It must be amazing to be a Supreme Court justice

It must be amazing to be a Supreme Court justice. One minute you might be issuing an opinion that calls the very citizenship of United States-born infants into question; the next minute you might be f--king off to Cancun or Bali, leaving behind a vague promise that if thousands of children born in American hospitals over the coming months are born stateless, with no more rights than the worst person in a confused and militarized federal chain of command is willing to put up with, then well maybe we'll sort all of that out afterwards and maybe we won't.

But it's not an urgent question, this whole argument over whether the U.S.-born children of immigrants are citizens or whether they exist in a stateless bubble, not technically deportable to their country of origin because this is their country of origin but still deportable somewhere, possibly to a nation paid to imprison them if nobody else steps up.

It's not urgent, even though there is no serious legal scholar in the country who argues that the 14th Amendment of our Constitution means anything but what it plainly says, and federal judges nationwide have been reading the riot act to Justice Department lawyers trying to pretend otherwise, blocking presidential aide Stephen Miller's white nationalist insistence that the laws now mean whatever The Regime wants them to mean.

I'll tell you what is urgent. What's urgent is, say, jetting off to Indonesia on a wealthy friend's private jet for nine days of island-hopping on that wealthy friend's superyacht. Or a week at your wealthy friend's private Adirondacks resort. Or sipping tea at a casual gathering of your wealthy friend's most cherished other friends, all gathered together in your wealthy friend's garden to admire his collection statues of history's most evil villains.

You know. Supreme Court stuff. The sort of things that Supreme Court justices need to do, when July rolls around. It doesn't have to be Indonesia; maybe your wealthy friend wants to take you to a luxury fishing lodge in Alaska, and maybe your wealthy friend wants to take you there on a private jet because his other friend, Supreme Court justice-picker Leonard Leo, can't stand to see his Supreme Court friend fly business class like a peasant. What if you get business class smell on you, after being on a commercial get that long. What if your wealthy friend kept smelling business class on you during the whole luxury fishing lodge vacation, and it kept ruining the vibes.

Certainly, the families of babies born in Texas hospitals between the months of July and Who Knows, 2025, may be in crisis due to a new administration edict declaring that their children aren't a citizen of the United States and are instead a citizen of Not Our Problem. But July is "me time," for the hardworking lifetime appointees of the Me Court. We'll get to the other stuff in good time.

I was curious what Supreme Court justices got up to, during the three months of the year when the court isn't in session and the clerks are piled with doing clerk work and Samuel Alito's chair is sent out for repairs because the man's continual angrytremors make his butt vibrate like an orbital sander and it's hard on the leather. It's surprisingly hard to find answers to that question, but here's an explainer from back in 2010.

Over the summer and throughout the year, the Justices give many speeches, receive honorary degrees, and teach classes (for example, Justice Kennedy typically teaches in Salzburg, and Chief Justice Roberts is teaching in Australia this summer). It’s up to chambers staff to make sure that a Justice’s travel and commitments go smoothly.

And then, just like the rest of us, the Justices vacation and engage in their many hobbies. For example, Chief Justice Roberts likes kayaking and other outdoor activities, Justice Thomas travels all over the country with his wife in their RV, and Justice Sotomayor takes in as many Yankees games as she can.

So the reason the question of whether U.S.-born children are automatically citizens of this country as a full damn constitutional amendment wrote out in plain text and as federal courts have considered a closed question for 150 damn years or has now been rescinded on the theory of Random Asshole Magic needs to be put off at least until summer is because extending the term a wee little bit to give a straight answer would cut into the time justices had planned to spend in Australia, teaching summer courses in Random Asshole Magic. And there are honorary degrees in Random Asshole Magic to be awarded, and increasingly prickly speeches to be given, and Walmart parking lots that need to be visited by Supreme Court Justice RVs.

It's important not to clarify whether the U.S. Constitution means what every lower court thinks it means, because that would have required three extra days of work and a whole lot of people are going to be extremely pissed off by the decision. But, fortunately, being a Supreme Court justice means you can tell those newborns to fk off until you're done teaching your course in Salzburg.

