Don(ald) Corleone Blew Supreme Court Scene

Letter to Romans: By doing a cameo appearance in the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship hearing, No. 47 courted bad mojo. Ask Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola. If you wanna make a scene, make sure you’re gonna reap box office hay when they see you pray.

But did President Trump’s history-making sit in at those oral arguments make or break the Justices with an offer they couldn’t refuse? The WSJ’s Kimberley Strassel didn’t think so in her op ed, “At the Supreme Court, Trump Courts Defeat.” The legal columnist asked, “Why would he show up & antagonize the justices? He has an able team of lawyers.” As Strassel answered her own question: “Donald Trump … became the first sitting president to attend a Supreme Court oral argument, a scene that ranked with some of the best gangster-intimidation movie scenes. There he sat in the public gallery, Don Corleone-esque, daring the [Justices] to find fault with his read on birthright citizenship. All that was missing was a horse’s head …” The problem with Mr. Trump’s drama, she opined, is that “as most gangsters find out, intimidation has limits [and] as often as not, it proves counterproductive … [and this particular] frustration-fueled bullying of the justices will get him nothing. It could lose him plenty.”

I dunno, consiglieri. The 9 Supremes wear big boy pants & were unlikely to have been intimidated by Trump’s meanest glare. But, agreed that, if he had to make a scene & wanted one that made a favorable impression on the decision-makers, Trump would have been advised to pull out a white carnation & blow a kiss at radical progressive Justice Brown’s direction, then, let his Solicitor General make the HUGE legal point he DID make. That is, by rationally explaining to even the densest Justice that the 14^th Amendment could not have been meant to apply to the newborns of illegal aliens who had jetted into the country, not to show “jurisdiction” aka “allegiance” to America, but to rip off its citizenship, benefits & voting rights like a common criminal.

Davd Soul