Birthright Citizenship Survived. Get Ready for A Baby Boom.
Plus: the Court also ruled 9-0 on trans athletes (yes, you read that right), and a third Colorado Democrat just got primaried by the DSA, except this time the movement also lost by 14 points on the sa
It’s Wednesday,
Today’s Read is SCOTUS and another DSA win, and I HAVE THOUGHTS. So make sure you read My Read.
Also for Friday, I have a special edition of The Read planned specifically for the eve of America’s 250th birthday. It’s going to be fun, so even if you are busy getting ready to celebrate, keep an eye on your inbox.
I have family arriving over the next few days for July 4th, so it’s going to be a little quiet over here.
I will see you Friday with a special edition of The Read. Go celebrate AMERICA!
Let’s get into the news.
In today’s Read:
The Court told Trump he can’t end birthright citizenship, and the “6-3” every outlet is running is actually 5-4 once you strip out Kavanaugh’s separate vote.
Same morning, the Court ruled 9-0 that Title IX doesn’t require girls’ sports to include biological males, buried under a louder 6-3 headline about the constitutional question.
A DSA-backed candidate ousted her third House incumbent in eight days in Colorado. Two hours earlier, the identical playbook got demolished by 14 points in that state’s Senate primary.
Quick Rundown: Carroll wants her money, the Epstein files hit a deadline, Venezuela’s toll passed 1,900, and the Court also blew up campaign finance law while nobody was looking.
The Supreme Court Just Told Trump He Can’t End Birthright Citizenship.
The Story.
On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Barbara that Executive Order 14160, Trump’s January 2025 order denying citizenship to children born here to undocumented or temporary-status parents, violates the 14th Amendment. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority, joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson on the constitutional question, a five-justice bloc. Kavanaugh supplied a sixth vote against Trump on narrower federal-law grounds, not the constitutional one, which means the real constitutional vote was 5-4, not the “6-3” most headlines are running. Thomas dissented for 91 pages; Alito called it “one of the most important decisions in the history of the court.” Hours later, Deputy AG Colin McDonald sent a memo directing every U.S. Attorney’s office to prioritize prosecuting “birth tourism” schemes under visa fraud and wire fraud statutes.
The Left’s read. The Constitution held, full stop. The ACLU’s Cecillia Wang called it “a victory that belongs to all of us,” and CBS, PBS, and CNN centered the 14th Amendment beating back an order that tried to rewrite it by decree, leaning on Alito’s and Thomas’s marathon dissents as proof of how big a swing this was.
The Right's read. A loss, but a survivable one. JD Vance told Laura Ingraham it was a "major, major mistake" while pointing to the "silver lining": pull Kavanaugh's statutory vote out and the constitutional question was 5-4, which is why Vance says birthright citizenship is "hanging by a thread." Sen. Eric Schmitt called it "wrong, dangerous, and disastrous" and is already floating a constitutional amendmen
What both sides are skipping. Everyone's reporting "6-3" because it's the cleaner number and it flatters both storylines. Neither wants to explain that Kavanaugh carved his own lane, and almost nobody outside CNN's own analysis mentioned the loss came bundled with a same-day enforcement consolation prize. And nobody in the mainstream coverage, left or right, went back to the actual 1866 floor debate to ask what "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was written to mean.
“significant illegal immigration into the United States is a new circumstance that was largely unknown as of 1868 and that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment could not have fully anticipated. And the Framers likely would not have anticipated (and presumably would not have intended) the odd result of granting a substantial birthright citizenship benefit to (i) those foreign citizens who violate U. S. immigration law and illegally enter or overstay and then have children in the United States over (ii) those foreign citizens who follow U. S. immigration law and have children in their home countries while seeking to lawfully immigrate to the United States. Nor presumably would they have wanted to grant constitutional birthright citizenship to children of foreign citizens unlawfully in the country while simultaneously denying constitutional birthright citizenship to children of tribal American Indians.”
“Consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress could amend §1401(a) or otherwise enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country. But Congress has not yet done so.”
A baby is not a product. A womb is not for rent. I wrote that back in April, knee-deep in a Wall Street Journal investigation about a Chinese gaming executive with over a hundred American-born children, and Monday’s ruling is exactly the reading that let that industry exist in the first place.
