“Dear friends, I am honored to accept the Liberty Medal of the National Constitution Center in this year that marks the 250th of the founding of the United States of America with the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776,” said Pope Leo XIV.

Pope Leo XIV delivered his live acceptance remarks virtually from the Vatican, which were livestreamed to those gathered at the National Constitution Center and to audiences worldwide.

“As a son of this great country founded by courageous men and women who dreamed of liberty and of a better life for themselves and for their children, I join you in asking God's blessings upon America's future that the lofty ideals enshrined at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence may continue to guide the flourishing of the nation in unity, justice, and peace,” he said.

As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, the ceremony brought together civic and faith leaders, as well as visitors from Philadelphia, across the nation, and around the world, to reflect on how the promise that individuals may worship freely, speak openly, and live according to their own convictions has strengthened civic life in the United States and inspired movements for human dignity and freedom around the globe.

“We honor Pope Leo XIV today in recognition of his lifelong work for promoting religious liberty and freedom of conscience around the world, ideals enshrined by America's founders in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution,” said Vince Stango, Interim President and CEO of the National Constitution Center.

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His Holiness Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Francis Prevost on September 14, 1955, in Chicago, Ill., is the first pope from the Order of Saint Augustine and the first U.S.-born pontiff. He was elected supreme pontiff on May 8, 2025, after decades of pastoral leadership, missionary work, and service in the global Catholic Church.

The Liberty Medal, established in 1988 and hosted by the National Constitution Center since 2006, recognizes and celebrates individuals of courage and conviction who strive to secure the blessings of liberty to people around the globe.

The medal’s distinguished roster of recipients includes U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush; Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy; world leaders Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, and Mikhail Gorbachev; U.S. congressional leaders Senator John McCain and Representative John Lewis; and U.S. cultural influencers Muhammad Ali and Ken Burns.

The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia is a private, nonprofit organization with a congressional charter “to disseminate information about the United States Constitution on a nonpartisan basis in order to increase awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people.”

For more information about the Liberty Medal, visit https://constitutioncenter.org/about/liberty-medal

But there is another question that deserves just as much attention: Where do I fit into this story? For many people, the answer begins with family history.

Genealogy is often thought of as a personal hobby or a search for long-lost relatives. But it can also be a powerful way of understanding American history itself. Every family story is woven into larger stories of migration, community, work, faith, conflict, aspiration, and civic life. Exploring where we come from can help us better understand not only our own identities but also the nation we have inherited together.

Recent historical research suggests that genealogy played a much more significant role in the founding era than is commonly recognized. Many founders, including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, carefully documented and studied their own family histories, viewing genealogy as a way to better understand their inheritance and their place in a changing world. Family relationships influenced inheritance, citizenship, political power, religious life, and legal standing. Rather than being a side concern, genealogy helped shape the very structure of the society the founders were building.

Across early America, people of diverse backgrounds preserved their histories in countless ways: through family Bibles, letters, oral traditions, quilts, gravestones, church records, court documents, and stories passed from one generation to the next. Enslaved families fought to preserve family connections despite systems designed to erase them. Indigenous communities maintained rich traditions of kinship and ancestry. Immigrant families carried family histories across oceans and into new communities. Genealogy has always been both deeply personal and profoundly civic.

That insight feels especially important as we celebrate America's 250th.

The Declaration of Independence tells us that all people are created equal and speaks of "one people" coming together to dissolve the political bonds that once tied them to another nation. The Constitution begins with three simple words: "We the People." Those ideals have always been aspirational, inviting each generation to expand the circle of belonging and help the nation live more fully up to its founding promises.

Genealogy offers another way into that ongoing work It also reminds us why primary sources matter.

When we explore our own family histories, we rarely rely on secondhand accounts alone. We search for birth certificates, naturalization papers, census records, death certificates, marriage licenses, letters, photographs, family Bibles, and other documents created by the people who lived those lives. These records allow us to move beyond inherited stories and encounter the past on its own terms.

The same is true of our nation's history. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, letters between the founders, petitions, diaries, speeches, newspapers, and court records are, in many ways, America's genealogy. They are primary sources that reveal who we were, what we believed, what we debated, and how our constitutional democracy came to be. Just as discovering an ancestor's signature on a naturalization record can make family history suddenly feel real, reading the Declaration in its own words or encountering the voices of ordinary Americans who petitioned for greater liberty and equality can make our national story feel immediate and personal.

Whether we are exploring our family's genealogy or our nation's constitutional history, primary sources invite the same habits of mind: curiosity, close observation, empathy, and the humility to recognize that every story is richer and more complex than we first imagined.

Looking into our family histories often reveals journeys across oceans and borders, service to country, moments of hardship and resilience, and efforts to build new lives and communities. Sometimes we uncover histories we never knew. Sometimes we encounter difficult truths. Often, we find both. In every case, we are reminded that American history is not distant or abstract. It was shaped through millions of individual lives, each contributing another chapter to a story that continues today.

That perspective makes this a particularly meaningful moment to explore family history. Starting on July 4, 2026 and running through the end of August 2026, visitors to the National Constitution Center can experience The Stories of US Discovery Center, presented by Ancestry, where historical records and interactive experiences invite people to discover connections between their own families and the broader American story.

The experience also reflects a broader commitment to preserving our shared history. Through Ancestry's partnership with the City of Philadelphia, approximately 20 million historical records, including birth, marriage, death, naturalization, and property records, will be digitized over the next two years, expanding access to the stories of the people who helped shape both Philadelphia and the nation.