To be fair, that's a rundown of how justices spent their 3-month summer breaks back in 2010—an eternity ago. Things have changed quite a bit since then, and for all we know two of the next three months will be devoted to an extended keg party at Brett Kavanaugh's third richest best friend's vacation home, or perhaps these days it's more common for justices to convene at former justice Antonin Scalia's grave, some to leave macaroni art of Scalia's favorite cases and others to piss on the macaroni art they find there. We don't know. We may not ever know, unless one of the justices screws up their financial disclosure statements again

Antonin Scalia, for his part, did vacations "right" according to Supreme Court standards. The man died on vacation at a luxury resort. He died in his sleep after a day of shooting quail, the sort of death that distinguished gentlemen have aimed at since the days of powdered wigs, the sort of death that the friends and aides collaborate to insist on even when the distinguished gentleman in question actually died inside a brothel, or on the toilet, or after ingesting a truly egregious amount of cocaine.

And to be honest, the Supreme Court lifestyle sounds amazing. Leaving parents hanging on the question of whether their newborn children have citizenship here, or somewhere, or nowhere; issuing abstract rulings opining that while presidents should of course strive to not do plainly criminal things, they can do plainly criminal things so long as they do it from behind the right desk; hurling grenades that blow up centuries of established law on the last day of the term and than getting the hell out of Dodge before the ink is dry, booking it at top speed to go off salmon-fishing or island-hopping. It is the reward granted only to those among us who know how to network at the top levels, and know all the right things to say to random assholes seeking canonicalization of their personal doctrines of Random Asshole Magic. You need to know how to dine at the houses of people who collect garden statues of famous dictators; you need to be that special kind of person who believes that your life experience as a college blackout drunk with anger management issues is, after all, more historically American than all others.

And you need to know how to compartmentalize, so that you are not eaten up with guilt after telling the nation that you will get around to the question of whether presidents can jail political enemies, or send legal immigrants to foreign torture prisons, or abide a new class of stateless newborns, or usurp multiple of the few supposed duties of Congress that Congress hadn't willingly washed their hands of yet, eventually. After a few more speeches and honorary degrees and fishing trips.

It's not that the Supreme Court can't act with haste when it wants to. On the contrary, the past year has seen the court act with a great deal of haste when it sees injustices that haven't yet worked their way through our legal systems but which are too unjust to let stand. It's called the emergency docket, or more often now called the shadow docket, and this year saw it stuffed with unsigned orders telling lower courts that even if they had very good reasons to believe that the government was violating well established law, the real injustice is not letting the violators keep violating it while the entire judiciary branch gets around to maybe possibly telling them to knock it off several years from now.

The Supreme Court has been so riled by the injustices they witnessed this term that they stepped in with emergency orders allowing the administration to continue deporting legal immigrants to foreign prisons even if lower courts are pretty damn sure that is illegal. They did so under the theory that ordering the administration to follow the law as currently understood harms the administration more than it harms the refugees being imprisoned, which is the sort of take you are expected to have if Leonard Leo and his friends are vetting you for a possible appointment to the Supreme Court.

The court stepped in with emergency orders allowing the administration to fire independent regulators that, for a century, everyone understood to be immune from such oustings—again, on the premise that the harm done to our independent watchdog agencies for what appear to be corrupt and illegal reasons is less than the harm that would come if the convicted felon president had to wait for approval, thus hurting his feelings and his convicted felon agenda.

The court inserted itself into the administration's new orders to ban transgender troops from the nation's military, issuing an emergency order that again asserted that the drunkest member of the executive branch could implement the policy regardless of whether lower courts had good reason to think the "policy" violated the civil rights of everyone affected by it. Because, again, maintaining legal precedents and the resulting status quo was thought to cause more injury to the executive than to the thousands of Americans whose military careers were suddenly upended.

