07/01/26
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, July 1st.
International… are you ready for this? You’re going to hate it…
International Joke Day
Well well well…. Finally. A day for a Kim. What will I tell? That’s the REAL question! Time will tell.
And now, the news.
Supreme Court Rulings
-via Axios (birthright citizenship), NBC News (investigation into Trump’s past renting practices), CBS News (spending limits), AP News (trans athlete ban), and The Guardian (Alito)
Let’s start with some Supreme Court rulings, shall we?
Starting with the big ruling on birthright citizenship. As you may recall, the president of the United States is a white supremacist. And so he’s trying everything he can to turn this country as white as he is orange.
Part of that plan includes ending birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the constitution. Right there in the 14thAmendment, Section 1.
This has been something Trump’s wanted to do… well he’s probably been thinking about it since the 70s when he was having employees mark rental applications from Black and Puerto Rican tenants with a codes like a 9, or sometimes just as blatant as a C for “colored” and then tell them that the rent was twice the actual price so they would be priced out, leading to at least two of Trump properties to be made up of 95% white tenants.
In Brooklyn.
But it’s specifically been on his mind since his first term. He tried to get rid of it then with no luck, so on day one of his second term, he signed an executive order to end it.
But of course, we know that executive orders are, essentially, presidential fanfiction. They’re a cow’s opinion until there’s an actual law behind it.
The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are known as the Reconstruction Amendments. We’re got the 13th, which banned slavery except for as punishment for a crime, which is why our prison system is what it is and why Black codes were created, making things like not having a job (a lot of places didn’t want to hire Black people in the mid-1800s) an arrestable crime), the 14th, and the 15th, which says the right to vote cannot be denied based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude (which is why they created poll taxes and literacy tests and it took until 1965 for the ballot box to actually be accessible to almost all Americans). Those three Amendments were written after slavery was abolished (except, as noted in the 13th, punishment for a crime). The 14th was written specifically so that Black Americans, whether enslaved or not, could be citizens.
It was a direct response to the Dred Scott Supreme Court ruling, well-known to be one of the worst Supreme Court rulings in history, which held that Black Americans, whether they were enslaved or not, were not citizens.
Dred Scott was a Black man who was enslaved and traveled to two different free states with his enslaver and, when his enslaver died, he tried to buy his freedom. His enslaver’s widow refused to let him do that, so he filed a suit in Missouri to say that, because he lived in free territories, he should be free. He sued for his freedom, as well as the freedom of his wife and daughters.
But in 1857, a 7-2 Supreme Court ruled that it didn’t matter if he lived in a free territory or not; Black people could not be citizens of America, no matter what.
Built the dang country on their backs but sure… okay.
A brief side note – courts in the north rejected the Supreme Court decision as binding, and instead, northern lower courts, like the New York Court of Appeals, said that any enslaved person who went to New York was free and could never be re-enslaved.
The Blow Family was the one who originally sold Scott to Emerson, the enslaver he traveled with and who died. After the Supreme Court decision, members of the Blow family purchased Dred Scott, as well as his wife Harriet, and freed them that same year. Dred Scott died the following year of tuberculosis and Harriet lived until 1876.
Going back to the 14th…
In 1868, the 14th Amendment was ratified and it included language meant to overturn that horrific ruling. “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.”
All persons.
There is no asterisk.
Because when the authors of the 14th wrote it, they knew it would apply to the children of immigrants. That was intentional!
And the reason we know it was intentional is because that was part of the debate.
While debating the language of the 14th, a Senator from Pennsylvania asked: “Is the child of the Chinese immigrant in California a citizen? … If so, then I am opposed to this provision… We have declared that by law they shall not come here… and now we propose to make their children citizens.”
And the Senator from California simply said this: “The proposition before us… relates simply… to the children begotten of Chinese parents in California, and it is proposed to declare that they shall be citizens. I am in favor of doing so.”
They wanted it to be applied broadly, not just to formerly enslaved people.
It was further proven to be intentionally inclusionary through a Supreme Court case called United States v Wong Kim Ark. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating into America and made all Chinese immigrants ineligible for citizenship. Why the Chinese?
