David H. Gans
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davidhgans.bsky.social
David H. Gans
@davidhgans.bsky.social
650 followers 400 following 33 posts
Director of Civil Rights, Human Rights & Citizenship Program, Constitutional Accountability Center. He/Him. Posts are mine alone.
Scholarly writing: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=2051040
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Reposted by David H. Gans
adamserwer.bsky.social
The right, along the Roberts Court, is trying to nullify the Reconstruction amendments guaranteeing equality under the law, in order to restore the Antebellum Constitution, which envisions “liberty” as an eternal aristocracy of race and class (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...
When the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson asked why “we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes,” he was identifying no mere contradiction, but liberty as it was imagined by men who owned other human beings as property. Slaveholders such as John Calhoun saw slavery as inseparable from their own freedom, and they worried that the false doctrine of abolitionism would eliminate that freedom away. “Already it has taken possession of the pulpit, of the schools, and, to a considerable extent, of the press; those great instruments by which the mind of the rising generation will be formed,” Calhoun said. (It seems the “woke mind virus” was telling lies about the great and benevolent institution of American slavery as far back as two centuries ago.) Defending slavery, however, required invasive uses of power, such as banning antislavery literature and returning escaped Black people to bondage. Many white Americans in the 19th century began to understand that the “Slave Power” curtailed their freedoms as well. And this is what many people forget: Systems of domination rarely spread their blessings widely. The Redemption-era revocation of Black freedoms didn’t result in prosperity for white people writ large, but a Gilded Age in which the upper classes gained unfathomable wealth and economic crises left millions destitute. The nation may have held on to white supremacy, but it also got low wages, a threadbare welfare state, and a society dominated by the rich. Everyone else was too divided by race and class to challenge them.
December 22, 2025 at 1:11 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
myconstitution.bsky.social
A #SCOTUS ruling on Trump's unlawful tariffs could come any day now. Watch more from @elizabethwydra.bsky.social on @bloomberg.com: www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/...
Raises Serious Legal Questions: Wydra on Boat Strike
Constitutional Accountability Center President Elizabeth Wydra weighs in on the second strike by the United States of an alleged drug boat while survivors were in the water and states these events rai...
www.bloomberg.com
December 17, 2025 at 3:05 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
myconstitution.bsky.social
"Equal protection" was meant to be an affirmative promise of what states owe their people. Read @davidhgans.bsky.social's new scholarship on the unrealized promise of the 14th Amendment: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Equality and Protection: The Forgotten Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment
At the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause are two fundamental principles: equality and protection.  Tragically, the Supreme Court
papers.ssrn.com
December 17, 2025 at 3:08 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
myconstitution.bsky.social
"On Monday, the Supreme Court heard argument in a case that could upend how the federal government has been run for over a century." Read more from CAC's Brian Frazelle in @slate.com: slate.com/news-and-pol...
We Seem to Have the Supreme Court’s Originalism Fail of the Term
The court is becoming “a dried husk of whatever people used to think it was.”
slate.com
December 12, 2025 at 7:51 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
myconstitution.bsky.social
The conservative supermajority of the Roberts Court is threatening to strike a huge blow to what remains of federal campaign finance law. Read @mbeckercohen.bsky.social and @davidhgans.bsky.social's full reaction to today's argument at #SCOTUS: www.theusconstitution.org/news/cac-rel...
CAC Release: Major Campaign Finance Case Tests Court’s Willingness to Respect Congress’s Policy Judgments Aimed at Curbing Harmful Corruption | Constitutional Accountability Center
WASHINGTON, DC – Following oral argument at the Supreme Court this morning in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, a case in which the Court is considering whether ...
www.theusconstitution.org
December 9, 2025 at 6:04 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
danw329.bsky.social
Powerful point from Justice Sotomayor in today’s oral argument in NRSC v. FEC: “every time we tinker with Congress’s design [for campaign finance law] we make things worse. Indeed.
December 9, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
myconstitution.bsky.social
At #SCOTUS argument this morning, conservative Justices showed no interest in probing what the Constitution’s history and original meaning say about independent agencies. Read CAC's full reaction: www.theusconstitution.org/news/cac-rel...
CAC Release: Conservative Justices Neglect History at Oral Argument in Monumental Case about Independent Agencies | Constitutional Accountability Center
WASHINGTON, DC – Following oral argument at the Supreme Court this morning in Trump v. Slaughter, a case in which the Court is considering whether President Trump’s attempted firing of Federal Trade C...
www.theusconstitution.org
December 8, 2025 at 6:56 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
myconstitution.bsky.social
Megadonors are trying to make it even easier to pour money into politics. Before oral argument tomorrow, read our #SCOTUS brief defending the law capping the amount a national political party committee may spend in coordination with federal candidates: www.theusconstitution.org/litigation/n...
