegal immigrants: the job of the legislature and the judiciary.
Number three, start by enforcing immigration laws. Our enforcement mechanisms on temporary visas need to be significantly stronger. When it comes to visa tests for permanent visas, we&#8217;d have to screen more carefully.
You&#8217;d have to share our values, come from a system that shares them, and be able to prove it. If you&#8217;re coming from a place where you can&#8217;t prove it, you shouldn&#8217;t get in. You have to show that you&#8217;re going to be of net economic benefit to the United States, that you&#8217;re not going to be a welfare draw.
When it comes to temporary visas, we would boot people as soon as the temporary visa has expired; we would actually follow up, which we don&#8217;t do right now. We would shut the border. We would start deporting people who are in the country illegally and are welfare-dependent or are engaged in illegal activity of any sort.
We can crack down on birth tourism, which was the key issue with regard to birthright citizenship. We can criminalize people who come to the U.S. through birth tourism networks.
Then there&#8217;s welfare. If you&#8217;re going to come in and be on welfare, you should not be able to come in. If you&#8217;re on welfare, you should be in line to get the boot again. We do not require congressional action here.
The worst thing you can do is black-pill, because that removes responsibility from the executive and the legislature, saying, “The judiciary blew it for us; there’s nothing we can do. I guess we&#8217;re screwed now.”
That&#8217;s not helpful.
But the most important thing is that the Supreme Court&#8217;s ruling yesterday did not change the existing state of the law. They simply didn&#8217;t do the right thing — which sucks, it&#8217;s a blown opportunity — but the answers are still there.
For conservatives and Republicans, immigration remains a winning issue because it is not that Democrats are so in love with the concept of birthright citizenship; it is that they are in favor of open borders.
Congress can do something, and congressional and executive policy can do something.
Democrats are celebrating because they want birthright citizenship to be the basis of mass migration.
But there’s a lot we can do about it.