These efforts are about more than preserving the past. They invite us to see history as something we inherit together and continue to write together. That idea is at the heart of the National Constitution Center's Our Story Continues campaign, which encourages all of us to recognize our place in the nation's ongoing constitutional story.

Understanding the past helps us better understand one another and ourselves. It reminds us that every family has a story worth telling and that every community has helped shape the nation we have inherited.

Civic learning begins with connection. Sometimes that connection starts with reading the Declaration. Sometimes it begins with visiting a historic place. Sometimes it starts around a family dinner table. And sometimes it begins by discovering the name of a great-grandparent in a centuries-old record.

As Americans gather in Philadelphia during this historic anniversary year, I hope they will not only reflect on the nation's founding documents but also ask what stories brought their own families to this moment.

Because the American story has always been written not only by the extraordinary figures we remember, but by the countless ordinary people whose lives became part of something larger than themselves.

Julie Silverbrook is the Chief Content and Learning Officer of the National Constitution Center.

As the abolitionist movement gained momentum in the 1830s and 1840s, it became more common for Black abolitionists like William Wells Brown, Henry Highland Garnet, Thomas Paul, and David Ruggles to cite the Declaration. The “colored convention” movement that emerged in the 1830s employed the Declaration’s preamble in numerous proclamations. For example, a “Declaration of Sentiments” issued at the 1834 convention in New York and repeated at the 1835 convention in Philadelphia quoted the Declaration’s preamble and plead “that the laws of our country may cease to conflict with the spirit of that sacred instrument, the Declaration of American Independence.”

Part One: Constitutional Voices: African Americans’ early responses to the Declaration of Independence

White abolitionists also cited the Declaration with increased frequency. In 1833, William Lloyd Garrison, who later denounced the Constitution as a “covenant with death,” described the Declaration’s preamble as “the corner-stone upon which is founded the Temple of Freedom.” In 1841, former president John Quincy Adams referenced a copy of the Declaration hanging on the wall of the Supreme Court to argue for the freedom of the Africans who took over the slave ship La Amistad. A few months before his Harpers Ferry raid, John Brown authored an abolitionist “Declaration of Liberty,” modeled after the Declaration of Independence, ending the document with the Jefferson quotation: “Indeed; I tremble for my Country, when I reflect; that God is Just; And that his Justice; will not sleep forever.”

Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” is the most iconic use of the Declaration as a political weapon. After denouncing the hypocrisy of a nation founded upon the premise that “all men are created equal” keeping millions of enslaved people in bondage, Douglass changed his tone toward the end of the speech to one of hope: “I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ringbolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”

The Declaration during the Civil War and Jim Crow

The Civil War was fundamentally a war about the meaning of the Declaration. In the lead-up to the war, pro-slavery forces began to insist that the words “created equal” were a mistake. In 1848, South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun argued that the Declaration’s preamble was a “great error.” In 1857, the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision gave this anti-equality reading of the Declaration the force of law. The meaning of the Declaration was the central focus of debates between Abraham Lincoln and Senator Stephen Douglas in 1858. “All men are created equal.… This they said and this they meant,” said Lincoln. Douglas called this reading of the Declaration “a monstrous heresy.”

Lincoln lost the Senate election to Douglas, but two years later won the presidency. And then the war came. In his “Corner Stone Speech,” Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, declared that the original Union “rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races,” an error that the Confederacy was formed to correct. “Our new government,” he insisted, “is founded upon exactly the opposite idea.”

Two and a half years later, Lincoln would dedicate the nation to the proposition that “all men are created equal,” and the Civil War Amendments began, at last, to give that principle constitutional force. Reflecting on this transformation, Senator Charles Sumner titled his eulogy for Lincoln “The Promises of the Declaration of Independence,” arguing that while the founders had “cut the connection with the mother country” and opened the path to popular government, Lincoln had set in motion the consummation of “all the original promises of the Declaration” and time and time again had “summon[ed] his countrymen back to the truths in the Declaration of Independence.”

Although Reconstruction briefly offered hope that those promises might finally be realized, the rise of Jim Crow and the persistence of white racial violence betrayed them. Yet Black leaders continued to invoke the Declaration as a moral claim on the nation. In 1895, at the close of his final speech, “Why Is the Negro Lynched?” Frederick Douglass still expressed faith that white Americans might one day overcome their prejudices and fulfill the nation’s founding ideals. Echoing the Declaration, he urged his listeners to remember “the sublime and glorious truths with which, at its birth, it saluted and startled a listening world … the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality.”

In the 20^th century, civil rights leaders often grounded their arguments in the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal citizenship. But the poetry of the Declaration’s preamble still offered a powerful rhetorical weapon. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. DuBois stated that “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.” In 1910, Ida B. Wells cited the Declaration in an essay honoring the 40^th anniversary of the Fifteenth Amendment: “Here at last was squaring of practice with precept, with true democracy, with the Declaration of Independence and with the Golden Rule.” On July 28, 1917, the NAACP organized a silent march down Fifth Avenue in New York to protest the horrific racial violence of the era. At the front was a simple banner containing the words of the Declaration’s preamble.

Thurgood Marshall cited the Declaration in a 1954 brief that the NAACP submitted to the Supreme Court for Brown v. Board of Education, echoing an argument that Charles Sumner had made a century earlier in the nation’s first school desegregation case, Roberts v. the City of Boston. “It was one thing, and a very important one, to declare as a political abstraction that ‘all men are created equal,’ and quite another to attach concrete rights to this state of equality,” Marshall wrote.

