The Court holds, and in holding, both limits and expands

The BBC reports that the Supreme Court's term has closed with a ruling on birthright citizenship that counts as a defeat for the current administration — while other decisions in the same term enlarged presidential power in meaningful ways. A contradictory term, some will say. I would say: a term in which the Court was actually working.

The Fourteenth Amendment's birthright clause is not an administrative convenience to be suspended by executive order. It is a settled constitutional commitment, placed in the document precisely because the founding generation — my generation — failed to place it there and left the Republic to pay a terrible price for that omission. When the Court reads that clause as it was written and ratified, it is performing the most essential judicial function: protecting the Constitution's text from the impatience of temporary majorities. I regard this outcome, as reported by the BBC, as the ordinary and correct operation of judicial review.

The simultaneous expansion of executive authority is a different matter, and one I read with more caution. The two outcomes are not symmetrical. Checking an overreach on birthright is the Court vindicating explicit constitutional text. Enlarging presidential discretion in other domains — the BBC's lead does not specify which — may or may not rest on equally firm textual ground. The distinction matters. Judicial restraint does not mean deference to the executive; it means fidelity to the Constitution's actual distribution of powers, which was designed to frustrate concentration of authority in any single branch.

I would counsel against reading this term as either a triumph or a catastrophe. A Court that rules against a president on a constitutional question and in his favor on a statutory one is behaving as the framers intended: as a referee whose loyalty is to the document, not to the player who appointed them. What would alarm me is a Court that found consistently for one branch — that would suggest the game had been fixed, not played.

What should be done? Legislators who wish to reduce birthright citizenship should pursue a constitutional amendment — the proper and only legitimate channel. Commentators who celebrate or condemn the Court wholesale, based on whether this term's ledger pleased their faction, should be reminded that the Court's value lies precisely in its indifference to that ledger. The accumulated precedent of two and a half centuries is a fragile and irreplaceable thing. Treat it as such.