Immigrants on Ellis Island

Birthright Citizenship Isn’t The End

American History

Assimilation

Ben Shapiro

mass immigration

Opinion

For years, the transgender movement has demanded that Americans go along with an increasingly rigid orthodoxy — adopt its preferred language, accept its premises without question, and treat any hesitation as bigotry. Women&#8217;s sports is where that demand finally ran into a wall. It&#8217;s one thing to ask people to use a new name. It&#8217;s another to ask the parent watching her daughter lose a state title to a biological male, or the coach watching a girl get bumped from the roster, to pretend she isn&#8217;t seeing what she&#8217;s seeing. Anyone who&#8217;s played sports or watched their kids play them knows there are real, obvious physical differences between male and female athletes. This was always going to be the issue where the emperor&#8217;s lack of clothes became impossible to ignore — and the Supreme Court said so, decisively.
In a 6–3 decision covering both West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, the Court held that neither the Equal Protection Clause nor Title IX stops states from reserving women&#8217;s and girls&#8217; sports teams for biological females. Title IX was passed in 1972 to guarantee girls a place in athletics, after decades in which they&#8217;d been frozen out. It took chutzpah to argue, 50 years later, that the same law requires schools to let biological males take roster spots, scholarships, and trophies from the very girls it was written to protect. Six justices weren&#8217;t buying it.
West Virginia&#8217;s Save Women&#8217;s Sports Act and Idaho&#8217;s Fairness in Women&#8217;s Sports Act both define sex by biology and reserve girls&#8217; teams accordingly — common-sense laws that got tangled up in lower courts eager to strike them down. The Fourth Circuit ruled against West Virginia, while the Ninth Circuit blocked Idaho&#8217;s law as unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause.
The Supreme Court reversed both. Writing for the majority, Justice Kavanaugh noted that Title IX explicitly authorizes sex-specific sports teams. Under the Equal Protection Clause he applied intermediate scrutiny — the standard for sex-based classifications — and found that &#8220;safety and competitive fairness&#8221; are important government interests substantially served by sex-based eligibility rules. He rejected the idea that courts should referee, case by case, which biological males have suppressed their advantage enough through hormones to compete against girls — an &#8220;almost impossible task&#8221; to perform fairly. For intermediate scrutiny, the fact that men and women , as a group, differ so dramatically in size, strength, and general athletic ability is sufficient to allow laws separating sports to pass constitutional muster.
Kavanaugh&#8217;s opinion didn&#8217;t shy away from naming what&#8217;s actually at stake: &#8220;Sports are generally zero sum.&#8221; Every spot given to a male athlete on a girls&#8217; team is a spot, a starting position, or a medal taken from a girl. That&#8217;s not a hypothetical for Kavanaugh, who has coached his own daughters&#8217; basketball teams for years — known to his players as &#8220;Coach K.&#8221; Few justices were better positioned to write that sentence.
Justice Thomas, in concurrence, went further, writing that transgender status doesn&#8217;t trigger heightened constitutional scrutiny and that sex is &#8220;binary&#8221; and &#8220;immutable.&#8221; But the line worth remembering is the one where he names what&#8217;s really been at stake all along — not just sports, but whether Americans can be made to say things they know aren&#8217;t true: &#8220;To use language to obscure reality—to show &#8216;indifference regarding the truth&#8217;—is to lie to the public and cease to treat our fellow citizens &#8216;as equal[s].'&#8221; The demand was never just for kindness toward people experiencing gender dysphoria — most Americans are happy to extend that. The demand was for everyone else to repeat a falsehood on command. Thomas just said, in a Supreme Court opinion, that no one has to.
Justice Gorsuch added that Title IX, as a Spending Clause statute, can&#8217;t bind states to obligations Congress never spelled out clearly. He also attempted to reconcile the decision with Bostock v. Clayton County — his much-maligned 2020 ruling that redefined &#8220;sex&#8221; under Title VII to include gender identity but never purported to govern locker rooms or sports teams.
Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, dissented in part, significantly acknowledging that sex in Title IX is binary, but arguing the equal protection claims should have gone back down for fact-finding on whether transgender athletes are &#8220;similarly situated&#8221; to biological girls — an invitation to years of litigation over hormone levels and athletic advantage.
Justice Jackson, in a separate dissent, argued Title IX should let students compete according to gender identity rather than biology. She added that &#8220;West Virginia&#8217;s law forces B. P. J. to live—in this case, to play—as a boy though she is a girl.&#8221;
It’s worth sitting with that, because four years ago, then-Judge Jackson sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee and refused to define what a woman is because she wasn&#8217;t a biologist. That non-answer was widely mocked at the time, and fairly so. Now the same justice has no trouble declaring, as a matter of law, that a biological male is a girl. The biology didn&#8217;t get more complicated in the intervening four years. What changed is that this time, declining to answer wouldn&#8217;t have gotten her to the result she wanted.
This decision validates the laws already on the books in 27 states protecting girls&#8217; sports, and removes the legal cloud that&#8217;s hung over them since the Fourth and Ninth Circuit rulings. Expect more states to follow now that the Court has confirmed there&#8217;s no constitutional cliff on the other side.
But don&#8217;t expect the fight to end here. The ruling says states may limit girls&#8217; sports to biological females — not that they must. That leaves an opening for the next round of litigation: whether states that let biological males compete against girls are themselves exposing girls to sex discrimination under Title IX. If &#8220;safety and competitive fairness&#8221; justify excluding males from girls&#8217; sports, advocates will argue, then states that decline to exclude them may be the ones violating the law.
For now, though, this is a clean, important win — for the rule of law, for the plain meaning of a 1972 statute, and most of all for the thousands of girls whose roster spots, records, medals, and scholarships are no longer up for grabs.
***
Carrie Severino is the president of the Judicial Crisis Network. Follow her on X <a href="https://www.twitter.com/@JCNSeverino">@JCNSeverino</a>