Martin Luther King, Jr. famously called the Declaration a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir” in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. But it was not the only time he cited the Declaration. He also invoked it in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and in a 1965 Independence Day speech that praised the Declaration for expressing “in such profound, eloquent, and unequivocal language the dignity and the worth of human personality.” In his final sermon, delivered in Memphis on April 3, 1968, King referenced the Declaration when he intoned, “All we say to America is, be true to what you said on paper.”

Malcolm X also invoked the Declaration but, in contrast to King, emphasized its right of revolution. In his 1964 “Ballot or the Bullet” speeches, he made the Lockean argument that Black disfranchisement rendered the government illegitimate and justified resistance: “This is not even a government based on democracy…. Half the people in the South can’t even vote…. Half of the senators and congressmen … are there illegally, are there unconstitutionally.” The Black Panther Party’s 1966 Ten-Point Program concludes by echoing the Declaration’s preamble. In 1970, the National Committee of Black Churchmen issued a Black Declaration of Independence that mimicked the original.

Other groups not originally included in the Declaration’s promise of equality have fought to make the words “all men are created equal” apply to them. Famously, the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” In 1917, Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, wrote to Congress: “Woman suffrage became an assured fact when the Declaration of Independence was written.” In 1978, gay rights advocate Harvey Milk stated: “In the Declaration of Independence, it is written: ‘All men are created equal, and they are endowed with certain inalienable rights.’…That’s what America is. No matter how hard you try, you cannot erase those words from the Declaration of Independence.” Native Americans, Latinos, farmers, and laborers have all cited the Declaration in their demands for equal treatment under the law.

But over the past 250 years, no group has been more steadfast in their devotion to the core beliefs of the Declaration or more determined to make them a universal reality than African Americans. These stories deserve more attention in this semi quincentennial year and beyond.

Charles Sahm is the director of content strategy and program development at the National Constitution Center.

On January 13, 2026, the justices heard oral arguments for three hours in both West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, a case from Idaho. Tuesday’s decision applied to both cases.

In his majority opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said in West Virginia v. B.P.J. that “Title IX allows schools to provide separate women’s and men’s sports teams defined by biological sex, and West Virginia has permissibly maintained female sports for biological females consistent with Title IX.”

Title IX bans discrimination based on sex in educational programs and activities that receive federal financial funds. However, the Education Amendments Act of 1974, known as the Javits Amendment, allows schools receiving funds under Title IX to establish “reasonable provisions considering the nature of particular sports.”

In the case from West Virginia, a parent sued on behalf of her child, B.P.J., arguing that a state law banning biological boys who identify as girls from competing on girls’ teams was unconstitutional. A federal court ruled in favor of West Virginia on Equal Protection Clause and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 grounds. A divided Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the district court decision in favor of the student on the Title IX claim and ruled against the state under the Equal Protection Clause.

In his majority opinion, Kavanaugh pointed to actions taken by the former Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) in1975. “HEW promulgated comprehensive regulations requiring that schools provide ‘equal athletic opportunity for members of both sexes’ and authorizing ‘separate teams for members of each sex where selection for such teams is based upon competitive skill or the activity involved is a contact sport,’” he said.

Kavanaugh also held that “the term ‘sex’ in Title IX, the Javits Amendment, and the Title IX regulations cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.” He also rejected claims that the restrictions on trans athletes competing on women’s and men’s sports teams violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

“The challenged West Virginia and Idaho laws make sex-based classifications in limiting female teams to biological females. Under this Court’s equal protection precedents, sex-based classifications are permissible only when the classification is ‘substantially related’ to achieving an ‘important’ government objective. The States argue—and the Court agrees—that the interests of safety and competitive fairness are important interests for purposes of equal protection analysis.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett joined Kavanaugh’s opinion.

Justices Thomas and Gorsuch also filed concurring opinions. Thomas agreed in full with the majority opinion but he added that “transgender status is not a suspect class requiring heightened equal-protection scrutiny.” Gorsuch said his opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) supported the holding in this case. In Bostock, Gorsuch ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred in the judgment in part and dissented in part. “The Court should have affirmed the Fourth Circuit’s decision to remand for further factfinding,” she said. “Because of the Court’s decision today, West Virginia, and any other state actor, can deny B. P. J. and others like her these experiences simply because it thinks they have an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not.” Justices Kagan and Jackson joined her concurrence.

Justice Jackson also concurred in the judgment in part and dissented in part. “The Court did not need to hold that Title IX protects against discrimination solely on the basis of ‘biological sex,’ even if only ‘in the sports context,’” she wrote, citing Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence. “The Court should have assumed as much while leaving open the possibility that Title IX’s definition of ‘sex’ is more capacious.”

While the decision clearly establishes that states may restrict competition in women’s and girls’ scholastic sports by biological sex, the next challenge will likely come from athletes who claim harm in states where transgender athletes are allowed to take part in contests that match their gender identity.

Today, 29 states have laws or policies that prohibit transgender students from competing in sports consistent with their gender identity, while 21 states have no such laws.

Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.

The Constitution’s Fourth Amendment reads, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

In Chatrie v. United States, a Virginia man, Okello Chatrie, claimed a detective did not reasonably obtain search warrants used to track down his cellphone location data. The government later used this data to convict him of robbing a bank.

Law enforcement had asked for a geofence warrant from a magistrate. Geofence warrants set a distance from a certain physical point from which service providers such as Google must provide data to law enforcement about a mobile phone users’ activity.

Chatrie was convicted of bank robbery based on evidence gathered in three different cellphone data requests to Google covered under one warrant, based on a protocol developed by Google and approved by a magistrate.

