By the time the second round arrived, Dale had already slammed his palm on the bar twice, and the ketchup bottle was beginning to fear for its life.
“Six to three,” he said, for the fourth time. “Six to three, Chuck. To let anybody born here be a citizen. You believe that? These are supposed to be the conservative judges.”
“It’s judicial activism,” Chuck agreed gravely, nodding into his mug with the solemnity of a man who had recently learned the phrase “judicial activism.” “Roberts has gone soft. Probably reads The New York Times. Probably does yoga.”
The ruling in question — Trump v. Barbara, handed down that Tuesday — had struck down the executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship, with the Chief Justice writing that children born on U.S. soil are citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Dale had not read the opinion. Dale had read a headline, felt a feeling, and driven straight to the tavern to have it professionally reinforced.
“It’s just common sense,” Dale continued. “You can’t just make somebody a citizen because of where they happened to squirt out. That’s insane. That’s woke math. That’s — Sheila, another round — that’s the kind of thing they never would’ve allowed back when the country was normal.”
The bartender, a woman named Sheila who had been polishing the same glass for six minutes as a form of meditation, finally set it down.
“Can I ask you two something?” she said.
“Shoot,” said Dale, who loved being asked things because it usually preceded him being agreed with.
“Have either of you actually read the Fourteenth Amendment?”
There was a pause. Somewhere in the tavern, a dartboard creaked.
“The what?”
“The Fourteenth Amendment. To the Constitution. The one the whole ruling is about.” Sheila leaned on the bar. “It says — and I’m paraphrasing — that all persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens. It’s been in there since 1868. That’s the part the Court was reading.”
Chuck squinted, the way a man squints when a fact has entered the room uninvited and is now looking for a seat.
“Well,” he said. “That doesn’t sound right.”
“It’s the actual text.”
“Then somebody snuck it in there.”
“During Reconstruction,” Sheila said. “So — Republicans.”
Dale waved this off like a fly. “Okay, but there’s no precedent for this. They just made this up on Tuesday to spite the President.”
“There’s a Supreme Court case from 1898,” Sheila said. “United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Guy was born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants, got denied re-entry to the country, and the Court ruled he was a citizen because he was born here. That’s been settled law for a hundred and twenty-eight years. Longer than either of you has been slamming your hand on my bar.”
Dale and Chuck exchanged the look of two men who had just been informed that the tree fort was, legally, their neighbor’s.
“See, this is exactly the problem,” Dale said finally, recovering. “This is what they do. They hide behind these little — these little technicalities. Like ‘the Constitution’ and ‘a hundred and twenty-eight years of case law.’ Very sneaky.”
“It’s not really a technicality if it’s the main document,” Sheila offered.
“So what you’re telling me,” Chuck said slowly, working it out like a man assembling furniture without the instructions, “is that the Constitution — the actual Constitution — says the woke thing.”
“It says the citizenship thing, yeah.”
Chuck sat back. He looked, for a moment, genuinely wounded. Then his face hardened with the resolve of a true patriot who has arrived, at long last, at the only logical conclusion.
“Then the Constitution’s woke,” he announced. “I’m sorry. I don’t like saying it. But if that’s what it says, then it’s been compromised. We gotta throw the whole thing out and get a new one.”
“A based one,” Dale agreed, brightening. “One that agrees with us. That’s how the Founders would’ve wanted it.”
“The Founders wrote the woke one,” Sheila said.
“Then the Founders were woke,” Dale said, without hesitation, and Chuck raised his mug, because you had to admire the consistency, and the two of them clinked glasses in defense of a country whose founding document they had just voted to repeal on the grounds that it kept saying things.
Sheila picked the glass back up and resumed polishing.
Outside, the Constitution remained in effect, load-bearing and unbothered, doing the one thing it had reliably done for a hundred and fifty-eight years: existing whether or not anyone at the Rusty Eagle had read it.
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