Sadie Schreiner, a Transgender Track Athlete, Fights to Compete in Her Sport as a Sprinter

The Supreme Court Just Saved Women’s Sports

Save Women's Sports Act

Everyone holds a grudge against some product so poor it&#8217;s unusable. The pan to which everything sticks; the deodorant that transforms the smell of sweat into a chemical weapon; the vile beer you haven’t raised to your lips since you were 19; much of the Disney Star Wars catalog.
CNN’s coverage of the Supreme Court is similarly dismal.
There are exceptions that ought to be acknowledged up front. Chief legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid traffics mostly in straightforward summaries and scoops, and senior legal analyst Elie Honig is among the most evenhanded and able in the entire industry (his <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-but-prosecutors-contorted-the-law.html">takedown</a> of disgraced Manhattan District Attorney and unwitting Trump 2024 campaign co-chair Alvin Bragg made for a particularly enjoyable and richly deserved demonstration of his fair-minded aptitude.)
But by and large: dismal.
Tuesday was particularly instructive. The Supreme Court released a pair of decisions celebrated by conservatives on the topics of campaign finance and transgender athletes before striking down President Donald Trump’s attempt to do away with birthright citizenship in its most highly anticipated opinion of the term.
It was a representative finale, as the Court has spent months serving up mixed bags that have driven the president to his wit’s end. Among the other subjects he’s suffered losses on: tariffs, mail-in ballot deadlines, and the employment status of Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook.
Nevertheless, a panel on Tuesday’s edition of Inside Politics <a href="https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/inside-politics/episodes/7f248bdc-b8ee-11f0-999e-bb9a43376430">breaking</a> down this final spate of cases appears to have been assembled for the express purpose of advancing a preposterous narrative about the Court’s supposed partisan bent.
After The New York Times’ Tyler Pager observed that Trump was likely to lash out over the birthright citizenship ruling, host Manu Raju insisted that the Court “did allow him to push the bounds of what he can do.”
Moments later, the discussion turned to National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, the aforementioned campaign finance case in which the Court held that the congressionally-imposed limits on the amount of money that can be spent by political parties in coordination with candidates violate the First Amendment – and devolved into a stunning demonstration of its participants’ juvenile hackery.
Raju characterized it as “a big win for Republicans, who were pushing to gut the post-Watergate rules.” You get all that? Republicans are desperate, to the point of violent metaphors to bring back Watergate-style corruption. Never mind the facts of the actual case, which had nothing to do with the scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office, or that the ruling cuts both ways. Just take CNN at its word.
It only got worse from there. NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe complained that while “people” want to see money taken “out of politics,” the Court has moved “in the totally opposite direction.” As a liberal, her misunderstanding of the American constitutional order – the judiciary is designed to be a check on the political branches, not a super-legislature that rubber stamps the whims of the “people” at any given point in time – is to be expected. As a professional political commentator, it’s embarrassing.
Not to be outdone, Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck marveled that “this Supreme Court” is “unapologetic” about “overruling its own precedent,” and parroted Justice Elena Kagan’s protest that “we’re supposed to have good reasons for overturning these precedents” before repeating Rascoe’s inane point about public sentiment. Arbitrary, undue restrictions on political speech don’t qualify as a “good reason” in Vladeck’s book? Spare a prayer for this man’s poor students. They’re paying over $80,000 a year in tuition to be misinformed by a slack-jawed blowhard.
Chief Supreme Court analyst and Fredo Corleone of Nina Totenberg’s Joan Biskupic picked up the torch from there to gush over Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in the trans athlete case, in which she argued: “how terrible it was going to be in terms of fairness on the competitive field.”
Huh?
She went on to declare that interpersonal tension between the justices could be chalked up to the fact that “the conservative members of the Court were chosen for certain reasons, and they were chosen for their vigilance on the kinds of rulings that-”
“And their reliability,” chimed in Vladeck.
“-not just President Trump might want, but the Republican Party would want. That was the whole point,” concluded Biskupic.
“Well, the word reliability, I think, is an important one because it’s exactly why the Court is constantly criticized. Because overturning precedent is not just a matter of throwing away trash,” declared chief legal analyst Laura Coates. “ It really is if the American public has chosen these nine Supreme Court justices in terms of a body that is supposed to provide the consistency, reliability so people can manage their lives accordingly, every time you overturn precedent, you undermine the ability of the American public, let alone the voting public, to understand the world in which they live and operate, and the balance of power. And so if they are in the business of deciding what we just said no longer applies, then how can the American public be in the habit of understanding what laws and rights they retain, and what will end up on the fire heap.”
What you’re not supposed to notice is that it’s the conservative majority that just rescued one of the public’s most cherished rights from the fire heap.
Or that the progressive chattering class only extolls the sacred value of stare decisis when it serves their political interests.
At the root of this parade of misfires, distortions, and outright lies — all of which were promulgated in only about 15 minutes of airtime — is the fact that it’s the Left that approaches legal questions in exactly the shameful manner that it pretends the Right does.
It’s the Democratic appointees to the bench who vote as a bloc on every single high-profile, politically sensitive case. It’s they who were appointed to promote a worldview rather than uphold the law. And it’s their cheerleaders in liberal media who have worked tirelessly to delegitimize Article III in the eyes of the public.
The cost of that campaign? Its participants’ dignity and professional pride.
They’re all too happy to pay up.
***
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a 2023–2024 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.