No, the Supreme Court spent most of the just-ended term sprinting to put out fires caused by far-right conservatives following the Project 2025-recommended playbook of starting so many fires threatening so many laws and rights that the courts could not possibly put them all out. The justices fairly bolted to insert themselves in the fray, in nearly all of the cases issuing unsigned orders announcing that the lower courts were Hurting Presidential Feelings by blocking likely-illegal acts instead of abiding by the FAFO principles cherished by the modern supremes.

So it was noticeable, very noticeable, when those same justices closed out the term with a new, this-time-signed announcement that maybe the 14th Amendment was still in effect and maybe it wasn't, who can say, not us because we've got theater tickets and chairs to reupholster. We'll get back to you. All the babies born this summer? Sucks to be you, you little snot goblins, because your entire life is going to change based on whether the law means what every non-insane judge and scholar says it means, and we'll get back to you when we damn well feel like it.

[T]he Court rolled back a trio of district court injunctions that had blocked Trump’s birthright citizenship order on a nationwide basis: Going forward, Barrett says, lower courts may enter injunctions only to the extent necessary to provide “complete relief” to the parties in a case before them. In the context of the birthright citizenship executive order, this can mean being an individual pregnant person who is suing for your unborn child’s citizenship, or being a resident of one of 22 states in which Democratic attorneys general have sued on their residents’ behalf to (temporarily) block the order from taking effect. For the time being, children born to undocumented people and non-permanent residents who fit this description will still become U.S. citizens as a matter of birthright.

Children born in the 28 states not covered by an injunction, however, are getting thrust into a constitutional gray zone. Instead, for however long it takes courts to resolve legal challenges to the order—which, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh pointed out in a concurrence, could take several years—children born to undocumented people and non-permanent residents from this point on will be relegated to a crude form of second-class citizenship. They will have trouble doing basic things like enroll in school, get an ID card, or obtain healthcare via Medicaid, as Matt Watkins explains at Slate. And if these legal challenges someday conclude with a 6-3 opinion in which the Republican justices decide to permit their favorite president to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment after all, those children could be subject to deportation at the government’s earliest convenience.

The upshot of CASA is that what was, until several hours ago, a fundamental right affirmed by the Constitution’s plain text and more than a century of Supreme Court precedent is now a privilege contingent on in which state you happen to be born, and to whom, and when. The last time the justices issued a decision like this one, the country fought a civil war over it.

Being a Supreme Court justice means you get to impose those costs on countless families for the claimed sake of legal rigor, simultaneously refusing to involve yourself in the question of whether or not the 14th Amendment still exists while still piping up with a stage-whispered "but maybe it doesn't" for whichever states might like that notion. You could spend an extra week or two coming to a fking legal conclusion as to whether the 14th Amendment still exists, reaching down into the lower courts to summarily solve the problem rather than glitter-bombing those courts and popping off for a holiday, but again: plans were made.

That is, after all, the only seemingly sturdy legal framework the Roberts Court consistently abides by. The prevailing question in both signed opinions and unsigned orders is seldom whether narrowing or removing a previously understood right may unnecessarily harm its targeted victims. Of far more interest to the Roberts Court is whether blocking such acts impinges on the rights of whatever administration, industry, or ideological group that wants to do the harming.

It is a new legal framework in which each American has only the rights they have the personal resources to protect. Rights are now presumed by the court to not exist if someone in power declares they might not, with the burden placed on each victim to reclaim those rights if they have the cash and skill to do it.

That isn't how constitutional rights—or any legal rights—are supposed to work. If your right to vote, or to protest, or to not be spirited away by masked kidnappers and thrown into a foreign torture prison or labor camp depends solely on whether you file a lawsuit or don't, then that is not actually a right. It is a guideline, at best.

But to people who spend the summer taking private jets to luxury vacation spots, you can easily see how they might think that the rights of the powerful might become the "major questions" of law, and the rights of the impoverished or merely unconnected are contemplated mostly to discern whether the unpleasant masses are causing undue harm to their betters by wanting things that more important people would prefer to not give.