Well, there wasn’t one real reason it’s just that… well a lot of Chinese immigrants started coming to the states during the California gold rush, as well as the railroad expansion, and they were willing to take low-paying jobs. And instead of people trying to figure out why they couldn’t get a job themselves, they blamed the Chinese immigrants.
Sound familiar?
What if I hummed this tune? Once that started getting around town, people started being more racist, and then once political leaders started using anti-Chinese rhetoric in speeches and found that it got the crowds excited… well, there we go.
That’s why, when they were debating the 14th, they specifically used the example of a Chinese child.
Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco, but his parents weren’t citizens. He traveled out of the country and wasn’t allowed re-entry into America because the government said that since his parents weren’t citizens, he wasn’t either.
The case went all the way up to the Supremes, and in 1898 they ruled that yes, Wong Kim Ark, having been born here in America, was, in fact, a citizen. Regardless of where his parents were born.
Because the 14th gets applied broadly.
I’m giving you all that background because I need you to understand that Trump never stood a chance here. This case has been asked and answered.
And yet still, because this is his court, Tuesday was still a shock when the court ruled 6-3 to uphold birthright citizenship.
Aleako, Gorsuch, and Historical Badman Justice Thomas would have excluded, per Thomas’ 91!!! Page dissent “the children of foreign temporary visitors and illegal aliens.”
91 pages – more than three times longer than Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion.
I say 6-3, but it was kind of 5-1-3 – Kavanaugh disagreed about the constitutional ruling part but noted that the federal law broadly conveys birthright citizenship.
And that’s… a REALLY long lecture on the 14th Amendment.
About which I regret zero, except I should warn you that this is going to be a long episode because the other big decision that came out of the Court today upheld state laws that ban transgender girls and women from school sports.
Now, to be clear, this doesn’t touch any state laws that allow trans athletes to play on teams.
The race stems from a 16-year-old named Becky Pepper-Jackson, a sophomore who has publicly identified as a girl since she was eight, has a West Virginia birth certificate that recognizes her as a girl, and has been taking gender-affirming medication.
Becky Pepper-Jackson is a 16-year-old and all she wants to do is run cross-country and do the shot put. But thanks to a West Virginia state law, she can’t.
It also stems from the case of Lindsay Hecox, a Boise State University student who sued over Idaho’s first-in-the-nation ban, because she never had a chance to try out for the women’s track and cross-country teams.
All these girls want to do is run! That’s it!
But no. And why? Because a bunch of unimaginative transphobes want to claim a Title IX violation.
I say unimaginative because this is a complicated situation. But they don’t want to look deeply at a complicated and nuanced situation and try to work it out. No, instead they want to pretend like they’re protecting women.
You want to protect women? Well transwomen are women, so start there.
Women are paid less. Respected less. Judged harder. We’re less likely to get promoted. We’re more likely to get murdered. We are literally taught to walk with keys between our knuckles and not to leave our drinks uncovered because it’s easier to teach the women to protect ourselves than to teach the men to stop killing us.
Do you really think that someone would spend the time, emotional and physical labor, and money to transition to a woman… to do cardio?
No! Trans people exist in a way none of these bozos could be – authentically. Bravely.
In 2024 the president of the NCAA said there were 10 openly trans athletes out of the more than 500,000 NCAA athletes. And yet – the NCAA and U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees have banned transgender women from women’s sports following Trump’s executive order fanfiction doing the same.
The Court also federal limits on how much money a PAC can spend in coordination with federal candidates. But who can be surprised there? Of COURSE they want as much money in politics as possible – how else would half of those Justices get paid on the side?
There was also a weird thing that happened, not in the court but regarding the court on Tuesday when Nina Totenberg, one of the most well-known SCOTUS reporters (sure, but does she have a podcast??) wrote and published for NPR a 1200-word story that was, for a hot minute, a bombshell scoop that Justice Aleako is retiring.
NPR then had to retract the story, which is very rare, and the explanation was that Totenberg had misheard a court announcement about upcoming retirements.
It’s interesting because the rumor is that Trump wants Aleako to retire so he can seat yet another bootlicker Justice. So, this is something to keep an eye on.
