KURT SCHLICHTER: Cheer Up! The Birthright Citizenship Case Moves Us Toward Inevitable Victory.

Would I have loved Justice Barrett or Chief Justice Roberts to have defied their natural judicial conservatism—in the non-political sense—and embraced the new thinking today? Yeah, that wouldve been great, but it wasnt in the cards. Instead, we got two votes that I frankly didnt expect. And those two votes position us for victory. If one of those five majority justices goes away and President Donald Trump appoints the replacement, its very likely we will have a 6–3 majority that supports limiting the current idea of effectively unlimited birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment.

Let me put it in sportsball terms. We didnt score a touchdown today, but we moved the ball down the field and put ourselves in position for a field goal or maybe even a touchdown in the next couple of plays.

So dont freak out, don’t cry, dont scream and yell. Theres no reason to. This result was better than we had any right to expect at this juncture in the process of changing the way the 14th Amendments citizenship clause is viewed under the law. And this is why keeping the Senate in 2026 is more important than ever.

Cheer up. Dont doom. We did better than we had any right to expect, and in the end were going to win.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Uses … (Wait for It) … TikTok Slang in Concurring Opinion.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Comcast Split Shows Bigger Is No Longer Seen As Better In The Media Business. “Things have been trending this way for a while, with AT&T’s ill-starred $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner helping to cement the idea that it was possible to be too diversified. Long gone are the days of Redstone or Murdoch empire-building, or GE’s Six Sigma spell-casting.”

Disney was supposed to be too big to fail after buying out every studio it could, but look at what’s become of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Marvel under its stewardship.

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Supergirl — The Most Predictable Of Disasters.

WOEING:

Exit quote: “We question $127.9 million in payments to Boeing, in addition to the $43 million we questioned in a prior 2019 CCP-related report, for a mission that is far from certain.”

SPACE: This Scrappy Little Rocket Company Just Made a Big Play Against Elon Musk. “Maybe you’ve heard of Rocket Lab, the scrappy New Zealand-based launch company whose innovative Electron small-lift rocket quickly became one of the most popular in U.S. service, thanks to its high success rate and rapid launch cadence. Except for nerds like me paying close attention to the launch industry, Rocket Lab gets a little lost in SpaceX’s shadow. But that might be about to change with the company’s multibillion-dollar acquisition.”

CHANGE: Cornerstone University launches ‘100%’ smartphone business degree.

Cornerstone University, located in Grand Rapids, is offering an associate’s degree and bachelor’s degree in strategic business management along with a master’s in organizational leadership through its new program.

Students pay a fixed rate of $2,400 per four-month term or $3,750 for the graduate level work. The intended audience is working adults.

According to the program’s website, SOAR aims to remove the financial barriers of traditional higher education by providing an affordable tuition structure where students “pay at least 50% less than other private online colleges.”

To achieve this, the platform prioritizes providing a “flexible schedule” driven by “engaging microlearning” through original podcasts, videos, audiobooks, and presentations developed by Cornerstone faculty. The goal is “to help students soar in all aspects of career and life.”

It remains to be seen whether smartphone degrees are worthwhile. But at a time when private schools are under tremendous financial pressure, adding tuition-paying students at basically zero marginal cost to the school seems smart.

WANT AIR CONDITIONING IN FRANCE? EASIEST WAY TO GET IT IS A TRIP TO THE MORGUE:

So far, somewhere over a thousand French people—older folks, mainly—have died in the heat wave that hit Europe in recent days.

That’s a preliminary number, and it’s in addition to the “normal” number of unnecessary deaths that occur every summer due to a lack of air conditioning. That’s just how many more people than you would expect in a normal summer week or two to die from excess heat. Because air conditioning is unusual in France and other European countries, more people die every year from heat-related causes than die of gunshot wounds in the United States.

You could say that in Europe, the most prolific murderers are the bureaucrats who make A/C difficult to get.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose:

Like France, England has imported just the chaps to send you to the morgue:

And MI6 has assigned their best spy to the case:

MOST OF IT COMES FROM CHINA AND THE “GLOBAL SOUTH:” One Of The Biggest Sources Of Mercury In Fish Isn’t What You’d Think. Although “China has been the world’s largest emitter of anthropogenic Hg since 1971. . . . Hg emission hotspots have significantly shifted toward the Global South (Fig. 3b), with Latin America, Africa, South and Southeast Asia experiencing rapid increases (Fig. 3a). In 2021, despite representing only one-fifth of the global economy59, the Global South (excluding China) constituted two-thirds of global emissions.”

No doubt some dumbass deputy mayor in France will blame the U.S. though.

SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP IN MAJOR BLOW TO TRUMP:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down President Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship, finding that the order violates the 14th Amendment.

Trump’s order declared that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.

Writing on behalf of the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts says children born to parents who are in the United States unlawfully or temporarily are “born in the United States” and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

“Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth,” he wrote.

On to Plan B: