Commentary Culture Investigations

Photo Credit:Image: Lupita Nyong’o.  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Gage SkidmoreBy William SullivanSelf-destructive feminism strikes the Western canon yet again.

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American ThinkerBy Kevin FinnThe Democrats rely on this technique to move the political needle, but there are simple ways to counter it.

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ChatGPTBy James ZumwaltThe thought of Pyongyang’s madman helping Tehran’s madmen should be most disturbing to the West.

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American ThinkerBy Javier A. HernándezAdvocates are trying to make it a policy issue within official D.C. circles.

John Roberts kicks ass. The chief justice’s supremely magisterial end-of-term majority opinion in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case, powerfully vindicated the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment. Roberts’s impressive historical analysis left the lead dissenter, Justice Clarence Thomas, looking like the bloodied loser of a Trumpian UFC cage match.
What’s more, the chief’s majority opinion just a day earlier in Trump v. Slaughter, upholding the president’s power to remove a member of the Federal Trade Commission, finally overturned the long-weakened 1935 precedent called Humphrey’s Executor. Roberts rightly restored the primacy of an earlier executive power case, Myers v. United States (1928), while in a companion ruling, Trump v. Cook, Roberts protected the Federal Reserve from injurious presidential political meddling.
Yet a reader who had just finished Sarah Isgur’s spritely new Last Branch Standing would not have been at all surprised by the chief’s dominant trifecta. Isgur is a gifted writer and also exceptionally knowledgeable about the federal courts. A member of the Federalist Society since her years as a Harvard Law School student, Isgur’s thank-you acknowledgments in Last Branch include at least a dozen appellate jurists. At Harvard, her then-dean, now Justice Elena Kagan, fiercely defended Isgur when she was slimed by a wholly false blog post, and Isgur and her husband, former Texas solicitor general (and onetime Supreme Court clerk) Scott Keller were married in the chambers of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The first one-third of Last Branch is compelling reading and informatively sophisticated; the final two-thirds are a comparative letdown. Isgur’s brief portraits of each current justice are excellent and indeed often witty; the depth and breadth of her understanding of the Court’s current doctrinal proclivities and interpersonal dynamics are expert and astute. Isgur’s title derives from how today’s Court is coping “without a functioning Congress” that “isn’t doing its job,” thus resulting in “a too-powerful executive branch.” As Last Branch rightly puts it, “as Congress has left the field, the Court is left to grapple with an executive branch gone wild” during both the Biden and Trump presidencies.
Isgur powerfully highlights statistical facts the vast majority of partisan critics knowingly ignore. “The Court is taking fewer cases than ever and overturning fewer precedents than at any time in the last seventy years.” While “the vast majority of the work of the Court mostly gets ignored,” especially when decisions are unanimous or feature dissents that don’t cleave to simplistic ideological divides, “partisans can’t abide an institution that has its own legitimacy if that institution doesn’t bend to their partisan interests.”
Isgur deeply appreciates how law, including constitutional decision-making, is supposed to be different in kind from mere politics. That appreciation of law’s fundamentally professional nature is utterly rejected by an increasing number of present-day ideologues, including a depressing proportion of ostensible law professors, who suffer from the “postmodern” affliction that everything is nothing more than politics in one or another guise. Anyone who is unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge the professional excellence of an opinion whose outcome one finds personally distasteful—say in my case the 2022 majority holding in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade—has no business holding themselves out as a worthwhile commentator on the justices’ work.
Isgur accurately asserts that “the opinions of the Court are certainly more sophisticated and better written than at any time in the past,” or at least since John Marshall and Joseph Story sat together in the early 19th century. By comparison, virtually everything the Warren and Burger courts produced between Justice Robert H. Jackson’s death in 1954 and Antonin Scalia’s arrival in 1986 deserves some degree of professional opprobrium, excepting only the usually dissenting opinions of John Marshall Harlan II.