CNN Washington DC

CNN’s Legal Eagles Act More Like Clucking Hens

Inside Politics (CNN)

Daily Wire White House Correspondent <a href="mailto:molohan@dailywire.com">Mary Margaret Olohan</a> on Wednesday pressed Vice President JD Vance to weigh in on the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding birthright citizenship and whether he&#8217;s upset with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf">In a landmark ruling</a> authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court held that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.
Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, joined Roberts in the decision, which dealt a blow to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda and drew strong backlash from conservatives.
“Some conservatives are angry with Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Are you one of them?” Olohan asked Vance after he delivered remarks to troops in Virginia Beach. 
“Well, look, do I think she made a mistake in the ruling? I do. I don&#8217;t know how anybody can say that if a person who is an illegal alien, or a person, for example, who&#8217;s pregnant and comes to the United States on a vacation, they have a baby, and all of a sudden their entire family gets the benefits of American citizenship,” Vance said. 
“I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s what the framers of the 14th Amendment had in mind. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s the right case, but look, it was 5-4. Sometimes the Supreme Court makes mistakes, we&#8217;re going to try to correct that mistake, but nobody&#8217;s perfect, including the Supreme Court,” Vance added. 
The Daily Wire also asked the Vice President about speculation — and a bogus NPR report — claiming Justice Samuel Alito will soon retire from the bench. 
“I don&#8217;t know, you know, Justice Alito is such an amazing guy, and I think the Supreme Court, he would be irreplaceable, but of course, if he retired, that&#8217;s up to him, and we would try to do the best job we could at finding a proper replacement,&#8221; Vance told The Daily Wire. 
Vance also responded to The Daily Wire’s question about why Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez <a href="https://x.com/Acyn/status/2072096503724908646?s=20">hopes</a> that the vice president leads the 2028 Republican ticket.
“I don&#8217;t think much about 2028, as you know,” Vance said to Olohan. &#8220;My attitude is, let&#8217;s do a good job now, let&#8217;s continue to try to make some wins for the American people. We can worry about the future when the future comes, but we got an important midterm election here. We got to keep the people in Congress who&#8217;ve been fighting for our troops and our veterans.&#8221;
“That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m focused on,” he said.
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Credit: CSPAN
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JD Vance/Amy Coney Barrett

