Commentators blast Supreme Court's birthright citizenship ruling: 'A legal abomination'

By Jon Brown, Christian Post Reporter Wednesday, July 01, 2026

5. Mollie Hemingway: 'Devastatingly bad'

The Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway, whose journalistic work has often focused on the Supreme Court, described Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion as a "devastatingly bad decision for the future of the country" on par with Roe v. Wade in 1973 and the disastrous Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857.

"Previously, we had a policy of saying if you have parents who are here illegally and you're born here, you might be considered a citizen, but today is the first day that the Supreme Court has ever said that's a constitutional right," Hemingway said Tuesday on Fox News.

Mollie Hemingway lays out how SCOTUS' birthplace citizenship ruling — which greenlights birth tourism for foreign nationals — is a "devastatingly bad decision for the future of the country." pic.twitter.com/reVcTSrPDp

— The Federalist (@FDRLST) June 30, 2026

Hemingway, who recently wrote a book about Associate Justice Samuel Alito, went on to praise his dissent, which noted the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was originally intended to enshrine citizenship for the children of freed slaves in the wake of the Civil War.

"It was never saying you don't get to have any say in who is a citizen," she said of the amendment.

Hemingway framed the continual impediments against national sovereignty from the judicial branch as an existential threat to the U.S., and warned that the destructive consequences could happen relatively quickly.

"You look at how — it's not just this case, it's so many things — anything that Americans try to do to restore their borders, to determine who gets to come here, you have rogue lower court judges just throwing it out and saying, 'You don't get to say.' This cuts to the issue of sovereignty, who we are as a people, whether we will even exist in a few decades," she said.