Episode 134 - 2026 Supreme Court Decisions

SCOTUS has sent down some seriously important decisions. Today we discuss Trump v Barbara, the Birthright Citizenship case, including its errors and how it can be handled.

Next we tackle Trump v Slaughter, the case that will allow Trump to actually Drain the Swamp by firing resisters. Paired with that is Trump v Cook, where the Court demonstrates cognitive dissonance with the Fed.

Finally, our remaining time covers three gun cases, Hemani, Wolford, and Viramontes. The first was a surprising total victory for the Second Amendment. Wolford told Hawaii that the spirit of aloha wasn't a legal principle, with another solid 2A victory. And the in the third, the Court decided to hear a gun ban case, which should yield us a big win next year.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Welcome to Careful Consideration of Our Common Concerns. I'm Dr. Ted Noel. It's time to call the seminar back into session, and our subject this time is the Supreme Court. And I'm going to dismiss with one item very quickly. That is the Democrat call for packing the court. It's not new. FDR did it a century ago or tried to, and it got wiped out. And the only way that can happen is when the Democrats own the House, the Senate, and the White House, because any packing plan prior to that would be vetoed or stopped by one of the houses. So we don't need to worry about it right now. What we need to look at are the decisions that came down in. There were a potful of big decisions in the last several days of the court. The first one that everybody heard about was Trump v. Barbara, and that was the birthright citizenship case. And the majority, five members, not six, declared that when someone drops a baby on American soil, that baby is a U.S. citizen. End of story. And they declared it on the basis of how they read the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Kavanaugh said, no, they weren't right on that. I agree with them on the decision. They should have taken a law from the 1950s and used it and not touched the constitutional one. I disagree with the court. I've said so in writing. And the reason is very simple. The court didn't follow its own precedent. It didn't do originalism. It treated American law as English common law, unmodified by the change at the Declaration of Independence from subjects to citizens. And here's what I'm talking about. When a baby is born in England, that baby becomes a subject of the king. Now, in modern England, that doesn't have a whole lot of meaning simply because the king is primarily a ceremonial office. But the fact remains that in the past, when the uh amendment was written, the king was more than a ceremonial office. He was ultimately the ruler of the British Empire. And he had some real powers. And anyone born in his territory was considered his subject and owed him allegiance. In the United States, what happened? The Declaration of Independence is detailed, and we may go into it at another time. But in essence, what it says is we aren't subjects anymore, we are citizens. And citizens have a power structure, and we'll talk about this again at another time, which is completely different. A royal power structure is top down. The king says, and everybody below says, yes, MASA. In a citizenship structure, citizens are the ultimate power, and they will cede power. That is, they will grant some of their individual power to a government above them, a layer above, for the purpose of having a peaceful society. They cede that power so that the government can write basic laws that tell you not to tear down your neighbor's fence, not to rape your neighbor's daughter, etc. Because otherwise, there'd be no laws that govern any of those things. Of course, we do know that in places that had almost none of those laws, you didn't have people demand jails as a rule. And what happened? People who violated those common laws of life very shortly found themselves deprived of life. Vigilante justice took care of the problem, and we don't really need that. But they granted power to the next level. And the states then granted power to the federal government to say, handle the stuff we can't handle. Well, the Supreme Court forgot that as citizens, we didn't import birthright citizenship because there never was such a thing. There was birthright subjectship. And it may be that the court didn't take enough attention with that. And we ended up with a rule which says, now anybody born in the U.S. is a citizen. Well, that's interesting. As one of my Cuban heritage golfing buddies says, what we can do? What can we do? Well, it turns out there's a lot you can do. And the Chinese, who have roughly a million of these supposed birthright citizens living in China, are about to have a problem. If Trump calls up Scott Bessant and says, hey, get this going, and here's the simple solution. U.S. citizens are obligated, remind you, obligated to file U.S. income tax returns. So it's almost certain that we have a list of people who were born in the U.S. who no longer live here and have not renounced their U.S. citizenship. That is, U.S. citizens of Chinese heritage living in China. We know that because there are a bunch of birth tourism outfits that have done that. They've done it from other countries. Same story, same solution. You simply