I think the Court got this one 100% wrong. Go read Senator Jacob Howard’s own floor speech introducing the Citizenship Clause, May 30, 1866: “This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.” People keep running that quote with the ellipsis cut right before “every other class of persons.” I won’t do that to you. Read it as the list it is: foreigners, aliens, and people who belong to ambassador or foreign-minister families are the excluded classes. The “every other class” Howard swept in was the entire point of the amendment, freed slaves and their children, the people Dred Scott said could never be citizens. That’s who the 14th Amendment was written for.
Howard wasn’t the only one saying it. Senator Trumbull, the amendment’s chief architect, said “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” meant “not owing allegiance to anybody else” and being under the “complete jurisdiction” of the United States, which is exactly why that same debate excluded tribal Indians who owed their allegiance elsewhere. Allegiance was the test. Not GPS coordinates at the moment of delivery.
A woman who flies to Los Angeles specifically to give birth doesn’t owe this country allegiance. A Chinese billionaire renting a California womb because his own government won’t let him have this many kids doesn’t owe this country allegiance. Their children weren’t accidentally born on American soil, they were shipped here on purpose, through an industry built for exactly this. That’s not the “every other class of persons” Howard meant. That’s a loophole nobody in 1866 was debating, because nobody in 1866 had invented commercial surrogacy.
I’ve spent two long pieces on how far that loophole has grown (part one, part two, paid subscribers, no apologies for the length): Xu Bo, a Chinese billionaire who wants sons because they’re “superior to girls,” legally fathered over a hundred children through American surrogates. Margaret Wang, who runs Rhea Fertility on Peter Thiel money, calls the U.S. the destination for “regulatory arbitrage,” her words. That’s not an accident of a 158-year-old amendment. That’s a national security vulnerability built on a reading of “subject to the jurisdiction” the men who wrote the clause never intended.
DOJ’s same-day birth tourism memo is the tell that even this administration knows something’s broken. It’s still too small. “Birth tourism,” as DOJ uses it, means visa fraud and lying to customs agents, a real crime. It says nothing about the legal surrogacy pipeline moving foreign elites’ children through American wombs by the hundreds, no fraud required, because nobody wrote a law around the actual loophole. One is fraud. The other is Tuesday.
Rick Scott’s SAFE KIDS Act doesn’t fix it either. It voids surrogacy contracts involving adversary-nation nationals, hits brokers with a misdemeanor, and has stalled in committee since November with zero Democratic cosponsors. No cap on children commissioned. No transparency across agencies. No protection for the woman whose body is the actual product. It’s a national security bill wearing family-values clothing, aimed at the wrong century’s problem.
Watch whether a single justice, in a future case, revisits what “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” actually meant to the men who wrote it. Watch whether Congress ever legislates the loophole instead of leaving it to DOJ memos. And watch whether anyone in Washington, either party, proposes something that closes the door on manufactured citizenship instead of chasing fraud around its edges.
The 14th Amendment was written to make freed slaves citizens. Monday, the Court used it to guarantee citizenship to a child conceived in a lab, gestated for a fee, and shipped home to a country that already has a father. Those are not the same amendment. A total travesty.
The Court Also Ruled 9-0 on Trans Athletes. You Wouldn’t Know It From the Headlines.
The Story.
Also on June 30, the Court ruled 6-3 in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox that states may bar biological males from girls' and women's school sports. Justice Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion. All nine justices, including the three liberal ones, agreed the laws don't violate Title IX; the 6-3 split was only on a separate equal protection question, where Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented. Kavanaugh wrote the ruling doesn't "require an overhaul of women's and girls' sports throughout America," while also writing a biological male who identifies as female deserves "respect" and shouldn't be "ostracized or vilified." Trump posted: "BIG WIN: The United States Supreme Court just RULED AGAINST MEN PLAYING IN WOMEN'S SPORTS."
The Left’s read. A devastating loss dressed in soft language. The Human Rights Campaign said it comes “at the expense of all women and girls.” CNN’s Steve Vladeck called it “a significant loss for equality advocates,” though he flagged the ruling also cracks a door for future challenges, a nuance mostly missing from the louder coverage.
The Right’s read. Common sense, finally codified. Fox led with Trump’s own post and framed the ruling as restoring biological reality after years of lower courts second-guessing state legislatures. The unanimous Title IX holding gets top billing as proof this was never actually close.
What both sides are skipping. This ruling doesn’t ban anything; it only permits. States that already let biological males compete in girls’ sports can keep doing exactly that; this just gives cover to the states that want to say no. That’s a green light for state-by-state sorting, not a national resolution, and it’s likely to reshape where recruits, families, and entire athletic programs land depending on which state they’re in. Neither side’s coverage frames it that way. The left doesn’t want to admit the ruling leaves its preferred states untouched, and the right doesn’t want to admit this is nowhere near over.
