Elie Mystal, writing powerfully for The Nation:

The legal upshot of the Supreme Court’s monumentally disastrous decision in Trump v. CASA (more commonly known as “the birthright citizenship case”) is chaos. Utter legal chaos. In its ruling on Friday, the court’s usual six monarchists granted Donald Trump’s request to reexamine various nationwide injunctions preventing Trump and Stephen Miller from implementing their plans to revoke birthright citizenship to any American who doesn’t happen to be white. With the legal sleight of hand so beloved by the Roberts court, the ruling doesn’t actually allow Trump to end birthright citizenship. It just makes it incredibly difficult for courts to stop him from ending birthright citizenship. It’s a distinction, one that lawyers will try to exploit for an entire rearguard action to defend citizenship in this country, but one that’s unlikely to make much of a difference if you happen to be born on the Republican side of the tracks. Once you read the fine print, it becomes clear that this decision is a historic, five-alarm catastrophe.

I love reading Mystal because he doesn’t mince any words.

The decision means that some courts, districts, and states will still defend the concept of birthright citizenship, while others will not. That could mean that whether or not a child born in America on or after June 27, 2025, is considered a citizen of the United States will depend on what state, or even county, that child happens to be born in.

If that setup sounds familiar, it should. It is exactly how this country determined citizenship from June 21, 1788, (when the Constitution was ratified) until July 9, 1868 (when the 14th Amendment was ratified).

I cannot begin to express how abhorrent and terrifying I find this decision.

Mystal writes that “one’s fundamental rights should not wildly change if they miss their exit on the interstate.”

Having fundamental rights shift as you move between states—a citizen here, not a citizen there—means a loss of rights for women, LGBTQ+, minorities, and, inevitably, a return to slave states.

Imagine you’re born in California, where your rights as a citizen of the United States of America are recognized. You hop on a plane to New York (another state that will recognize your American citizenship), and your plane is diverted mid-flight to Texas. It’s boarded by masked ICE agents, and you are shackled and dragged off, because in Texas, you are not a citizen of America. You have no rights. You can be held indefinitely or deported to a country you’ve never been to—legally, with no recourse.

What other rights can be stripped from you? How about your right as a woman to decide who—or whether—you marry? If you’re a LGBT couple, your marriage might be illegal in Utah. Your interracial relationship? Void in West Virginia. Georgia already forced a brain-dead woman to give birth in Georgia. What makes you think that won’t be extended to all women?

It’s fashionable to say that the court’s ruling is not really about birthright citizenship, because the legal question focused on the power to issue nationwide injunctions. But that sanewashing of the court’s opinion does not survive its first contact with reality. By taking away the ability of courts to enter nationwide injunctions in this case, the court is giving Trump carte blanche to violate the constitutional definition of citizenship in any district where a friendly Trump judge will allow him to. And, in practice, this ruling will extend to every other single issue where Trump has been stopped thanks to a nationwide injunction.

And here is how we return to a country with slave states. Trump is one executive order away from declaring that “slavery is legal.” Obviously California, New York, and the rest of the “blue” states will challenge the order, and win. But it will only be enforceable in those states (at best—as Mystal notes, the nature of this ruling might make it valid only for those who themselves are part of the lawsuit). In states where there is no challenge—or a challenge is lost—slavery will be legal.

If you think I’m being hyperbolic and irrational, think back a few months to when the idea of abducting of a legal visa holder in broad daylight by masked men seemed hyperbolic. Or to when deporting a man protected from deportation was an irrational idea. Or to just a few days ago, when a Supreme Court decision stripping lower federal courts of their authority seemed absurd.

Indeed, this decision places virtually unchecked power in the hands of the Supreme Court. The “court’s usual six monarchists” (as Mystal calls them) have set themselves up as the most powerful arbiters of what’s legal, rendering their decisions as untouchable. Any law can be declared unconstitutional. Any executive order can be deemed lawful. If they don’t like what Trump is doing, they can constrain his actions—unless, perhaps, he agrees to do something for them, I suppose. As Mystal notes,

We’re living in a world where six Republican Supreme Court justices used the courts of a monarchy we revolted against as the controlling authority on whether the president of the United States has to follow the Constitution.