The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause does, in fact, apply to all people born in the United States. Only five justices reached that conclusion — a much closer decision than it should have been. (The sixth, Brett Kavanaugh, joined the majority on purely statutory grounds.) The primary dissent from Justice Clarence Thomas accused his colleagues of expanding the meaning of a clause narrowly tailored to help newly emancipated Black Americans.

The dissent was yet another bit of ahistorical storytelling from Thomas, which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was simply not willing to abide. Though Jackson joined Chief Justice John Robert’s majority opinion defending the constitutionality of universal birthright citizenship, she also filed her own concurring opinion on the case. In 20 pages, the most junior justice on the bench provided a tour de force of narrative history to counter her oldest colleague’s claims......

In her concurrence, Jackson wiped the floor with Thomas’ blatant cherry-picking of history. “The Court’s conception of a color-blind Constitution and the Government’s (and principal dissent’s) cramped, group-specific reading of the Citizenship Clause are two sides of the same coin, stemming from a basic misunderstanding of the relevant history,” she wrote.

Meetings of freed Blacks before and during the Civil War came together to produce the “political and intellectual scaffolding” that would be incorporated into the 14th Amendment and, much later, the Black Civil Rights Movement, Jackson noted. In the attendees’ discussions, there was little doubt that they were already Americans, albeit ones deprived of their rights.

“The citizenship thesis of the Colored Conventions was thus not that some new status should be created and conferred on freed Blacks,” Jackson wrote. “It was instead that freed Blacks already had a rightful claim to citizenship because they had been born on American soil.”

The overwhelming sentiment from those gatherings and the subsequent debates in Congress completely rejected Thomas’ argument for a narrow scope for birthright citizenship.