Last Branch repeatedly emphasizes how “it’s too simplistic to think of the Court as a 6-3 conservative, single-dimension behemoth.” Instead, it must be understood as a group of three trios—liberals Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—three institutionalists focused on the consequences of the Court’s rulings: Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—and the three conservative purists concerned only about getting the law “right” as they see it: Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch. As this end of term repeatedly featured, any two if not all three of the institutionalists usually control the outcomes of the Court’s divided cases.
Of John Roberts, Isgur writes that “no other chief has been in the majority as often for at least seventy-five years” per Roberts’s 90+ percent score since 2018. She also asserts that Roberts is “perhaps the most powerful chief justice since John Marshall” died in 1835. Two weeks ago that seemed an interesting contention, but now, after the close of this term, Roberts has confirmed Isgur’s prescience.
Last Branch is repeatedly charming. “A few years back, when the Chief walked in to find a clerk asleep at his desk, the Chief didn’t wake him. He took a selfie with him and then hung it like a trophy.” Of the other institutionalists, Isgur reports, “Kavanaugh has been in the majority at a higher rate than any justice since 1953.” Barrett is “the first mother of school-age children ever to sit on the Court,” and as the only justice with no Ivy League degrees, she’s taken 75 percent of her clerks from non-Ivy law schools. In stark contrast, only one of Kagan’s 60-plus clerks has come with public university bachelors and law degrees. And even before this recently concluded term, Barrett already was “the least likely to vote for Trump” of all six Republican-nominated justices.
Of the conservative purists, Clarence Thomas is “correctly viewed as the intellectual leader of the right” and may well “leave the most lasting legacy of any justice currently serving.” The highly introverted Alito works mainly from home, and, like Gorsuch, does not participate in the “cert pool” whereby the other seven justices’ clerks split up the onerous work of evaluating every one of the thousands of often meritless petitions submitted to the Court. Gorsuch, whom Isgur memorably tags “the Great Concurrer,” “writes separately more than any other justice,” as was certainly true this term too. Gorsuch’s chambers appropriately feature a portrait of 19th-century justice Benjamin Curtis, best known for dissenting in the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford case upholding race slavery. While Isgur unsurprisingly declares that Thomas is the justice “you’d most like to have as a mentor,” her characterization of Gorsuch as the justice “you’d most like to have on your side in a bar fight” is certain to be without evidentiary support!
Among the three liberals, Elena Kagan, like Roberts, “views the job as an exercise in consensus building.” Isgur also asserts Kagan “is the best writer on the Court today. Maybe ever,” but Gorsuch is at least her equal and maybe that of Robert Jackson as well. Sonia Sotomayor is perhaps best known for her often lengthy dissenting statements delivered from the bench, but she nonetheless has volunteered that “Clarence Thomas and I can spend hours outside in the hallways either after lunch or leaving a conference just talking about life.”
Ketanji Jackson, the most junior justice, has been giving Gorsuch serious competition for separate writings; in the 2024-25 term she issued 10 dissents and 9 concurrences, while Kagan in stark contrast published just 4 and none. Across three terms, Jackson’s separate writings totaled nearly 60,000 words, with Gorsuch at 56,000, Barrett under 20,000, and Chief Justice Roberts at 168. ‘Nuf said.
Isgur rightly reminds us that the Supreme Court is “by design a counter-majoritarian institution,” such that it is “supposed to be unpopular.” Ideologically partisan critics who call for Court “reform” purposely ignore what a superb bench the current one is, and inaccurately attempt to paint even the institutionalist trio of justices as Trump lackies. In fact, as Last Branch documents, “Trump in his first term had the lowest success rate at the Supreme Court of any president in at least a century,” and the president’s recent losses in the birthright and Federal Reserve cases, among others, only further highlight this basic truth. As Isgur writes in appropriate exasperation, “if the Court were biased in favor of Trump, these numbers don’t make any sense.” In fact, of course, they aren’t biased, and unlike partisan hacks, the numbers don’t lie.
Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today’s Supreme Court
by Sarah Isgur
Crown, 389 pp., $32
David J. Garrow’s books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Luther King Jr. biography Bearing the Cross and Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.
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Most Americans have been raised since childhood to understand that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution confers American citizenship automatically at birth to all those newborns fortunate enough to find themselves on United States territory. Unlike European countries or, for that matter, almost everywhere in the world, America, we are taught in elementary school civics classes, welcomes citizens on the basis of ius soli, the law of the soil, rather than ius sanguinis.
But the renowned legal scholar Richard Epstein disagrees vehemently, and in The Myth of Birthright Citizenship, he mounts a timely, quixotic challenge to the conventional wisdom: timely, because President Trump issued an executive order last year purporting to curtail birthright citizenship; quixotic, because the Supreme Court just rejected both Trump’s and Epstein’s attempts to restrain it.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State where in they reside.” So reads the plain text of the 14th Amendment, which post-Civil War America ratified on July 9, 1868, and which, per Epstein, has given rise to “one of the most contentious constitutional debates of our time.” Amid this contention, Epstein parts ways with most of his fellow originalist academics, arguing that “the children of illegal aliens were never part of the constitutional structure of the United States in the years before the Fourteenth Amendment; nor was this posture changed in any way by the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Refreshingly, Epstein articulates his policy priors at the outset. “I am opposed today to birthright citizenship on its merits,” he writes, “even though I am the grandson of immigrants from eastern Europe. Yet I am also strongly supportive of expanded immigration, as authorized by Congress after public deliberation and debate.” That his legal conclusion aligns with his political outlook shouldn’t be held against him.
Epstein anchors that conclusion in the legacy of the Naturalization Acts of 1790 and 1795, which offered citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years.” He regards the phrase “under the jurisdiction of the United States” as requiring something more than mere formal presence in a legal precinct or simple “local allegiance” to its laws, but rather the exclusive and unequivocal submission to American authorities, which he contends both illegal immigrants and short-term legal visitors cannot provide, given their citizenship elsewhere. In other words, it’s not enough for immigrants to comply with local, state, and federal laws; they must instead abjure their loyalty and obedience to their country of origin and subjugate themselves to American authority—an impossibility given their status.
As proof, he adduces statements presented during congressional debate over the amendment, including the insistence by Michigan Republican senator Jacob Howard that the citizenship it bestowed “will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, [or] who belong to the families of ambassadors.” The children of foreigners and aliens, Howard proclaimed, do not automatically merit citizenship. Epstein also contends that “the 1866 Civil Rights Act, whose foundations the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to solidify, excluded from its scope citizens of foreign nations and members of Indian tribes.”
Epstein also invokes the maxim ex turpi causa, non oritur actio, or “out of a wrongful cause, a legal cause of action cannot arise,” in service of his claim that children of illegal immigrants should not benefit from their parents’ wrongdoing. Similarly, he contends that “birthright citizenship would mean that a child, in violation of natural law, can be separated from his parents at birth when they are deported while he remains, breaking the bond of natural love and affection between parent and child.”
And he squarely confronts the strongest evidence to the contrary: The 1898 Supreme Court decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that “every citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States.” Writing for a 6-2 majority, Justice Horace Gray declared that “to hold that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution excludes from citizenship the children, born in the United States, of citizens or subjects of other countries would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, or other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.”
In response, Epstein correctly notes, first, that the parents in Wong Kim Ark were not illegal aliens but long-term residents. More importantly, he asserts that Gray’s ruling was “flatly wrong” in one place, “plainly wrong” in another, and logically and legally inferior to Justice David Brewer’s impassioned dissent. Along similar lines, he also strongly criticizes the recent district court opinions that enjoined enforcement of Trump’s executive order.
But Epstein has numerous additional counterarguments to contend with, among them the clear injunction by the authoritative 18th-century English jurist William Blackstone that “the children of aliens, born here in England, are, generally speaking, natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such.” Then, too, most legal scholars interpret “subject to the jurisdiction of” much less strictly than Epstein does; Supreme Court justice Joseph Story said as much in the early 19th century when he held that “allegiance by birth, is that which arises from being born within the dominions and under the protections of a particular sovereign.”
