Karen Hunter is warning viewers not to mistake the Supreme Court’s latest birthright citizenship ruling for the end of the fight.
After the court ruled in Trump v. Barbara that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth under the 14th Amendment, Hunter said the celebration should be met with caution.
“This is a temporary light and momentary,” Hunter said in the clip. “They’re coming back. You want to know how I know? Because Clarence Thomas basically said it in his dissent.”
Hunter urged viewers to read the opinion for themselves, calling it “accessible” and “not a whole lot of legal jargon.” She said the ruling rests on history reaching from English common law to the rejection of Dred Scott v. Sandford.
“This is what they upheld,” Hunter said. “But it can just as easily be overturned with a court that says so.”
Much of Hunter’s sharpest criticism was directed at Justice Clarence Thomas, who dissented.
“I do think it’s ironic that the only Black man on the Supreme Court, the one who replaced Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, would write against an expansive view of citizenship, she said. “He is doing exactly what he was placed there to do.”
Hunter also praised Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s separate writing, reading Jackson’s response to Thomas’ view that the citizenship clause was tied narrowly to formerly enslaved people.
“That narrow vision of the 14th Amendment bears little relationship to the history of its ratification,” Jackson wrote, according to Hunter.
“This woman, first of all, can write,” Hunter noted. “She’s brilliant.”
“Complacency will be punished at this point,” she added. “Doing nothing won’t be the move. […] We got to vote in November. That’s a non-negotiable.”
