David French

So I think there's a logical reason why the court would take this just to settle this once and for all.

And I would say the oral argument to me was fascinating from this legal nerd perspective because the current court are all pre-MAGA conservatives, people who spent their entire careers in sort of like that Reagan-Bush world of classical liberalism, limited government, originalism was the touchstone of sort of pre-MAGA conservative jurisprudence.

MAGA jurisprudence is not that.

It is not originalism.

And so you had this really interesting exchange between Justice Roberts and John Sauer, the Solicitor General.

In other words, the new world didn't change the text of this amendment.

And so if you want to revise citizenship in response to a new world, there's a way to do it.

It's through an amendment process.

It's not just by reinterpreting the 14th Amendment to defy the plain text of the amendment.

And so, you know, in MAGA world,

A lot of this new constitutional thinking is called common good constitutionalism.

In other words, we envision our version of the common good, and then we interpret the Constitution, in essence, to back up that vision of the common good, which is completely the opposite of an originalist frame, which just says,

To the extent there's any ambiguity, you go back to the original public meaning.

In other words, there's a fixed meaning to the language of the Constitution.

Common good constitutionalism contradicts that.

And so what we saw was this clash of philosophies.

And, you know, it was interesting.

There was a moment where the ACLU lawyer who did a very good job arguing the position said,

said, we have to go with the original public meaning.

And the Trump administration is arguing some version of living constitutionalism to try to conform the Constitution to their preferences.