In addition, as explained by UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo—Epstein’s chief birthright citizenship antagonist among originalists, whom the author credits in his acknowledgments for “forc[ing] me to delve deeper into materials that I thought I had mastered”—”the Reconstruction Congress is responsible for the greatest expansion in the recognition of constitutional rights other than the First Congress, which proposed the original Bill of Rights.”
Furthermore, Epstein quotes extensively from senators engaged during Reconstruction in the heated debate over the 14th Amendment. But as Yoo argues, “it is unclear whether the views of individual members of the Reconstruction Congress should count more than the views of the states that ratified the Amendment,” which don’t appear to provide support for Epstein’s thesis. And even within the congressional debate itself, Pennsylvania senator Edgar Cowan expressly asked supporters of the amendment, “Is the child of the Chinese immigrant in California, a citizen? Is the child born of a Gypsy born in Pennsylvania a citizen?” California senator John Conness responded in the affirmative.
Epstein presents rejoinders to these arguments, too, which the reader may or may not find persuasive. He faces a steep uphill climb even among legal scholars with whom he generally shares a common outlook. And a majority of the Supreme Court just rejected his arguments, holding in Trump v. Barbara that “the Citizenship Clause uses jurisdiction in its ordinary sense—referring to the power of the United States to govern those within its territory.”
But The Myth of Birthright Citizenship skillfully lays bare the complexity of the issue, as three justices noted in dissent in Barbara, largely tracking Epstein’s historical and legal contentions. In plain, cogent terms, he exposes everyday Americans to plausible arguments that run contrary to our basic civics programming. For that, he’s to be roundly commended.
The Myth of Birthright Citizenship: What the Fourteenth Amendment Really Says
by Richard Epstein
Encounter Books, 232 pp., $19.99
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI.
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The novelist Michael Connelly has given us some memorable characters over the years—the no-nonsense Harry Bosch, the quick-thinking and fast-talking Mickey Haller, and the intrepid cold-case-cracking Renée Ballard. Now we have a new cop in Connelly’s crime-fiction world—Detective Sergeant Stilwell—introduced last year (without a first name) in his new Catalina series.
Unlike Connelly’s other ace investigators, Stilwell—or Stil for short—doesn’t live in gritty Los Angeles or its environs. He runs the sheriff’s station on Catalina Island, 22 miles off the coast of California. Stilwell used to work homicide on the mainland, but he accused a colleague of obstructing justice and was shipped off to Catalina after an internal review ruled against him. The island is “a transfer destination for deputies who had somehow run afoul of the department’s command staff,” and Stilwell is always running afoul of command.
Life on Catalina is quiet—at least initially. In Nightshade, the first of two books in the series so far, our detective finds himself investigating poaching and petty crimes, keeping his misfit deputies in line, and attempting to negotiate small-town politics, at which, of course, he fares poorly. It’s a far cry from chasing down bad guys in L.A., but he tries to make the best of it. He has met someone new, Tash, after an acrimonious divorce, and they enjoy drinking wine and watching old movies in the evening and eating lunch at a local diner.
Luckily for Stil—and us—things don’t stay quiet for long. A woman’s body is discovered submerged in the harbor, which leads to another murder, the discovery of corruption in the mayor’s office, and much else besides. Stilwell is not supposed to work the murder case, but he does so anyway, and his success at getting to the bottom of things eventually puts Tash in serious danger. Stilwell shows up just in time, against all odds, to save her, and all’s well that ends well, or so it seems.