Nine justices, not six, agreed Title IX doesn’t require a school to let a biological male compete on the girls’ team. Sit with that, because almost none of the coverage wants you to. Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, cast as the ruling’s losing side, signed onto the exact same statutory reading conservatives have wanted since West Virginia and Idaho passed these laws. Not a 6-3 culture war outcome. Unanimous.
The 6-3 split was on the narrower constitutional question. Kavanaugh also wrote that a biological male who identifies as female deserves “respect” and shouldn’t be “ostracized or vilified,” and I don’t disagree, I’ll just say it in my own words instead of his. Nobody should be bullied or treated cruelly for struggling with gender dysphoria. That’s compassion for a real mental health condition. What it doesn’t buy is a spot on the girls’ team or a key to the locker room. Compassion for the person and access to women’s sports and women’s spaces are two different questions, and collapsing them is how we got here.
The left's version has its own gap. Robinson warning that any girl could be branded "the wrong kind of girl" buries the part where three liberal justices just told you the statute was never on their side to begin with. That's the text of Title IX, and pretending it's a partisan bloodbath is its own kind of laundering.
My line hasn’t moved: girls’ sports get to mean biological girls, a 1972 statute doing what it was always supposed to do. Biology is a fact. It doesn’t get set aside because a man believes he’s a woman. Period. And per the skip above, this is a floor, not a ceiling. Watch which states go the other way, and whether the equal protection theory Sotomayor’s dissent left open ever gets tested by one of them.
The Billionaire Baby Factories and the Law Trying to Stop Them
I came across a Wall Street Journal investigation from last December, and we must discuss it. It opened in a Los Angeles family court in the summer of 2023, where a clerk was working through routine surrogacy petitions, the kind of paperwork that normally gets a quick stamp and moves on, designed to unite a newborn with its intended parent as quickly as possible. Then the clerk noticed something. The same name. Again and again, on filing after filing.
A Third Colorado Democrat Just Got Primaried by the DSA.
The Story.
On June 30, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old DSA-backed democratic socialist, defeated 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado's 1st District primary, the third House Democrat toppled by a DSA insurgent in eight days, following last week's New York sweep. Kiros's platform includes abolishing ICE and ending U.S. military aid to Israel; she's drawn scrutiny for calling 9/11 and October 7 "inevitable" results of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy. Nearly three hours earlier, state Sen. Julie Gonzales, a former DSA member running an "insurgent progressive" campaign against Sen. Hickenlooper, lost by 14 points after being outraised roughly twelve to one.
The Left’s read. Real, but precise, not a takeover. NPR framed Kiros’s win as “the progressive wing’s deepening influence,” while treating Gonzales’s loss as proof the model doesn’t travel statewide.
The Right’s read. “Socialism goes west,” and the specifics are the point. Fox and Breitbart led with Kiros’s 9/11 comments and noted over $1 million in AIPAC-linked spending failed to stop her.
What both sides are skipping. Almost nobody put the two Colorado results in the same sentence. A DSA win in a safe urban seat and a DSA-adjacent blowout loss in a real statewide race are two different data points, and each side only cites the one that fits its story. Neither side is breaking down who actually cast these votes by income or education, which is where the “working class” branding falls apart.
Two Colorado Democrats went home Tuesday night, and only one fits the story the press wants to tell. Melat Kiros, on record calling 9/11 and October 7 “inevitable,” just knocked out a fifteen-term incumbent in Denver, her movement’s third scalp in eight days. I’ll say what I said about the New York sweep: “democratic socialist” is branding. Put “democratic” in front of “socialism” and it sounds like a debate club. The actual project is centralizing the means of production, which has a different name, and the people cheering Kiros know it.
Here’s the part almost nobody’s reporting. Two hours before Kiros’s race got called, Julie Gonzales ran the identical insurgent playbook statewide against Hickenlooper and got beaten by 14 points after being outraised twelve to one. Same night, same state, same lane. NPR is framing Kiros’s win as “the progressive wing’s deepening influence” while filing Gonzales’s blowout under fundraising math. Convenient. A DSA-aligned candidate wins where the district is safely blue enough to survive comments about terror attacks being “inevitable.” It gets crushed the second it needs an actual swing voter.
