It's worth taking a moment to actually read the 1898 case because it could not be more clear that everybody means everybody.

The United States rule of nearly unrestricted birthright citizenship is an outlier among modern nations.

That's not quite true.

Wong Kim Arc does a wonderful job of laying out.

English rule was always by birth.

Hello and welcome to opening arguments.

This is episode 1249. I'm Thomas Dowd over there as real life attorney Matt Cameron. How are you doing, Matt? Happy April Fool's Day, Thomas. What an April Fool's Day it has been at the Supreme Court. I don't celebrate. It's against my religion. So I don't want to hear any stupid jokes or pranks. I just, I don't. I'm not in my anti-prank. Oh, I got bad news for you because that's the whole episode. This is just one long prank in America.

Hey. for pranks. I just, I don't, I'm not, am I anti-prank? Oh, I got bad news for you because that's the whole episode. This is just one long prank in America. So we got this great break, Matt. We're going to pretend, what if they did a whole case that was like, hey, what if like birthright citizenship didn't exist? And they're like, we'll do it on April 1st. We'll do a whole case. Everybody, no, we'll

pretend. We'll do briefs and stuff. We'll pretend that it's a real case. And then we'll mark it up

for April 1st. It'll be so good. Yeah. That's so funny. I really starting to wonder.

Were you half expecting the oral arguments to just be like, nah, gotcha, fools. I mean, I cannot emphasize, I'm going to make this point several times today, but this is the stupidest argument. The federal government has ever brought to the Supreme Court by far. It has to be. This is so bad. I mean, I spent a lot of time over the weekend in the last couple of days reading the briefs, reading the source material, getting more familiar. I knew the arguments, obviously, I'm familiar with the law, but I wanted

to go deep on this because it's so interesting to me and because there is a fake controversy here that has been created. This is like climate change, right? Where you've just had a bunch of people decide that they have another side to this because it's convenient for them. I think climate change denial might be smarter than this.

Yeah. Yeah. At least you can get lost in some data

or something and be like, oh, actually, if you

look at the blah-bibla, this is just like pretty straightforward. You can cloak it in science. But yeah, this is just lies and misrepresentations and just policy. There's a lot of policy, which is never usually a kind of thing that somebody who's going to win a legal case brings in if you're just talking about policy. Famously, that's a good way to lose usually. We'll get into it, but I just want to point out that as of now, kind of a call back to a couple weeks again when we're talking about prediction markets, the wisdom of the crowds has decided as of last night, it was 8417 in favor of striking this down. and now there is a 7% chance, according to Kalshi, that this will survive, that this order will survive. I think that might even still be too high after watching these arguments. I want to get into it. I want to play some clips. I want to show you kind of what these arguments are and really expose them for what they are. I want to come back another time, maybe even next week, and talk more about the people on the other side of this, the right-wing grifters who have, I think, very knowingly in bad faith, come up with these arguments. It's not often that I really say that about people on the other sides of arguments. Usually you can find people who really believe something. Yeah, you lawyers are pretty chill usually. They're pretty patient about that and too much, I think. Usually when it makes it of the Supreme Court, there's at least somebody in the other side that believes in what they're saying or can believe it.

But as we're going to see, everything is overwhelmingly against the government here.

It's even stupider than I realized after I started digging into it.

So you've got plenty of time.

We'll talk about it.

We've got pretty much the whole show because this is really the most important case of the term. I do think the tariffs case is probably more consequential, ultimately, because that actually had a chance of working. I never thought this had a chance, and I've said that from the beginning. And I think the only question at this point is whether it's going to be anywhere between 6-3 and 9-0. So procedurally, should this have been like even somehow faster? Does it make sense that they're even doing this? They did it as fast as possible. They actually leapfrog the First Circuit. So this is actually one of those where they decided. Of course, they couldn't do that with Jack Smith's criminal cases. They had to let that take it sweet time. Sure, sure. Go through every possible appeal and motion to reconsider and everything. But, you know, this one they wanted to hear as quickly as possible. And, you know, I understand people are saying it's kind of scary that they even considered this. But at the same time, I have to say there is this movement that is building to the point that I think it's going to be good to get a definitive statement from the court saying that Juan Kim Arc, the 1898 case that really already settled this. Yeah. Actually already settled this. I think that would be good to get that in writing at this point. Yeah, it's good to get a ruling that's like, this happened. Like, we were there for this.

Right. We're not in a Mandela effect universe where there wasn't that, you know. They could rule on

the Bernstein bear spelling, too, if they want, you know. That's probably, that's more controversial,

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