say, okay, Mr. Wang, or whatever your name is, you were born here, you're a United States citizen, you're now 18 years old. You've been 18 for since the last April 15th, and you have not filed a tax return. Now, anybody who doesn't file a tax return in the U.S., who lives in the U.S., is likely to discover that the Internal Revenue Service is very happy to take advantage of the situation. They'll do a couple of things. One is they'll come down on you and they will impute income. They'll look and say you're living in this kind of a house. That means you have this kind of income, you're driving that kind of a car. And they don't have to have pay stubs. You were paid under the table, doesn't matter. You have imputed income. And you owe taxes on that imputed income. You didn't claim any deductions, you didn't claim any exemptions, you owe taxes on it. End of story. And they can send it along. But basically, the idea is the IRS says you have a certain standard of living, we impute a certain standard of income for that, you owe taxes on that income, and if you don't pay up, well, guess what? We're going to charge you with two crimes. One is failure to pay, at which point we attach your income. And now most of the birth tourism is in families that are well off in Red China. So you look and you say this family owns certain property, of which certain property exists in the United States. That's fine. We will attach that property. That means the United States government owns it until you pay up. And if you don't pay up for a certain length of time, we'll take full possession of that property, which means a Chinese company that owns some American manufacturing company will suddenly be owned by the United States government, which will then sell it off to U.S. citizens. Oh, how nice. We got rid of that farmland next to the Minot, North Dakota missile base. It's suddenly owned by the Americans. And the Chinese get kicked out. Because they're not employees of the U.S. government. We continue. We've attached your property. If you don't pay up yet, you still don't pay up, we've taken possession. You are now charged with income tax evasion, which is a felony. If you don't show up to court, we will try you in absentia. And we will get a default judgment, which means you are now a convicted felon. And anybody who watches the National Geographic show contraband uh seized at the border will discover that every person who enters gets a quick check of their passport through the NCIC, and lo and behold, you have a warrant for your arrest based on your conviction. You show up, you go to jail. That's interesting because we have a rule that says the United States Post Office cannot deliver ballots to anyone who is not in the United States, who is not a member of our foreign services, either military stationed overseas or State Department stationed overseas. Those people can this can have ballots sent to them, but you can't. Guess what? A million Chinese just got taken off of the election rolls. Most interesting. You see, there are tools. And of course, we have one other tool. If you show up with a big belly at the border, we can simply turn you around and say you're not admissible. You are not here as a visitor, you are here to give birth, and that is not an acceptable reason for entering the United States. End of story. Any female is obligated to submit to a pregnancy test. If you are pregnant and you have a visa, a visitor visa for six months, or a student visa for longer than six months, you do not get entry into the United States. You get on the next plane back home. This would shut almost all of this down now. So the case doesn't mean much. Now, can Congress change this? Yes. Will Congress change it? Not now. Democrats won't ever agree to anything that Republicans want, but that's the way it is. Let us now move on to the next case, which has a huge import on the swamp. The case is Trump v. Slaughter. Rebecca Slaughter was a commissioner of the National Federal Relations Board. Trump fired her for refusing to follow his policies. She said, No, I'm protected by statute XYZ. And the Supreme Court said, let's take a look at Article II, Section One of the Constitution, because, you know, there may be something that the Constitution has to say with about this. And it reads, The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America. Pretty simple statement. No qualifications, nothing else. An LRB is part of the executive. What the Supreme Court did was say he can fire her. He doesn't like the way she colors her hair. She's gone. His job is to see that the laws be faithfully executed. And if he has that job, the first thing he has to do is decide what the laws are saying. Second, he has to check and make sure that his minions are doing the job the way he wants them to do it. Which means he can fire anybody in the executive branch. The Civil Service Act, be damned. I don't like you, you're gone. I will anticipate that in the near future we are going to see mass layoffs, mass reductions in force in the federal government, because frankly, most of it has no reason to exist, even under current statutes. You can make an argument that the EPA has some reasons to exist because of pollution, for example, in a river coming from Minnesota, going past Missouri and so on, the Mississippi. Or air pollution