Justice Elena Kagan, in a 6-3 decision, said the Court was presented with a two-part Fourth Amendment question. “Answering that question in full would mean deciding whether the police conducted a Fourth Amendment ‘search’ when they acquired the cellphone data leading to Chatrie’s arrest and, if so, whether that search was reasonable given the features of the warrant they employed.”

“We decide the first part of that inquiry today, concluding that the police conducted a search when they gained access to [Google’s] Location History data,” Kagan noted. The second part of the question Kagan returned to a federal court of appeals to determine if the search was reasonable, properly described with particularity, and supported by probable cause.

Citing the Court’s precedent in Carpenter v. United States (2018), Kagan said, “The Fourth Amendment protects individuals’ reasonable expectations of privacy, and governmental intrusion into that private sphere generally qualifies as a search.”

Kagan found the question presented in this case closely mapped to Carpenter. “In Carpenter, this Court held that accessing cell-site location information (CSLI) constitutes a Fourth Amendment search because ‘individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements.’”

“Everything Carpenter relied on to find that law enforcement officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they accessed CSLI records applies as well or better to the police’s accessing of Location History data,” she concluded.

The second part of the question will head back to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. “The Fourth Circuit did not address the questions that unusual warrant raises. Because this is ‘a court of review, not of first view,’ the Court leaves it up to the Court of Appeals to decide whether, at each step of the search process, the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of particularity and probable cause,” Kagan concluded. Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined Kagan’s majority opinion.

In her concurrence, Justice Jackson wrote the Supreme Court should have settled the question returned to the Fourth Circuit. “As the Court observes, ‘[w]hen officers have obtained a warrant,’ the validity of a search turns on ‘whether a magistrate has properly found probable cause to support a particularly described search.’ In my view, it is clear that at a minimum the second and third stages of the search process here did not satisfy this foundational requirement.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch filed an opinion concurring in the Court’s judgment. But he would have taken a different approach to answering the Fourth Amendment issue. “To decide whether the Fourth Amendment is in play, I would consult its terms, asking first whether Location History qualifies as one of Mr. Chatrie’s papers or effects, and then asking whether the government searched those papers or effects. This traditional approach remains very much part of our law.”

“So just as the First Amendment protects speech over the internet today no less than it did speech delivered in the town square in 1791, it should hardly come as a surprise that the Fourth Amendment might protect as personal ‘effects’ electronic diaries of one’s travels as it always has more traditional ones,” he wrote.

Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett, dissented—arguing that this decision and Carpenter established a “protected Fourth Amendment interest in any sensitive personal information about them that is collected and owned by third parties.” This expanded definition also included a requirement, he believed, that “the police must obtain a warrant every time they access any cell-phone location information from a third party, however brief the duration, however innocuous the request, and however voluntarily that information was disclosed by the user.”

Justice Barrett, in a brief dissent, wrote that she agreed with Alito that “under our Fourth Amendment precedent, including Carpenter, Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy in data about his public movements that he voluntarily disclosed to Google. I therefore respectfully dissent.”

Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of the National Constitution Center.

The question before the justices was whether the Constitution guarantees citizenship to children born in the United States of parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present in the country. Under the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, “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.”

President Trump’s executive order last year said children born in this country to parents here unlawfully or temporarily are not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and don’t qualify for citizenship. A majority of justices disagreed.

Although the decision in Trump v. Barbara striking down the executive order is considered a 6-3 ruling with dissents by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, it was actually 5-4. Justice Brett Kavanaugh would have struck down President Trump’s birthright citizenship order because it violated a federal statute, but not the Citizenship Clause of the 14th  Amendment.

That 5-4 split is significant both legally and politically. The dissenters would encourage Congress to use legislation to change the federal statute (8 U.S.C. § 1401(a)) that codifies the Citizenship Clause to add new exceptions to citizenship as in Trump’s order. Such a change likely would face steep odds in the current court because of its ruling Tuesday. But if the narrow five-justice majority were to change in time, the constitutional ruling could be in jeopardy. It would only require one vote.

How could the nine justices divide on an issue that had been settled and reaffirmed for more than a century, and on Trump administration arguments rejected by some of the nation’s most respected historians and legal scholars as “off the wall?” To some observers, the divide is another example of how far to the right this court has moved, particularly with the Trump appointees Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett.

So why did they split?

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Roberts wrote that the story of citizenship in the United States begins with English common law, of citizenship, known as jus soli, or the right of the soil. That common law rule was carried to America and prevailed in all of the states after American Independence.

The common law understanding continued until Dred Scott v. Sandford, which departed from the common law and adopted the view that blood, not soil, determined citizenship, and descendants of slaves were not eligible. The country returned to the common law in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which made citizens of “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed.”

The 14th Amendment completed what the 1866 act started, according to Roberts. The amendment, he wrote, “was intended to repudiate Dred Scott. This time, however, the goal was even grander—to put the ‘great question of citizenship’ ‘beyond the legislative power’ altogether, to settle the issue once and for all.”

The 14th Amendment, he wrote, “achieved its aim. The Citizenship Clause mirrored the common law’s criteria for citizenship. The Clause starts, like the common law, with territory—a child must be ‘born . . . in the United States,’ not elsewhere (even to American parents). And the clause ends, again like the common law, with sovereign power—a child must be ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States, unlike (say) the families of foreign ministers. A child born on American soil and subject to American law was made an American citizen. Even the language of the clause is that of the common law.”