Daily Wire Asks JD Vance If He’s Angry With Barrett Over SCOTUS Loss

JD Vance

News

For years, saying that men and women, and that boys and girls are different, has been viewed as an act of aggression in many of America’s most elite sectors.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court treated it as what it is: the truth.
In upholding West Virginia’s and Idaho’s laws barring males from female sports, the Court held that a state “may maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females.” The reasoning was almost startling in its obviousness — and a fact of nature and commonsense that would have been unquestioned even two decades ago. Given the inherent physical differences between the sexes, separate teams reduce injury and secure fair competition. This is not bigotry. It is biology, and it is, at its heart, justice.
Justice Thomas, concurring, went to the root of the issue that the majority only gestured toward, and he did so contra the prevailing legal methods so fashionable today. The official positivist story is that judges exclude moral considerations from their rulings. The reality is that all judges operate from moral premises — inevitably so, often quietly, and in the background — and getting the morality right is no small matter. And Justice Thomas got it right. Sex, he wrote, is immutable and binary; men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women and girls, however sincerely they believe otherwise. That is as clear a declaration of human ontology and teleology as you will ever see in a Supreme Court ruling. That is the deeper victory here — a victory tethered to natural law. The Court did not merely side with the girls who watched a male claim their state shot put title. It sided, however modestly, with reality itself. When reason, nature, the common good, and the law converge, truth wins. That is moral sanity, and it has been in short supply.
But a ruling that vindicates the meaning and reality of sex is also a fitting occasion to warn my own side against abusing it. For even as conservatives rightly celebrate the Court’s recognition that sex is real and weighty, a faction on the right has spent recent months committing the mirror-image error — treating sex as though it settles questions it has no business settling.
The target has been Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and yesterday’s ruling on birthright citizenship is putting her gender in the crosshairs once again. Disagree with her jurisprudence on immigration and birthright citizenship all you want; that’s your prerogative. But discrediting her reasoning by appeal to her sex, or to her status as an adoptive mother — as some now do — is a category error. It is also textbook Bulverism, C.S. Lewis’s name for the trick of explaining why someone is wrong without first bothering to show that she is wrong: “you only think that because you’re a woman.”
A legal argument is sound or unsound on its own terms. The sex of the one making it has no bearing on whether it tracks with the truth. The intellect’s apprehension of reality is not indexed by sex; the human mind, male or female, is equally capable of grasping what is. Truth answers to human nature’s fittedness to reality as such — not to truth qua sex. That sex carries real teleological weight for vocation and embodiment is entirely true, and entirely beside the point here.
The adoptive-mother line some use to discredit her is even worse, because it isn’t even about her reasoning. It infers bias from biography. A judge’s conclusions stand or fall on her construction of the law — for good or for ill — not on the shape of her family. Attack the argument, or concede you haven’t got one. I’m no expert on the Constitution and immigration, and Justice Barrett may well be wrong. If she is, make the case from text and history — not from sex.
And here is the irony the moment lays bare. The progressive who insists a male can be a female denies that sex means anything fixed at all. The populist who insists Barrett rules as she does because she is a woman insists that sex means everything — that it skews the very operations of the intellect. Both are failures of the same faulty anthropology. Both refuse to see the human person as he and she actually are: embodied, sexed, and therefore genuinely different in vocation and form; yet equally rational, equally answerable to reality, equally made in the image of the God who is Truth. To suggest otherwise is to deny the ontological and epistemological equality of men and women as image-bearers of God.
The Court got the first half right today. Sex is real. It is given. It is not ours to redefine. The task now falling to conservatives is to hold the second half with the same conviction: that honoring the difference between men and women never requires pretending a woman cannot think or that her status as an adoptive mother necessarily colors her rulings. A movement that learns to say sex is real will have won an argument. A movement that also learns when sex is beside the point will have learned wisdom.
***
Andrew T. Walker is associate professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and managing editor of WORLD Opinions. He is a fellow at The Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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