traveling from some coal-fired power plant in the Midwest across Pennsylvania, New York. Those kinds of things. Those are interstate issues and best handled by the Fed. But most of what the EPA does is nonsense. Everything the Education Department is nonsense. We can go on. There's a long list. And frankly, Trump v. Slaughter just opened the floodgates. And I suspect that what he did was he called his cabinet heads in, or he may do it at the next televised cabinet meeting and open with an announcement that I need you guys to look inside your departments and identify every employee who is obstructing this administration's policies. Put the list together and get rid of them. My statement here stands as a detailed announcement that that's the plan. And it's my authority. Therefore, they're gone. So that'll be a good thing to see. Now they did something very weird in a case called Trump v. Cook, where Lisa Cook was a Federal Reserve governor. He fired her, she said no. And the Supreme Court kind of contradicted itself, frankly, and said, no, the Fed is something else. He can't fire Fed governors. So we'll see where that goes. That's a weird set of cognitive dissonance with the court. Now, there are three cases that have to do with guns, and I'm going to talk about those very quickly. And then maybe on another session we'll talk about some other cases. The first one is Himani, the second one is Wolford. In Himani, you had a guy who used uh marijuana. And on the firm form 4473, that everybody who buys a gun fills out is are you a user of an illegal drug? And if he says yes, he's not supposed to get a gun and they blocked him and whatnot. If he says no and he is a user, it's a perjury. You know, this is nonsense. And what the court said was, and they did this right. If he is not intoxicated and unable to control himself at the time he's using a gun, that's a prohibited activity. But buying a gun when he does use intoxicants is nonsense. You know, blocking that. And so they overthrew that restriction, that particular item in the National Firearms Act. I think others are going to get chipped away. The other one is the Wolford case out of Hawaii. And in Wolford, if you were carrying a weapon and you decided you wanted to go into your local grocery store, which is a privately owned facility held open to the public. That's the key language. If they didn't have a sign that says guns are welcome, you couldn't carry your gun inside. Loosely known as the vampire rule, because you can't come in to see the vampire unless he invites you. Well, the Supreme Court said that's a BS and overturned the Hawaii rule because Hawaii was claiming, well, we have the spirit of aloha, and the court pointed out that yeah, you could have the spirit of the big apple or the spirit of the Windy City or whatever else. Doesn't matter. The law is the same everywhere. Your spirit of aloha has no legal meaning. And the rule is now private property held open to the public is de facto an accepted place to carry a gun. The only difference is if they put a sign outside that says no weapons. They're allowed to do that. They're private property. But at the same time, unless they do that, guns are okay. So Hawaii's law went bye bye. Uh New York had a law like that. I think Chicago had one. There's a bunch of other cases that are getting. Uh lots of activity at lower courts because of the Wolford case. Now, there's one other case that's important, and this one is a grant of certierari. And what that says is that the Supreme Court is going to hear this case, and the case is Viramontes visa versus Cook County, that's out of Chicago. And basically, Viramontes is a case challenging Illinois' law that bans AR-15s. And the court simply said the question presented is are they protected weapons? In essence. You know, are these modern semi-automatic weapons protected? And that includes AK-47s, AR-15s, it includes um Ruger Mini 14s, run the list. There's a whole bunch of them. Uh and this is a virtually a slam dunk. And particularly since Justice Jackson noted in was it Jackson? Yeah, I think it was Jackson. Noted in one of her other decisions that oh, it was the decision in Mexico versus Smith and Wesson that unquestionably the AR-15 is in common use. And so Mexico was told to go pound sand. And part of the rule here is the only way you can ban a weapon is if it is dangerous and unusual. Well, given that AR-15s are the most common single firearm in the United States, they're not unusual. Therefore, it cannot pass a conjunctive test of dangerous and unusual, because it's not unusual. It might be dangerous. All guns are dangerous in some fashion. So are cars. So are bathtubs. Matter of fact, far more people die in bathtubs than are shot by rifles. So the point is, this case is unquestionably going to be a win for the Second Amendment. And all of the AR-15 bans, including Virginia, including California, are going to go bye-bye. Now the question is whether they take away all of the crap in California about conforming weapons. You know, you have to do this, you can't have a magazine that does this or that or the other thing. I suspect that all of that stuff's going to go away, too. So we shall see what happens. There are other cases for our next sitting of the seminar. Until next time, the message is what matters. I'm Dr. Ted Noel.