Roberts rejected the arguments by the primary dissenter—Thomas—that a person must be “domiciled” in the United States to be subject to its jurisdiction and eligible for citizenship.

“If Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design. Words appearing frequently in the Executive Order—mother,’ ‘father,’ ‘lawful,’ ‘temporary—are absent from the clause. For a simple reason: they did not matter.”

Justice Thomas, joined by Alito and Gorsuch, said the executive order was consistent with the original meaning of the Citizenship Clause insofar as it applied to children born to parents here lawfully or unlawfully but not domiciled in the United States.

“The Citizenship Clause was enacted for people who were born in this country and called it home,” he wrote. “It was enacted for freed slaves such as Dred Scott, who had ‘a domicile’ here and therefore were entitled to sue as citizens. It was enacted for men such as Frederick Douglass, who demanded citizenship ‘not as aliens nor as exiles,’ but as ‘Americans.’”

That the Constitution requires “domicile,” he argued,” is supported by the constitutional text, contemporaneous evidence, early executive practice, early legislative practice, judicial precedent, and all of the other indicators of original public meaning. The Court’s alternative account does not have a similar degree of support.”

Thomas accused the Court of “repurposing” the 14th Amendment to protect its own preferred rights that were never envisioned by the Reconstruction Congress. “Today, the Court does so again by recognizing a constitutional right to citizenship for the children of all foreign birth tourists and illegal aliens,” he concluded.

Gorsuch echoed Thomas’ primary argument, writing: “What matters isn’t whether a child’s parents are citizens. What matters is whether they (and, by law, their child at birth) have made this place their home and are thus ‘domiciled within the United States.’”

And Alito said the majority’s interpretation of the amendment confers citizenship on “virtually everyone who happens to be born in this country, including the children of ‘birth tourists,’ women who come here solely for the purpose of giving birth to a child and then promptly return home.”

He contended that analysis of the amendment’s text and the history of its adoption “shows that it does not degrade the concept of United States citizenship in this way. Instead, the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.”

Kavanaugh wrote that the court could have struck down the executive order on grounds that it violated the federal statute codifying the Citizenship Clause, but not the 14th Amendment.

The Constitution, he wrote, is “an enduring document, and its principles were designed to, and do, apply to modern conditions and developments. The original constitutional principles do not change absent a constitutional amendment, but the relevant principles— both the rules and exceptions alike—must be faithfully applied not only to circumstances as they existed in 1787, 1791, and 1868, for example, but also to modern situations that were unknown or unanticipated by the Constitution’s Framers.”

He added that “under basic tenets of constitutional interpretation,” other exceptions to birthright citizenship, such as those recognized in the executive order and in the 1898 decision, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, are constitutional.

Tuesday’s opinions are long– more than 200 pages in total– a challenge for readers. But as Justice David Souter once told an audience, the public must read the decisions to decide who is right, whether one explanation of principles and history is more persuasive than a different explanation.

There may be attempts, as suggested by some of the dissenters, to legislate the Trump administration’s views, but for now, the Roberts Court majority has ruled on the meaning of the Constitution’s Citizenship Clause.

Marcia Coyle is a regular contributor to Constitution Daily. She was the Supreme Court Correspondent for The National Law Journal and PBS NewsHour who has covered the Supreme Court for more than three decades.

In his majority opinion for the Court in Trump v. Barbara, Chief Justice John Roberts held that “[c]hildren born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.”

The 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause reads that “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.”

Joining the majority opinion were Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed an opinion concurring in the judgment and dissenting in part. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch wrote separate dissents.

The Court had considered the concept of birthright citizenship during two hours of oral argument on April 1, 2026. The justices raised several key questions about an executive order’s definition of a right established in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

At issue was Trump’s executive order No. 14,160, Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, which claimed that birthright citizenship did not apply in two situations: 1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

The Majority Opinion

“The Citizenship Clause must be understood in light of its historical context, from the English common law to the widespread condemnation of the Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford,” Roberts wrote. In Dred Scott, Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney held that African Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” and that African Americans were not American citizens.

“Under the English common law, children ‘born within the [sovereign’s] dominions’ owed a natural ‘allegiance’ to the sovereign who protected them at birth,’” Roberts noted. “This common law of citizenship—known as jus soli, or right of the soil—crossed the Atlantic and prevailed in ‘each and all of the states’ after American independence.”

Roberts then cited the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which made citizens of “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed.” He said, “What the Civil Rights Act began, the Fourteenth Amendment, and its repudiation of Dred Scott, would finish.”

The Chief Justice then turned to the precedent of United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), a long-settled ruling that defines the citizenship rights of people born in territory controlled by the United States. “In Wong Kim Ark, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment was ‘declaratory’ of the ‘fundamental rule of citizenship by birth that prevailed at common law,’” Roberts said, with some exceptions. Today, those exclusions include children of accredited foreign diplomats; children of hostile invaders or occupying forces; births aboard foreign sovereign vessels; and children born in American Samoa and Swains Island.

Roberts also rejected arguments made by the Trump administration that birthright citizenship was a right only reserved to those domiciled in the United States.

“Attempts to narrow Wong Kim Ark by noting that the Court’s opinion repeatedly referred to the domicile of Wong’s parents fail because the holding’s underlying reasoning cannot be squared with a domicile requirement,” he concluded. “The Court exhaustively canvassed the text and history of the Citizenship Clause and at no point identified any evidence that the ratifiers thought themselves to be imposing a domicile limitation.”

