The Supreme Court’s Newest Stunt: the Birthright Citizenship case as Reputation Laundering

The United States Supreme Court is built to resolve uncertainty, not to relitigate the obvious. It exists to settle disputed questions of law, to reconcile fractured lower courts, and to clarify what the Constitution does not already make plain. That is why what the Court has just done with birthright citizenship is so revealing. The Fourteenth Amendment states, with unambiguous force, that anyone born on American soil is a citizen, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” There is no serious legal argument on the other side of that sentence – not a historical one, a precedential one, nor a syntactical one. For more than a century, that principle has been treated not as debatable, but as foundational. This is among the most settled propositions in American constitutional law. Which raises the only real question that matters: why is this Court taking a case it would normally never touch?

The answer has nothing to do with law, but rather public relations.

This Court, unlike any in the modern era, has embraced image management as part of its core mission. It does not merely decide cases, but curates political narratives in an unprecedented manner. It stages legitimacy as the six conservatives on the court shred precedent, eliminate constitutional rights, and work to advance President Donald Trump’s political agenda. The decision to take up a birthright citizenship challenge is about providing institutional cover for this anti-democratic, blatantly partisan, behavior.

We have already seen this Court’s PR reflex at work. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, during one of the most polarizing confirmations in modern history, penned a carefully manicured op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending his “independence and impartiality.” Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch have recently been appearing on Fox News, to plug their books, defend the court’s extremism and justify use of the highly criticized “shadow docket.” This is not the quiet tradition of book tours or private law school speeches that justices used to adhere to. It is coordinated image rehabilitation on partisan airwaves amid a self-imposed legitimacy crisis. The Court now sees itself not just as a judicial body, but as a political institution that must actively tend to its brand.

While it is true that this Court has stunned even conservative legal scholars with rulings that deviate from long-settled interpretations of law and precedent, the far more likely explanation for why it has agreed to hear this otherwise settled birthright citizenship case is not that it intends to overturn the Constitution, but that it intends to use the case to gaslight the American public. The Court has taken a case where the outcome is already written so it can appear restrained and reasonable by not doing something extreme and unreasonable. Conservative justices are engineering a moment where they can rule against Trump in the safest way possible – on an issue where the law is so clear that they have no real room to do anything else.

In other words, this is reputation laundering.

Notably, the strategy is straight out of Trump’s own playbook – threaten a catastrophe, let the panic build, then step back just in time to play the hero. Trump has mastered this in the foreign affairs and economic policy arenas. Now the Court is copying the strategy when it comes to our Constitution.

By agreeing to hear this case, the Court gets to manufacture a headline it badly needs: “Supreme Court Defends the Constitution Against Trump.” It gets to posture as a bulwark of democracy – after spending another term weakening regulatory power, voting rights, basic freedoms, and the rule of law itself. Every other grotesque decision of the term will be washed in the afterglow of this one “good” outcome. Right-wing partisans will hold it up as proof that the Court is not biased, captured, or radically pro-MAGA. “See?” they will say. “They ruled against Trump.”

The danger here is not that birthright citizenship will fall. It almost certainly will not. The danger is that we are being trained to accept symbolic resistance as institutional virtue. To treat one obvious ruling as proof of neutrality. This Court hopes to trade on a case it never should have taken in the first place as cover for everything else it is doing in the shadows.

In reality, the Constitution does not need saving on birthright citizenship. It instead needs saving from a Court that now treats its legitimacy as a branding exercise – and settled law as a stage upon which to perform deception on the American people.