Now watch who’s actually doing the electing, because this is where “working class” stops meaning anything. In last week’s New York sweep, Darializa Avila Chevalier won higher-income precincts by 5.1 points and lost lower-income precincts by 9.1. Claire Valdez won higher-income areas by 33.7 points and college-educated areas by 36.4. Brad Lander’s best precinct, Park Slope, has a median household income of $202,310 and a plurality with a master’s degree, and he won it by 40.6 points over the guy who actually carried the lower-income vote.
Every DSA-aligned winner ran up the score with young, college-educated, higher-income voters. Every one of them lost the actual working-class precincts to the more moderate Democrat. Kiros herself is a doctoral student and former lawyer. Say “working class” one more time.
And here’s the part small business owners should sit up for. DSA’s own Labor 101 curriculum defines “working class” as anyone who has to sell their labor to survive, full stop, no income cutoff, no job-type cutoff. Jacobin’s companion explainer spells out what that means in practice: a New York City train conductor pulling $70,000 a year is “working class,” while a Bronx bodega owner earning far less is not, because he’s “charged with his own exploitation, as well as that of others, even if few in number.” Their example, not mine.
Own a bodega with one employee and their model puts you on the same side of the line as a hedge fund manager. The labor economists Jacobin cites for the numbers put the “corporate elite” at 2 percent of the country and the working class at 63 percent. On the stump, they’ll sell you Bernie’s “millionaires and billionaires” line. Their own curriculum says the actual target is anyone who signs a paycheck, and that’s every small business owner in America, not just the ones with private jets.
That’s not an accident, and it’s not new. I’ve written before about how the DSA actually operates once its people win (full piece here, free), and the model isn’t “represent your district.” It’s “co-govern.” Mamdani said it himself on stage at the 2023 DSA convention: “We are special as DSA electeds not because of ourselves; we are special because of our organization.” Nithya Raman found out what happens when you forget that, censured in writing by her own chapter in 2024 for accepting an endorsement from a mainstream Jewish Democratic club, with members privately told to stay quiet to preserve the chapter’s “leverage” over her.
So no, this isn’t a working-class movement being run by working people. It’s academics, activists, and nonprofit lifers, career activism and NGO work instead of manual labor, entrepreneurship, or the kind of innovation that actually creates a job, getting elected by the most comfortable, most educated, most insulated voters in the Democratic coalition, then answering to a private committee instead of the constituents who thought they voted for a Democrat.
That’s the trajectory worth watching, more than any single Colorado race. A party that keeps letting its safest seats get captured by an organization whose own bylaws call for overcoming capitalism isn’t managing an insurgency. It’s being eaten from the inside. Keep going and there won’t be a Democratic Party left to argue about. There will be a Socialist Party wearing the Democratic Party’s name, and those are not the same thing.
Watch whether Hakeem Jeffries treats Kiros the way he treated the New York winners, welcome in, no pushback, whether a vulnerable House Democrat in a genuinely competitive seat starts distancing publicly, and the AIPAC-linked money that spent over a million trying to stop her and failed. Somebody’s going to have to explain that one to their donors.
E. Jean Carroll wants her money now. After the Supreme Court refused Monday to hear Trump’s appeal of the 2023 verdict, Carroll asked a judge to release the roughly $5.8 million he owes her, with interest. His lawyers want a delay; Carroll’s team says every prior delay has already been denied.
The Epstein files hit a deadline Thursday. Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the DOJ to release less-redacted records by July 2 or explain why it can’t. DOJ is appealing, calling the order a bid to drive “misleading headlines.” Fox’s own headline called Sullivan the “Clinton judge,” which tells you where that defense is headed.
Trump’s yelling at gas stations instead of Iran. Days after two nights of U.S. strikes on Iranian sites and Iranian retaliation against American bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, Trump posted that “Gasoline Retailers must get their Prices down, IMMEDIATELY,” targeting $2.50 a gallon. Iran denied requesting the Doha talks Trump announced, calling it “fake news.”
Venezuela’s earthquake death toll just passed 1,900. The confirmed toll has climbed past 1,900 six days after the twin quakes, with more than 10,500 injured and rescue crews warning the survival window is closing.
The Court also gutted campaign finance limits, same morning, different headline. In NRSC v. FEC, the Court ruled 6-3 that a 1974 cap on party-candidate coordinated spending violates the First Amendment, overturning its own 2001 precedent. Kagan dissented, warning “the party can serve as the candidate’s checking account.” A real midterm advantage for the GOP, and almost nobody noticed.
That’s The Read.
See you Friday.
If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.