Concurrences and Dissents

Justice Kavanaugh disagreed with the majority’s constitutional holding, but he concluded that Trump’s executive order violated a federal statute, 8 U.S.C. §1401(a). “Congress could—consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment—amend §1401(a) or otherwise enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country. But Congress has not yet done so.”

Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, argued in his 91-page dissent that “the Civil Rights Act and the Citizenship Clause guaranteed citizenship to persons born and domiciled in the United States regardless of their race. Neither guaranteed citizenship to persons who were not domiciled in the United States.” He also called the Chief Justice’s majority opinion “not historically accurate.”

“The Court today takes the extraordinary step of holding facially unconstitutional the President’s Order excluding from citizenship the children of foreign temporary visitors and illegal aliens,” Thomas concluded. “In doing so, the Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”

In her concurring opinion, Justice Jackson, joined by Justice Sotomayor, objected to the dissent from Justice Thomas. “Despite his longstanding endorsement of a ‘colorblind’ Constitution, Justice Thomas now surprisingly suggests that the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure, relating only to ‘freed slaves such as Dred Scott,’ and those who shared with them certain characteristics.”

“It is for this reason, he says, that ‘children who were born in the United States but [to parents] not domiciled here’ are not entitled to claim birthright citizenship. But that narrow vision of the Fourteenth Amendment bears little relationship to the history of its ratification.”

Justice Alito called the majority opinion a “serious mistake.” He rejected the idea that the 14th Amendment confers citizenship “on virtually everyone who happens to be born in this country, including the children of ‘birth tourists,’ women who come here solely for the purpose of giving birth to a child and then promptly return home.” And like Thomas, Alito believed the 14th Amendment confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.”

Justice Gorsuch wrote to explain his agreement with Justice Thomas. “At the heart of today’s dispute lie two competing views of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause,” he explained. “On one account, the Clause incorporated the English common law rule of jus soli (literally, the ‘right of the soil’),” he noted. The other account, he said, “adopted a distinctly American settler’s view of citizenship … that promises the full ‘dignity and glory of American citizenship’ to any child born in this country to parents who have made this Nation their permanent home, regardless of their race, religion, or national origin.” Gorsuch agreed with the latter interpretation.

To be sure, today’s 194-page decision from the Court is a landmark decision with many facets to be explored. But for now, birthright citizenship covers anyone born in the territory of the United States, with some very limited exceptions.

Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.

The words that begin the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence are considered our nation’s creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But that wasn’t always the case. One of the underappreciated facts of American history is that it was Black Americans, free and enslaved, who were the first to interpret the phrase “all men are created equal” as a statement of individual equality and have employed it most often and most eloquently over the past 250 years to advance liberty and equality for all Americans.

As historian Pauline Maier argued in her seminal book American Scripture, in 1776 and for decades after, the Declaration was not regarded as the sacred text it is today. “It was Independence, not the Declaration, that the people celebrated,” Maier wrote. “And when they quoted that document, they cited the last paragraph, the one that proclaimed that ‘these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.’… There was comparably little attention—indeed, so far as I can tell, none at all—to the document’s second paragraph.”

Maier may have overstated the case a bit. Recent scholarship by Eric Slauter has documented abolitionists such as Anthony Benezet, who citied the Declaration’s preamble, while Danielle Allen notes that James Wilson invoked the Declaration’s preamble at the Pennsylvania ratifying convention. David Armitage has also demonstrated how British observers recognized the glaring contradiction between the Declaration’s claim of equality and the existence of American slavery.

But Maier’s larger point holds true: most white Americans did not view the preamble as a statement of individual liberty and equality in the founding era and early republic. Jesse Wegman in his new biography of James Wilson, The Lost Founder, cites the work of University of Pennsylvania professor William Ewald to highlight the fact that none of the founders besides Wilson, ever used the words “created equal” or any of the other key phrases from the preamble. A survey by the historian Mark Graber finds that before Abraham Lincoln, no president had ever invoked the phrase “all men are created equal.”

But Black Americans quickly seized on the Declaration’s egalitarian promises. It is important to note that the Black freedom struggle predates the American Revolution. However, the Declaration’s preamble handed Black Americans a powerful ideological and rhetorical weapon, which they employed as “a battle cry for freedom,” according to historian Benjamin Quarles.

Just weeks after the Declaration was signed, the mixed-race religious leader Lemuel Haynes’s freedom jeremiad, “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping,” used its preamble to advance the legal and philosophical argument for abolition. In 1777, Prince Hall, a formerly enslaved Black Bostonian, authored a petition to the government of Massachusetts, employing the Declaration’s language of “natural and unalienable rights,” linking the colonists’ “glorious struggles for liberty” with the cause of Black freedom.

Citing the Declaration as a promise of freedom

Below are some lesser-known examples of African Americans using the Declaration to advocate for their freedom and civil rights during the 50 years between 1779 and 1829, when it became more common to view the Declaration as a touchstone for equality.

In 1779, a group of 19 enslaved men submitted a freedom petition to the New Hampshire Assembly stating: “The God of Nature gave them Life and Freedom, upon terms of the most perfect Equality with other men; That freedom is an inherent Right of the human Species, not to be surrendered but by Consent.” The group included Prince Whipple, an enslaved aide to General William Whipple, Jr., a signer of the Declaration.

In 1781, the enslaved woman Mum Bet, who later changed her name to Elizabeth Freeman, sued for her freedom in Brom and Bett v. Ashley. (Brom, an enslaved man, joined her case.) Her argument was that slavery violated the Massachusetts Constitution. The jury agreed, and the court granted her freedom (and back wages). Her freedom suit, combined with a 1783 suit brought by an enslaved man, Quock Walker, led to the de facto abolition of slavery in Massachusetts.

