The Court That Forgot What Law Was For

The justices now kneel before the altar they sanctified, watching it bleed the Fourteenth dry.

Illustration (Donny Evans)

---

Chief Justice John Roberts sat in a leather chair at Georgetown Law, opposite the dean, and uttered a sentence so grave it should have stopped the room cold: “the rule of law is endangered.” No robe, no bench, no ceremony—just calm, conversational dread from the highest legal authority in the country. And there it was, dropped with the composure of a man describing a house fire from inside the foyer.

Roberts, whose jurisprudence has long armed the powerful and anesthetized the Court against pleas from the vulnerable, did not shout or plead. He spoke plainly, like someone trying to ease the nation into its own eulogy. For two decades, he wrapped institutional erosion in the language of balance and restraint. Now, as the foundation buckles, he wants to talk collapse. He’s not warning us. He’s confessing. And we should be furious.

That word—endangered—doesn’t come from a protester’s sign or a law student’s blog. It came from the man who once gutted the Voting Rights Act under the pretense of judicial modesty. And when he starts sounding like a constitutional hospice nurse, it means the cancer isn’t speculative anymore. What Roberts sees now—what he cannot unsee—is that the rule of law no longer resides in marble chambers or majority opinions. It hangs instead on the whims of those who treat legal restraint as optional, compliance as theatrical, and constitutional guarantees as paper armor. The audience received his warning like a distant forecast—acknowledged, accepted, and promptly filed away for someone else’s obituary.

The justices now face a question so grotesque in its premise that even the Court’s most hardened ideologues are squinting at it sideways: whether a child born on American soil can be denied citizenship because their parents crossed a border without papers. It is a case that never should have reached the docket, a fever dream of nativist fantasy given the dignity of oral argument. And yet, here it is—one hundred and fifty-seven years after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment—under debate at the highest court in the land, as if the word born requires a political disclaimer. Legal doctrine isn’t being interpreted here. It’s being exhumed and hollowed out, draped in precedent while its spirit is quietly smothered.

During oral arguments, Amy Coney Barrett leaned forward—not to clarify, but to confront. The target wasn’t a liberal colleague or an activist litigant. It was the Trump-appointed attorney pushing to erode birthright citizenship, whose argument casually implied that Justice Elena Kagan, the daughter of immigrants, might not be a citizen herself. Barrett, the Federalist Society’s crown jewel, didn’t flinch. She dismantled the logic in full view, laid bare its consequences, and lit a flare no one in the room could ignore. Even silence began to feel like liability.

Barrett didn’t echo liberal reasoning. She didn’t blink. She recoiled—quietly, but unmistakably—from the stench of what her own side dragged into the room. For years, the conservative legal movement has operated like a sanctified machine: strip protections, consolidate power, swaddle the wreckage in originalist scripture. But this case reeked. It didn’t just test doctrine. It spat on it. A legal theory so rancid it risked blowing apart the illusion that any of this was ever about principle. Barrett sat still and let the absurdity hang in the air, too poisonous to endorse and too loyal to strike down.

For a flicker, the machine stalled. The Court didn’t look impartial or principled. It looked cornered—boxed in by the grotesquery of its own design. The conservative legal apparatus, built to grind compassion into precedent, choked on its latest assignment. No one reached for doctrine. No one tried to cloak the rot in constitutional velvet. The argument was left to decompose in plain view—too feral to excuse, too aligned with power to condemn. And for the first time in years, the room no longer resembled a courtroom. It resembled aftermath.

The justices are weighing whether to sever one of the oldest arteries of constitutional identity. Birthright citizenship emerged from the wreckage of slavery, carved into the Fourteenth Amendment to anchor the idea of national belonging in something immovable. That clause marked a hard boundary—drawn in blood—between empire and democracy. The framers of Reconstruction made it foundational. The guarantee was designed to outlast regimes, administrations, and moods. To drag it back into question is to reopen a wound the country never fully closed. No court can do that without staining itself.

The justices have begun to fear the implications of their own ideology. Roberts reached for caution. Barrett reached for distance. Neither moved fast enough. The rot they once dignified with doctrine now stands before them with a straight face and government credentials, arguing for the erasure of citizenship at birth. This is what institutional decay looks like when it graduates from theory to litigation. No mobs, no decrees—just a microphone, a seal, and the slow sterilization of justice.

A republic doesn’t need fire to fall. A gavel will do.

Every autocrat has an origin story, but the true rupture comes later—when the courts stop restraining power and start formatting it. That’s when authoritarianism acquires the polish of permanence. It enters through the docket, not the parade ground. This is how constitutions get rewritten without amendments, and how regimes preserve the theater of law while stripping it of consequence. When birthright becomes discretionary, rights become aspirational. And aspiration has no standing in court.

The alarm is blaring in full sentences. The chief justice speaks of collapse to a room of future lawyers. One of the Court’s most rigid conservatives recoils from an argument her own movement helped nurture. The Fourteenth Amendment is dragged to the altar yet again—this time with the knife held by the state. The pattern is unmistakable. The machinery of constitutional order is being repurposed to carry out its own dismantling. And every syllable of hesitation from the bench reads like complicity in draft form.

No one on that bench is blind to what’s taking shape. The justices who spent decades laying the legal scaffolding for unchecked power are now glancing up at the weight above them. Their legacy isn’t stability—it’s a weaponized judiciary, hollowed doctrine, and an executive that no longer asks permission. They shaped a court that bends with power and snaps under principle. Now they hesitate, as if hesitation can redeem design. But when the foundation groans, who gets buried first—the architects, or the people beneath?

The people go first. They always do. The immigrant mother in Kentucky, thirty weeks into a high-risk pregnancy, warned that her daughter may be born without a country. The asylum seeker from Venezuela, whose unborn child is now tethered to a case before the Supreme Court. The families who crossed an ocean only to learn that birth on American soil no longer guarantees protection. These stories aren’t theoretical. They’re preludes. When the Court toys with the definition of citizenship, it does more than rewrite the law. It puts lives on a clock.

The Court already knows what this ruling will unleash. A breach here doesn’t stop at the border. It spreads—quietly, bureaucratically—through schools, clinics, polling stations, and court dockets. Citizenship becomes suspicion. Proof becomes currency. Entire communities wake up provisional. Hospitals stall. Ballots disappear. Parents stop asking for help. Children stop existing on paper. The erosion never announces itself. It settles in, one denied service and vanished record at a time.

The judiciary can survive bad rulings, but not the moment it teaches the country that law is just a costume power wears to make theft look like order.

—Once that lesson takes root, the robe no longer conceals anything worth respecting.