Author, columnist, speaker

Washington's Greatness and a Feckless Court

By Robert Knight

Last weekend, our family took in the new, improved Mount Vernon, which, frankly, knocked our socks off.

Not only are George Washington’s 18th-century mansion and grounds superbly restored, but there’s also a Smithsonian-quality museum and a riveting film about the Revolutionary War. 

It even snows inside the theater at one point.

Without George Washington, the United States of America would not have happened. America’s armed forces commander, and later the first president, was utterly indispensable.

King George III and Parliament had imposed intolerable conditions, such as quartering soldiers in colonists’ homes and demanding a “stamp tax” on all documents and transactions.

The colonists had plenty of reasons to revolt. Battling extreme hardship and the greatest world empire at the time, Washington’s army dropped from 20,000 to only 3,000, and the cause seemed hopeless.

But they fought for six years from April 19, 1775, to Oct. 19, 1781, securing victory at Yorktown with help from the French fleet.

Washington, who with his wife Martha never had children of his own, became the father of his country. Offered a chance to be king, he went home instead.

As revealed in books like “George Washington’s Sacred Fire” (Peter A. Lillback with Jerry Newcombe, 2006), he was fueled by a deep Christian faith, something conspicuously absent from Mount Vernon and modern revisionism.

The museum has some other quirks, such as ignoring Thomas Jefferson and barely mentioning the Marquis de Lafayette.

But it respectfully chronicles the inconvenient reality that Mount Vernon had many slaves, most of them acquired from Martha’s first husband’s estate. And it is handled well without letting it override Washington’s importance.

Washington made being an American citizen one of the most valued privileges in the world.

I thought about this while poking through the legal wreckage of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Trump v. Barbara on June 30 to uphold birthright citizenship.

It applies even to babies born to illegal aliens and to “birth tourists” who come specifically to create new U.S. citizens.

The ruling written by Chief Justice John Roberts qualifies nearly anyone in the world to have a baby on U.S. territory and create an instant citizen.

As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent, this “devalues” American citizenship.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer had informed the Court in April about evidence cited by members of Congress that communist China is sending hundreds of thousands of women to U.S. territories to have babies, bring them home and indoctrinate them, “creating a whole generation of American citizens abroad with no meaningful ties to the United States."

But this didn’t matter to the Court’s majority, which seems to have decided that the Constitution is a suicide pact.

The 14th Amendment states, “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 wherein they reside.”

The Court chose to pretend that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is superfluous. If being born on U.S. soil establishes citizenship, the “jurisdiction” phrase cannot logically mean the same thing; it is a caveat added to protect children born of freed slaves after the Civil War.

In fact, the1866 Civil Rights Act acknowledges citizenship only to people “not subject to any foreign power,” such as babies born to foreign nationals.

These points were raised in powerful dissents by Thomas and Samuel Alito.

The United States is one of only a few countries still allowing birthright citizenship. If an American woman has a baby in Tokyo, the child is not a Japanese citizen.

At the end of June, the Court delivers its most controversial decisions before recessing. On June 30, the justices rightly upheld the right of states to protect female athletes by barring males from competing in female sports. Only the three leftist women dissented.

But in Watson v. Republican National Committee, a June 29 opinion written by Amy Coney Barrett, the justices rejected a challenge to state laws allowing the tallying of mail-in ballots after Election Day.

In his scathing dissent, Justice Thomas said there was no better way to undermine faith in fair elections than to count ballots for days and even weeks afterward, especially in close races.

We are living in a perilous time.

Hundreds of thousands of foreigners, legal and illegal, are minting new U.S. citizens. The Democratic Party is being overrun by openly communist and Islamist candidates under the Democratic Socialist banner.

They are taking power in states with sanctuary cities, massive welfare fraud, compromised voter rolls, no photo voter ID laws, and astronomical numbers of illegal aliens joining the free stuff army.

Given the Court’s reluctance to protect U.S. citizens from what amounts to a foreign invasion, the U.S. Senate has no excuse for not voting to pass the SAVE America Act to restore election integrity.

In the birthright citizenship ruling, Roberts wrote, “In the odious decision of Dred Scott v. Sandford [1857], this Court imposed the Southern States’ beliefs onto the Nation.”

Yes, and here’s some updated phrasing: “In the odious decision of Trump v. Barbara, this Court imposed the Sanctuary Cities’ beliefs onto the Nation.”

I doubt that George Washington could have conceived of what is happening today in America right before our eyes, or that he would not find a way to do something about it. 

Illustration by Alexander Hunter in The Washington Times.