The second book in the series, Ironwood, which was published this May, is set a few months after the final events of Nightshade. The mayor is awaiting trial for corruption, and Tash seems to have recovered from the traumatic events in the first novel. But a drug bust at the local airport goes wrong, and one of his deputies is killed while another is seriously injured. Stilwell is told, once again, to respect protocol and not investigate. But he, again, does so anyway. After all, these were his people: “He felt a responsibility to them … to make sure justice prevailed. … So he remained a dog with a bone, unable to let go.” As he discovers, the incident at the airport wasn’t a drug bust gone wrong, and there is more to his boss’s attempts to keep him on ice than respecting protocol.
Connelly’s books rarely give us just one murder, and in Ironwood, Stilwell also becomes involved in a hunt to find a serial killer after the killer himself leaves a clue at the harbor and the remains of a young woman are discovered up island. Why a man who had taken such care to hide his crimes over the years—burying his young female victims four feet deep—would suddenly court the attention of the police is a question Stil himself asks and never satisfactorily answers. But he doesn’t have time to solve the riddles of the human heart. No sooner has Stilwell put the perp behind bars than he finds himself hunted by a particularly lethal killer backed by people in powerful places.
Another Connelly staple is to bring his characters into each other’s books, and who else than Renée Ballard works with Stilwell to solve the serial killer case. She is more than a little impressed with Stil’s skills and surprised at everything he has had to deal with on Catalina since moving there. “Small island, big crime,” he tells her. She nods, and so do we.
Stilwell is not Connelly’s most finely drawn detective. You know the type: fast-acting tough guy who has a problem with authority, a good heart, and an unbending commitment to justice. But the change in setting to Catalina is refreshing, with its small-town characters, ocean views, and hills.
Connelly always sprinkles his novels with a few references to current events to give them a contemporaneous feel. In Ironwood, both ICE and Southern California wildfires get a mention, but Connelly handles these with a light touch. He’s not writing for the ages or to change the world, he’s writing for us and to make a buck.
He’ll make more than a few with Ironwood. I enjoyed it more than Nightshade, and if I’m right about what comes after, his next Catalina novel will be even better.
Ironwood: A Catalina Novel
by Michael Connelly
Little, Brown and Company, 336 pp., $32
Micah Mattix is the editor of Portico.
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When Platoon was released at the end of 1986, I was in college, and the level of excitement was immense. A few months after rah-rah, blah-blah Top Gun had been largely ignored by my fellow left-leaning students, we were all finally going to be shown what it meant to be “in the shit,” as Max Fischer would say with awe to Vietnam vet Herman Blume in Rushmore. I didn’t see Top Gun until years later, and I hated Platoon. The military movie of the era that spoke to me, an unlikely ROTC cadet who would soon become an unlikely second lieutenant (and sent off to fight a small war in Southwest Asia), was a movie that came out the same month as Platoon: Heartbreak Ridge.
I will always respect Oliver Stone for dropping out of Yale, which he hated, and volunteering for the infantry in Vietnam, providing him with the experience that led to his writing and directing Platoon. But I followed the opposite course: I loved Yale and got an ROTC scholarship to pay for it, despite having no interest whatsoever in the military; like Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, I always pictured myself being classified “4-P. In the event of war, I’m a hostage.” Platoon reminded me of an ROTC training weekend in Connecticut, in which it rained nonstop and the only defense I had against it was a “shelter half,” a large piece of canvas with no posts to hold it up. Ever been rained on for 48 hours? Unpleasant. Ever try to sleep in a mud puddle squeezed under a large branch only sort of holding up your shelter half? Also unpleasant. It rained excessively in Platoon, it gave me ROTC PTSD, and I thought: If they ever send me off to war, I hope it’s someplace dry. Wish granted!