In 1783, an anonymous writer published an essay in the Maryland Gazette under the pseudonym “Vox Africanorum.” Although the essay is written from the viewpoint of an enslaved person, the race of the writer is unknown. Reminiscent of the “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” speech that fellow Marylander Frederick Douglass would deliver 69 years later, the author notes: “Liberty is our claim…. Has not the wisdom of America solemnly declared it? Attend to your own declarations—‘These truths are self-evident.’ ”

In 1791, while surveying the new District of Columbia, Benjamin Banneker, a Black mathematician and scientist, sent a letter to Thomas Jefferson, then secretary of state, confronting him with his own words from the Declaration. Banneker calls “pitiable” the idea that Jefferson would advocate for these “rights and privileges” while “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression.” Jefferson replied, offering little more than vague hope that someday “a good system” will be “commenced” for improving what he calls “the degraded condition” of the enslaved.

In 1797, Jupiter Nicholson, Jacob Nicholson, Job Albert, and Thomas Prichet—four formerly enslaved North Carolina men living in Philadelphia—submitted the first known African American antislavery petition to Congress. In their request to amend the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, they appealed to federal “public Declarations in favor of Liberty & the common Right of Men.” Congress, by a 50–33 vote, refused to accept the petition for a formal hearing.

In 1799, the prominent ministers Absalom Jones and Richard Allen were two of 71 Black Philadelphians who signed a petition to the U.S. Congress calling for an end to the slave trade and for African American civil rights, arguing that the slave trade and the Fugitive Slave Act violated the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and “the declaration of Congress. South Carolina representative John Rutledge, Jr., denounced “this new-fangled French philosophy of liberty and equality.” The petition was rejected by an 85–1 vote.

On January 1, 1808, in celebration of the ban on the importation of slaves to the U.S., which became effective that day, Reverend Peter Williams, Jr. delivered “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade” at the African Zion Church in New York. The published sermon celebrates “that illustrious moment, when the sons of 76 pronounced these United States free and independent; when the spirit of patriotism erected a temple sacred to liberty; when the inspired voice of Americans first uttered those noble sentiments, ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

In 1813, James Forten, a successful Black businessman who had served as a powder boy during the Revolution and claimed to have been present when the Declaration was first read in Philadelphia, published a pamphlet under the pen name “A Man of Colour” that employed the preamble to argue against legislation being considered by the Pennsylvania legislature to restrict Black civil rights. Forten beseeched the legislature not to deprive its Black citizens of “those inestimable treasures, Liberty and Independence.” Forten’s pamphlet succeeded; the proposed legislation was voted down. Forten would go on to use his wealth to fund the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator and the American Anti-Slavery Society.

On July 4, 1827, William Hamilton, a prominent Black abolitionist, delivered a speech at the African Zion Church celebrating the official end to slavery in New York, which had passed a gradual emancipation law in 1799. Hamilton began by quoting “the ever memorable words” of the Declaration’s preamble. He then assailed Jefferson, who had died in the previous year, as “an ambidextrous philosopher” and attacks the “inconsistency of men holding slaves at the same time declaring in the most solemn manner” their devotion to “self-evident truths.” Portions of the oration were published in Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first African-American-owned and operated newspaper.

In 1829, David Walker, a free African American abolitionist, published “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World,” a fiery pamphlet that he distributed throughout the South. In contrast to the pleading tone of many earlier antislavery tracts, Walker blasts Jefferson and the founding generation for their racism and hypocrisy. “See your Declaration Americans!!!,” Walker implored. “Hear your language, proclaimed to the world, July 4th, 1776…. Compare your own language … with your cruelties and murders.” He also invoked the Declaration’s right of revolution: “Hear your language further!... But when a long train of abuses and usurpation … evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government.”

In this era before the abolitionist movement gained momentum in the 1830s and 1840s, these early statements by Black Americans set the stage for a broader discussion for more than a century about what Martin Luther King, Jr. famously called a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”

Charles Sahm is the director of content strategy and program development at the National Constitution Center.

In Trump v. Slaughter, President Trump removed Rebecca Kelly Slaughter from her position as a commissioner for the FTC. Slaughter countered by suing Trump and others. She claimed her dismissal violated the terms of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which said that FTC commissioners could only be removed by the president for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that Slaughter’s firing violated a New Deal-era precedent set in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), which established the constitutionality of the removal protections in the act.

On Monday, the Court’s majority officially overturned Humphrey’s Executor in a 6-3 decision from Chief Justice John Roberts—affirming the president’s broad power to remove executive officials from office. “The FTC’s for-cause removal provision is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution,” Roberts determined. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined the chief’s decision.

“Humphrey’s framework . . . has not withstood the test of time,” Roberts wrote on Monday. “We long ago abandoned the notion that there are some powers that are only partly executive.”

The circumstances changed in recent years, Roberts said. “We recognized that the FTC exercises executive power,” Roberts added. “And more than 200 years have passed since we recognized that the Constitution ‘vests the whole executive power in the President’ alone.’”

“If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it. Humphrey’s has for decades been a result in search of a rationale,” Roberts concluded.

