Speaker
Neil Gorsuch
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
Justice Gorsuch cited a statistic that only 13% of 8th graders are proficient in American history at grade level, motivating his children's book on the Declaration.
Justice Gorsuch noted that approximately one third of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had their homes burned or destroyed as a consequence of signing.
SCOTUS ruled 6-3 that the 14th Amendment mandates birthright citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil, with Roberts joining the liberals. The ruling ignores the original meaning of 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof' and kicks the immigration crisis back to a Congress that has repeatedly failed to act.
Thomas writes 91 pages to make one fundamental point: citizenship in America has always required domicile — that a place is your home. Birth alone was never enough. A baby dropped on U.S. soil by parents who owe allegiance to a foreign country was never, under the original meaning, an American citizen.
SCOTUS struck down FECA's limits on coordinated expenditures between political parties and their candidates, ruling it abridges First Amendment speech. The Chinese wall between parties and candidates was always absurd — parties coordinating with candidates is normal politics, not corruption.
SCOTUS overturned Humphrey's Executor, the 90-year-old case that let Congress insulate agency heads from presidential removal. The unitary executive theory — once a Scalia dissent — is now law. If you work in the executive branch, the president can fire you.
Roberts says the president can fire FTC heads but not Federal Reserve governors, because the Fed is 'independent' in a special way. Thomas and Alito both call this unprecedented. In 237 years, the court had never before blocked a president from removing an executive officer — until now.
Gorsuch wrote a children's book because only 13% of 8th graders are proficient in American history. The Declaration was built on three radical ideas — equality, God-given rights, and self-governance — and the people behind it risked everything. One signer, Thomas Nelson, died so poor he was buried in an unmarked grave.
By ruling on constitutional grounds rather than statutory grounds, SCOTUS took birthright citizenship out of Congress's hands. You'd need a constitutional amendment to change it now — not a federal statute, not an executive order. Ilya Shapiro says he expected the court to take the statutory off-ramp Kavanaugh proposed.
Thomas doesn't reject Wong Kim Ark — he reinterprets it. The Chinese parents in that case couldn't renounce their Chinese citizenship (it meant death) and couldn't obtain American citizenship due to the Chinese Exclusion Act. They were effectively domiciled in the U.S., which is why their child was a citizen.
Roberts traces American citizenship back to British jus soli — the rule that anyone born on the sovereign's soil is a subject. But this logic conflates British subjection with American citizenship, glossing over the fact that the entire American Revolution was fought to reject the British model of sovereignty.
Alito argues the 14th Amendment only requires citizenship for those who at birth owe allegiance solely to the United States. Congress could expand citizenship to cover Dreamers and others — but it should be Congress's choice, not a constitutional mandate locked in forever by a bad precedent.
SCOTUS allowed mail-in ballots received after Election Day to be counted if postmarked before it. Ben Shapiro says the bigger threat to election integrity isn't late counting on the back end — it's ballot harvesting on the front end, where bad actors gather and submit ballots en masse.
SCOTUS ruled 6-3 that Title IX permits states to ban biological males from girls' sports. But the real courage was Thomas's: gender dysphoria is a mutable mental condition, not an immutable characteristic like race or sex, and it creates no protected class requiring heightened constitutional scrutiny.
The Bostock decision — written by Gorsuch himself — said the Civil Rights Act protects men who identify as women from employment discrimination. That precedent forced the majority to contort its logic in the trans sports case, creating a distinction between Title VII (employment) and Title IX (sports) that barely holds.
Analysis
What they talk about
- History 67%
- Education 33%
Connections
Shows they appear on and people they share episodes with. Drag to explore.