I could not identify at all with the operatic heroes-and-villains theming of Platoon (which may indeed place viewers in the shit, but is also fairly dopey and overwrought; Stone was very young when he wrote it). What I did identify with was Heartbreak Ridge’s depiction of garrison life—the hanging out part of the military career, the bit between wars, and consequently the vast majority of your life in uniform. The soldiers (in this case, the Marines) play tricks on each other, goof off, go on runs, do whatever their day-to-day assignments may be. Watching over them all is a clueless young dope barely out of school, as I would soon be. He’s played by a Broadway song-and-dance man named Boyd Gaines. Gaines’s character sports what military folk call BCs—military-issue horn-rims so chunky they’re nicknamed Birth Control glasses—and tries his wobbly best to seem like a leader of men. Like me, he was a student of his own incompetence and understood the importance of deferring to his nominal inferiors, the senior NCOs, who have vastly more experience and relevant knowledge than the lieutenants but do not have college degrees. The LT’s top sergeant—Gunnery Sergeant Tom Highway—is played by another song-and-dance man, Clint Eastwood.
Through Eastwood’s character, who is hilariously trying to win back his ex-wife by becoming a sensitive, communicative modern man (though forever scarred by a battle on the titular ridge back in the Korean War), the movie provides a quintessential portrait of garrison living, from the way he trolls the troops with his unpredictable choice of T-shirt for the morning run (everyone who doesn’t have a match is out of uniform and consequently has to scramble to get the right one) to his joining in the endless fraternal infighting that means your worst enemy isn’t the Russians or the Chinese, it’s Delta Company or Second Battalion or what have you. During a gladiatorial fight between Gunny Highway’s Recon platoon and a rival, he offers an unforgettable iteration of a maxim I would hear many times in the Army: “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.” “Your man cheated!” he is told by a disapproving officer after Highway’s handpicked Marine bests two others with a double gonad-punch. “I say he improvised,” Eastwood’s Highway responds, with a textbook snarl. “He adapted. He overcame.”
Sneakily, by being tough on his Marines as individuals but fiercely devoted to them as a group, Gunny Highway is transforming these slackers into a band of warriors. He instills in them a level of cohesion and interdependent loyalty that nonmilitary people can never know, unless they devise the means to get shot at in their office cubicles. Even more sneakily, the movie, directed by Eastwood from a script by James Carabatsos, who fought in Vietnam at the same time as Stone, shines a light on a path out of the darkness for the American military that Stone got lost in.
From the late 1960s, drug use and bad behavior became rampant in the military and morale sank to an all-time low, where it remained throughout the 1970s, perhaps hitting rock bottom during the Carter years. America lost confidence in the military, and the military lost confidence in itself. Top Gun was a whiz-bang sugar-high fantasy portrait of American military might. It made the military look fun, sleek, and cool. But Heartbreak Ridge, which hits a climax when Gunny Highway’s men, finally shaped into a fierce and lethal force that successfully carries off the 1983 invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada, is more or less an accurate portrayal of how the military—and the country—rebounded.
The troops rescued some 600 American medical students from St. George’s University who were being detained in their dorms by homicidal Cuban-backed Marxists who had shoot-to-kill orders. In a scene that exemplifies the “he adapted, he overcame” ethos, the troops, whose radios aren’t working, use a civilian phone and a credit card to make a call back to Fort Bragg to call in an airstrike (something like this actually happened).
This was just four years after Iranian revolutionaries, putting a cap on the ’70s and the Carter era, broke the spirit of our country by holding 66 Americans hostage for more than a year. The invasion of Grenada, though much joked about at the time by late-night comics (and my fellow students, who I was beginning to suspect didn’t love their country as much as I did), was a small but crucial confidence-building measure. The American military could do good things, punish evil, and ward off disaster. We could take action to protect our citizens instead of wringing our hands while foreign dictators had their way with them. Heartbreak Ridge dramatized this essential change of outlook with the same flair for both disarming comedy and audacious self-confidence that characterized the commander in chief himself. Ronald Reagan was president. America was back, baby.
Editor’s note: This retrospective review is one in a series celebrating 1986, arguably the greatest year in movies—inarguably if you’re Gen X.
Kyle Smith is a columnist and film critic at the Wall Street Journal.
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Darran Anderson, City Journal Rarely has freedom of expression in the modern era faced such adversity.

Jamiles Lartey, Marshall Project Law enforcement cameras are popping up everywhere, but many agencies have little safeguards to prevent abuse by individual officers.