The court ruled that birth on U.S. soil confers citizenship on virtually all U.S.-born children regardless of parents’ status. As such, the debate over birthright citizenship is now, short of a constitutional amendment, entirely a political one. The only recourse for conservatives who seek to restrict immigration, both illegal and legal, is to win elections and then pressure their representatives to act on their behalf. The constitutional door has closed.

In 2022, the pro-life movement faced a similar transition in the aftermath not of a legal defeat but of its signature legal victory. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization found no constitutional right to an abortion and returned the issue to the states for popular resolution. After spending decades waging its battle against legalized abortion primarily in the court of law, the movement suddenly found itself fighting exclusively in the court of public opinion.

This meant the legal question of whether a constitutional right to abortion exists became secondary to the political question of whether abortion is something a decent society should permit. While they sound similar and are deeply related, answering them requires entirely different skill sets. The former demands astute legal minds who can combine constitutional expertise with knowledge of cutting-edge science, which increasingly favors the conclusion that life begins at conception. The latter, meanwhile, demands the storytelling ability and emotional intelligence of a missionary.

The ends are the same, but the means are quite different.

The pro-life movement’s failure to adjust accordingly and convince society of its position cost it dearly. Later that year, deep-red Kansas rejected a measure that would have said the state constitution does not protect abortion rights. The measure failed by nearly 20 points in a state President Donald Trump had carried in the previous presidential election by 15.

This raised a troubling question, which has yet to be resolved: If the pro-life movement couldn’t convince voters in one of the most Christian and conservative states in the nation, what chance did it have elsewhere?

As it happened, very little.

Five more states weighed in on abortion that year. California, Michigan, and Vermont enshrined abortion protections. Kentucky and Montana, reliably red states, rejected pro-life-backed restrictions.

2023 and 2024 were much the same story. Ohio voted to codify abortion rights. Missouri overturned the state’s existing near-total abortion ban. Arizona added a “fundamental right to an abortion” to its state constitution.

Since Dobbs, the pro-life movement has won at the ballot box only in Nebraska, South Dakota, and Florida — and Florida requires an asterisk: The abortion-rights side won a clear majority there, 57%-43%, but fell short of the 60% supermajority threshold the state legislature had set for the amendment to pass.

The comparison isn’t perfect: Immigration restrictionists, of course, won’t have to fight on 50 separate battlegrounds. But the fundamental transition required of the movements is the same. Success is no longer a matter of simply winning arguments. It’s about earning popular support.

These goals sound similar but are not the same. Winning arguments can be done with data and logic alone. Winning popular support requires something more — not just convincing people you’re right, but making them want to stand alongside you.

The question then isn’t merely “Is this side correct?” but also, “Does this feel right?” and “Can I envision myself on this team?”

The law is impersonal. Politics, however, is personal — and requires a personal touch.

On Tuesday, news of the birthright citizenship ruling elevated the issue in the public consciousness. This offered a precious moment for immigration restrictionists to begin pressing their political case. Could they succeed in winning the converts necessary to enact a political solution for their cause?

Progressives, for their part, continued pushing the same political argument they’ve been making for decades: that even questioning whether people born on American soil are entitled to citizenship is inherently racist and xenophobic — and that anyone entertaining it is complicit in spreading moral evil.

It’s not a legal argument, it’s a political one — as predictable as watching the pro-life movement get cast as a coalition of misogynistic men bent on “controlling women.”

What wasn’t predictable was how thoroughly some prominent figures on the Right would go on to confirm this caricature.

Consider what White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the Trump administration’s point man on immigration, had to say on Tuesday’s episode of Jesse Watters Primetime, the highest-rated show in primetime cable news.

“Just physically being on U.S. soil does not make you a citizen or qualified to carry on or capable of executing the inheritance of this country,” Miller said. “We have people from all over the world from Third World nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel.”

The suggestion that certain people who have immigrated to the United States are so primitive as to be 5,500 years behind Americans goes well beyond the common, and defensible, nationalist argument that other cultures are incompatible with our own. Indeed, the comment crosses into a racial hierarchy argument that most Americans assumed had disappeared from official government rhetoric a century ago.

Here, Miller isn’t making an argument about culture, assimilation, or law. He’s making an argument about racial fitness. It is a truly deplorable thing to say. And it was surely greeted by popping corks on the Democratic side — no opposition researcher could have scripted a more perfect confirmation of the caricature they’ve been selling for years.

Elsewhere, Sean Davis, CEO and co-founder of the conservative Federalist and another prominent immigration restrictionist, saw Miller’s racism and raised him a stack of sheer lunacy. In a lengthy post on X, he floated a list of “ways forward” that included forced sterilization of foreign visitors and “dissolution of the Union.”

His post went viral almost immediately, shared by the likes of Jake Tapper, Krystal Ball, and other left-wing and progressive commentators who could barely contain their glee.

The Claremont Institute’s Jeremy Carl, meanwhile, wrote a post implying that Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s two adopted children, who are Haitian, somehow compromised her ideological “purity” or reliability as a conservative justice, as though having nonbiological, nonwhite children in her family made her predisposed toward a “liberal” outcome.

Carl, who’d been nominated as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs this spring before withdrawing, is implicitly suggesting that proximity to black or Haitian children softens or corrupts a person’s intelligence.

His argument, in other words, has nothing to do with immigration policy and everything to do with blood.

The rest of the day’s attacks on Barrett, mostly having to do with her being a woman, which supposedly renders her unfit to serve in important positions, all but guaranteed that any potential converts to the immigration restriction cause wouldn’t give it a second look.

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, for instance, called Barrett a “DEI hire, little better than Ketanji Jackson,” and separately posted: “The worst Supreme Court Justices of all time have all been women. That’s just a fact. Republican presidents should take the hint.” Republican congressional candidate Derrick Evans, meanwhile, wrote: “Amy Coney Barrett is the poster child for why we need to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment.”

Not to be outdone, prominent right-wing influencer Joey Mannarino wrote: “If Amy Coney Barrett really votes against ending birthright citizenship, we should begin to look into how to deport her Haitian child back to Haiti.”

The display on the Right on Tuesday was truly stunning.

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Politics, as the old adage goes, is the art of the possible. But what’s possible is, itself, an art of attraction. The immigration restrictionist political movement, building off the ugly scenes from the winter in Minnesota that caused the nation to recoil and sour on Trump’s mass deportations, is off to a deeply unfortunate start in the post-Trump v. Barbara age.

It was so bad, it might be irreversible — at least as long as this cast is leading the charge. And without popular support, the suggestions laid out in the Washington Examiner’s editorial will be dead on arrival.