In a concurrence, Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed with the majority but worried about the delegation of too much power to federal agencies. “Congress has endowed formerly independent agencies not just with executive authority, but with enormous legislative and judicial powers as well. And now the President enjoys control over all those powers too.  From here, the only sure path is to finish the journey we start today and restore legislative and judicial powers to where they belong: in Congress and the courts.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor worried the Court’s recent decisions in similar cases concentrated too much power in the executive branch. “The majority’s decision continuing that trend today is egregiously wrong. In this case, the Court takes one of the oldest debates in American history and decides that the six Justices in the majority, alone, ought to be the ones to settle it for all time. That decision does not just overrule precedent; it all but ignores that precedent exists.”

“In granting the President this unbridled authority, the Court upends its precedent, misconstrues our history, and sheds any pretense of judicial modesty,” she concluded. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her dissent.

For now, Fed governor remains in the job

Also, in Trump v. Cook, the Supreme Court faced a decision about a government request to stay a district court ruling preventing President Trump from firing Lisa Cook. She started serving a 14-year term on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2023. Trump tried to fire Cook this year, alleging mortgage fraud by Cook before her appointment. Under the Federal Reserve Act, the president can only remove members of the Federal Reserve Board “for cause.” The administration sought to lift a preliminary injunction.

In his 5-4 decision for the Court’s majority, Chief Justice Roberts concluded that the District Court’s order should remain in effect pending the conclusion of litigation over Cook’s attempted removal. “The Government has not shown that it is likely to prevail on the legal arguments advanced in its stay application,” he determined. “Acceptance of the Government’s position would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment—an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference.”

Roberts also noted that the Court’s decision was on narrow grounds to allow Cook the opportunity to respond before her termination. And in a telling comment, Roberts said the Court did not need to address Cook’s due process argument, “for the statute alone makes it unlikely that the Government will prevail on appeal as to the validity of the procedures used to fire Cook.” Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the majority decision.

In his concurrence, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the decision did not rule on the President’s ability to lawfully remove Cook for cause, and any debate about the Fed’s independent status was for Congress to decide. “If the Federal Reserve’s for-cause removal protections are to be eliminated, that change must occur through the legislative process,” he concluded.

Justice Jackson in her concurrence said she joined “the Court in reaching a merits conclusion in this case. Still, on the most important stay considerations (the risk of irreparable harm and the equities) this application is not a close call. The Government misses the mark by a mile.”

In his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the majority ruling was flawed. “The statute authorizing the President to remove Cook for ‘cause’ says nothing about notice or a hearing, so it does not require notice and a hearing. Any other result would violate Article II of the Constitution, under which the President may remove executive officers at will.”

Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, said the Court acted too soon in accepting the case. “What is before us is simply an application for a stay pending appeal, and the Court should have granted or denied that application in a brief order last fall,” he wrote. “Had we adhered to this well-worn path and decided this application in October, the parties could have continued litigating this case in the lower courts.”

Finally, Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed with some points made in the other dissents and voiced another concern. “The District Court’s order blocks the President from removing Cook for mortgage fraud, and that is so even if he satisfies the requirements that the Court’s opinion sets out. Under our precedent, that significant interference with the President’s removal authority clears the ‘irreparable harm’ threshold.”

Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.

The state law at issue in the high court was actually a Mississippi law. But Alaska’s relief stems from the fact, as noted in its brief filed to support Mississippi, that nearly all Alaskan voters vote by mail. At least 18 other states and territories have similar laws permitting counting of late-arriving ballots.

The decision in Watson v. Republican National Committee is a defeat for Republicans and President Donald Trump who have tried to eliminate or restrict mail-in ballots because, they contend, despite a lack of evidence, that those ballots are rife with fraud.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett led the majority in an unusual lineup that included Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and, in part, Brett Kavanaugh.

In her opinion, Barrett explained that the “defining element” of an “election,” the term used in three federal statutes, has always been the electorate’s choice of a candidate.

“That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote– as it is in Mississippi,” she wrote. “But the [federal] Election-Day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”

Barrett noted that the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) reinforced her view that while federal law dictates when ballots must be cast, “state law dictates when they must be received.” UOCAVA permits the late receival of overseas military and absentee ballots.

In his dissent, Alito agreed that the defining element of an election is the electorate’s choice of a candidate, but that’s where his agreement ended. He and Barrett sparred over history, text, and court precedents.

“The acceptance of these late-arriving ballots effectively postpones the date on which the electorate’s choice is made, and federal law precludes that postponement,” he wrote. “Election day is a specified date, not a span of multiple days.”

Alito said that “two centuries of historical practice” reinforce his arguments. “From this country’s founding until the late 20th century, election-day ballot collection was the near-uniform practice, with only a few late-arriving exceptions.”

He also warned that the majority’s decision “spawns a slurry of troubling election-law questions and risks further undermining Americans’ confidence in election integrity.

But Barrett countered, “as we have said time and again, however, policy arguments are properly directed to legislatures, not courts. The question today is not whether requiring ballots to be received by election day is a good or bad idea; the question is whether the idea has made its way into the United States Code.”

Congress is currently enmeshed in another election-related battle over the so called SAVE Act that would require voter ID and other steps before accessing the right to vote. Mail-in ballot restrictions were at one point also part of the legislation.

The justices have one final election-related case to decide. In National Republican Senatorial Campaign v. Federal Election Commission, the campaign is challenging limits on spending by political parties in coordination with candidates.

On Tuesday, the justices will issue the remaining decisions of the term, including Trump v. Barbara, the Trump Administration’s challenge to the Constitution’s birthright citizenship clause.

Marcia Coyle is a regular contributor to Constitution Daily. She was the Supreme Court Correspondent for The National Law Journal and PBS NewsHour who has covered the Supreme Court for more than three decades.