And, damn, it must be an amazing feeling to be at the very pinnacle of importance, your job guaranteed in almost every imaginable future and circumstance, and be able to forestall harm to your fellow scions and club members while telling the newborn infants of 28 states to fk off until fishing season is over.

I don't think I, personally, would like it. It would be hard to sleep, as August rolled around, with news stations blaring about paramilitary groups firing off tear gas after rolling up to a Home Depot parking lot and shoving people into an unmarked van for deportation to Guantanamo Bay or El Salvador or Rwandan prisons. I would wonder where things went wrong, and would be puttering around the home office wondering whether or not it was something I could do something about. Knowing that an entire class of newborn infants was stuck in legal limbo and that I could step in to resolve it, I just didn't want to—I think that would eat at me.

So maybe the people who know how to best answer Leonard Leo's questions about Magical Asshole Theory are, after all, better than us. They are certainly built different. Their heads are filled with ideas that federal judges, appellate judges, law professors and historians remain unable to fathom, and whenever any of those people pipe up with a theory of how all the pieces fit together the justices go lol and throw out a new opinion that erases the last stuff and proposes something different. And they really, really are not put out by an American public wondering where all the rules of 2024 went, when 2025 rolled around.

Though the chief justice has insinuated, in several of those public appearances that were allowed to be caught on tape, that maybe the real harm here is that the public is questioning the court much too often, and while that doesn't really impinge on the court's right to do whatever the hell it wants whenever the hell it wants, it still causes harm because it makes the justices feel bad.

I wonder, then. I wonder if Justice Thomas and wife will take their usual RV vacation this summer, and what Thomas will think as he drives through ICE checkpoints set up to check the papers of everyone (not white) who drives through. I wonder if the Alitos will hoist a new confederacy-adjacent flag at home, just to piss off the neighbors. I wonder if Amy Coney Barrett, the one who wrote the opinion explaining that while the court didn't have time to weigh in on whether the g-ddamn 14th Amendment still exists, it did have barely enough time to tell the lower courts that they were free to use their imagination on that one and that it'd probably get worked out eventually—I wonder a lot of things there.

This summer, it's likely that all of the emergency orders and regular orders and blatant, sneering Trump toady contempt for judicial powers all merge together, and we see paramilitary-garbed ICE agents camping out outside hospital delivery rooms so as to better meet their quotas. Deporting pregnant mothers counts as just one deportation, after all, but if you wait until after the delivery it now counts as deporting two.

And perhaps the mothers and infants both are sent off to camps in Rwanda, since there may be no other nation willing to take a stateless child. Because taking legal immigrants and sending them to foreign concentration camps is legal now, in that it's considered legal enough to keep doing until the justices get the required paperwork to begin debating whether it might not be, and because there are at least a few countries unstable enough and dodgy enough to consider mass imprisonment as a potential profit center.

And maybe Barrett and the others are just playing a game, here, and maybe the 14th Amendment no longer means but the court majority recognizes that that one is such an explosive and explicitly fascist move that it might not be wise to press the button going into peak luxury vacation season, and they're going to hem and haw on the subject through October, and November, and December, and let the rest of us know how things are only after a few more honorary degrees have been collected or islands have been hopped-to.

We don't know for certain, but it's probably that. Because that's what the Roberts Court has become known for, this process of peeling centuries of precedent away one process objection at a time, turning rights into things that you still technically have so long as you don't actually press the question. You still have the right to cross state lines, but maybe there are exceptions if you're pregnant and live in a state that rather you didn't. You're still a citizen, but maybe there's an exception if some roided-up yahoo in military camo thinks you're not and you can't find a lawyer between the time he sees you and the time you're put on a plane to an undisclosed location.

It seems like if the Supreme Court had a majority that was going to do the decent thing, and not the wantonly cruel history-revising white nationalist concentration camp-promoting thing, they would have stepped up and done it rather than pissing away their time chastising the lower courts for looking at the forever-changing legal landscape and allegedly guessing wrong.

If you're a certain kind of person, it must be an amazing feeling to be able to toy with a whole entire nation like that. And if you're not that kind of person, I have no idea how you live with yourself after doing it.