When the Supreme Court struck down the birthright-citizenship executive order on Monday, Ben Shapiro's syndicated column explained the outcome to his readers this way: "Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by the court's liberal justices, concluded" that the Fourteenth Amendment means what it has meant since 1898 [1][2]. He lists the dissenters - Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch. Two names never appear in the column, and they are the two names that break its story.
The first is Amy Coney Barrett. The syllabus of Trump v. Barbara prints the lineup in black and white: "Roberts, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson, JJ., joined" [3]. Barrett - appointed by President Trump - joined the constitutional holding in full. Not a concurrence, not a hedge. Her name is on the opinion that declares children born here to parents unlawfully or temporarily present "are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment" [3].
The second is Brett Kavanaugh - also a Trump appointee - who concurred in the judgment: he agreed the executive order is unlawful, on statutory rather than constitutional grounds, reading the citizenship statute Congress wrote to settle the question on its own [4]. He declined the constitutional holding, which is why the judgment is 6 to 3 while the constitutional core is 5 to 4 [4]. On the only question the executive order posed - can it stand? - he answered no.
The honest lineup reads: the Chief Justice, three Democratic appointees, and a Trump appointee signed the opinion; a second Trump appointee agreed with the result; three justices dissented. Half of the Republican-appointed justices who heard the case voted against the order. "Roberts and the liberals" survives only by deleting both of them.
The deletion does work for the column's larger argument - that the ruling is partisan drift rather than law. A 5-4 with Barrett inside the majority and a 6-3 judgment with Kavanaugh aboard reads instead like what the opinion says it is: "scant evidence" for the government's "dramatically revisionist view" of a clause the Court settled 128 years ago [4]. Shapiro is free to argue all six got it wrong. The column instead adjusts who the six were.
His piece gets the vote count right - "6-3" appears in the text - and correctly notes the ruling stands unless the Constitution is amended or the Court revisits it [1]. The arithmetic was available. The names were the casualty.