And that’s how the Supreme Court went Tuesday.
France’s Heat Wave
-via NY Times, US Soccer, Etymonline, and ABC News
In France, roughly 1,000 more deaths than usual were reported between Wednesday and Saturday as the country continues to deal with the heat wave that is giving them some of their highest recorded temperatures.
Since June 18th, at least 74 people have died in the water, since the high temperatures have brought on a rise in people swimming in rivers and other bodies of water.
The high temperatures, which have exceeded 104 degrees for days, have also closed or limited the hours for schools and disrupted the train schedule.
Though a brief break in the heat is expected through tomorrow, a third major heatwave is expected as early as July 6th.
There is a tiny bit of good news for our French friends – one Tuesday they won their match against Sweden, 3-nil and with that have moved on to the round of 16 where they will play Paraguay.
Here’s something, since we’re already doing a long episode anyway… saying nil instead of zero in soccer is a huge part of the language of the game. In the same way you say match or pitch.
But they’re not the only sport that say nil. Not many do! But there are a few – rugby, field hockey, netball (lol), and sometimes cricket.
When in cricket? Usually when a British broadcaster is broadcasting.
The word nil comes from the Latin nihil, meaning “nothing.” And then it started getting used in legal Latin through phrases like “nil debet” meaning “he owes nothing.” And so that’s how “nil” snuck until the English language.
But sports is known for a lot, not typically their love of the Latin language. Why keep nil?
Soccer, as it’s known now, was invented built in the elite boarding schools, universities, and private clubs of England. And do you know what those rich old fancy people were doing in those places? Using Latin phrases!
The students were learning it, the rich people were using it, the podcasters were pretending like they knew it and hadn’t just heard a few phrases on West Wing.
And so nil just… became the word for zero.
It’s also possible it stuck around because yelling “zero” over a crowd of screaming footie fans, or through an old timey radio with a bad connection, could sound like “hero.”
And there you go!
Sports by Kim, history edition.
Oh, also in sports news - after 23 years in the NBA, and eight with the Lakers, LeBron James is leaving the city of Angels, a team where his son also plays, to be a free agent for the third time in his career.
Republicans in Disarray
And finally, on Tuesday, Speaker Johnson, famously bad at his job, proved it yet again and had to just close the House and tell members to go home because a small group of Republicans, dissenters in his own party(!), took the floor from him, refusing to let anything else pass, not even things their own party wants, until they pass Trump’s voter disenfranchisement bill.
That’s SO embarrassing for Johnson.
The House is now on vacation until mid-July. Then they’re back for two weeks, then they’re back on vaca for their August recess. It’s so embarrassing of the Republicans. These are not serious people.
And it’s not like they’re going to come back in fighting form in September because apparently now they’re going to do, for the first time ever, a midterm convention.
You know like, like a presidential convention. But for the midterms.
Oh, they’re so scared about these midterms. Hey, here’s something. Instead of doing voter disenfranchisement and trying to put on a convention that usually takes 18-24 months to plan but now throwing it together in two months… why don’t you try doing something that helps voters and see if they want to vote for you?
Give that a shot for once, and see where it gets ya.
And that’s it. That’s the news.
No giraffe facts, but lots of Latin to make up for it.
As they say in Ted Lasso, audi alteram partem (AW-dee AW-ter-ahm PAHR-tem). (That’s the closest I could get to “be curious, not judgmental.” It means “hear the other side.”)
This episode is too long!
Post hoc ergo propter hoc – that one is because of West Wing. That one I actually know. It means, “After this, therefore because of this.”
International joke day. The biggest joke of all? You just listened to a very long episode of this podcast and there was So. Much. Latin.
A guy and his pet giraffe walk into a bar. The guy sits down and orders a couple of beers. He sees his giraffe start to get thirsty and being a bit tipsy he gives the giraffe some alcohol. The giraffe passes out and the guy gets up and starts to walk away when the bartender calls out to say, "Hey! You can't leave that lying there!" The guy turns around and slurs, "That's not a lion! It's a giraffe!"
That’s called a callback.
But more than all of that, because you’re patient… I’m proud of you.