National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission | Constitutional Accountability Center
www.theusconstitution.org
December 8, 2025 at 2:10 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
evanbernick.bsky.social
Amplifying the voices of people who tried for an entire year to come up with an “originalist” case against birthright citizenship and failed to persuade anyone who wasn’t already persuaded is not worth it.

Signed, a guy who spent an entire year refuting them
December 7, 2025 at 8:39 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
jamellebouie.net
bad actors like wurman are why i think it is important to place the birthright clause in the full context of section 1 and section 1 in the context of both dred scott and the two decades of antislavery and abolitionist agitation and political thinking that proceeded it
anthonymkreis.bsky.social Anthony Michael Kreis @anthonymkreis.bsky.social · 17d
The evidence is the text. All you have to do is read the Constitution.
December 7, 2025 at 7:09 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
larryglickman.bsky.social
On Aug 24, 1869, Ohio Rep. John Bingham, principal framer of the 14th amendment, gave a remarkable speech on “Equal Rights-Impartial Suffrage,” in which he said of those who sought to reject the principal of birthright citizenship, “no greater political atrocity than this can possibly be committed.”
What is necessarily implied in this declaration of the Democratic Party? 1. That citizenship is not a birth-right, and from this it results that the majority may rightfully, in the several States of this Union, deprive the minority of all the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States. I submit that no greater political atrocity can possibly be committed by human agency. Let the people accept this proposition and they will become the architects of their own ruin. Nothing can be clearer than this, that under the representative system of government the rights of the minority are as sacred and inviolable as the rights of the majority. If the majority may rightfully disfranchise the minority of citizens on account of race, color or former condition of servitude, they may, with equal propriety, disfranchise citizens for want of stature or property, or on account of nativity, thereby, presenting to teh world the miserable spectacle of a government wherein a mere majority subjects to the absolute despotism of their will a minority of their fellow citizens, almost equal in number to themselves, and per chance, greatly superior in all the attainments and virtues which adorn, or elevate, or ennoble human nature.
December 7, 2025 at 1:52 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
jamellebouie.net
i think to understand the meaning of the birthright citizenship clause to the framers of the 14th amendment, you have to understand significance of dred scott to the civil war republican party. dred scott wasn't just a bad ruling, it was understood as a rejection of the declaration itself.
December 6, 2025 at 6:03 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
jamellebouie.net
worth saying that some portion of the freed slaves were themselves illegal aliens having been brought illegally into the united states by smugglers. if the birthright clause applies to them, it applies to undocumented immigrants
mjsdc.bsky.social Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 19d
Here is the question presented. It's a relatively clean vehicle for the Supreme Court to finally decide whether it is lawful for the president to deny birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants. www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/25...
QUESTION PRESENTED The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that those “born * * * in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” are U.S. citizens. U.S. Const. Amend. XIV, § 1. The Clause was adopted to confer citizenship on the newly freed slaves and their children, not on the children of aliens temporarily visiting the United States or of illegal aliens. On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order No. 14,160, Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, which restores the original meaning of the Citizenship Clause and provides, on a prospective basis only, that children of temporary visitors and illegal aliens are not U.S. citizens by birth. The Citizenship Order directs federal agencies not to issue or accept citizenship documents for such children born more than 30 days after the Order’s effective date. The question presented is whether the Executive Order complies on its face with the Citizenship Clause and with 8 U.S.C. 1401(a), which codifies that Clause.
December 5, 2025 at 7:03 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
myconstitution.bsky.social
#SCOTUS found "pretty big holes" in President Trump's justifications for unilaterally imposing tariffs. Watch more from @elizabethwydra.bsky.social on @bloomberg.com: www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/...
Raises Serious Legal Questions: Wydra on Boat Strike
Constitutional Accountability Center President Elizabeth Wydra weighs in on the second strike by the United States of an alleged drug boat while survivors were in the water and states these events rai...
www.bloomberg.com
December 3, 2025 at 9:30 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
profmsinha.bsky.social
Historian of Reconstruction here, this is a brilliant Op Ed www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/o...
Opinion | Trump Is Trying to Kill the Education Department Because He Misunderstands Its History
www.nytimes.com
December 1, 2025 at 6:42 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
fssp.bsky.social
After emancipation, a Black Mississippi veteran reported that his white neighbors "outraged [Black Southerners] beyound humanity. Houses have been tourn down... & the old Negroes after they have worked there till they are 70 or 80 yers of age drive them off in the cold to frieze & starve to death."
Mississippi Black Soldier to the Freedmen's Bureau Commissioner, December 16, 1865
www.freedmen.umd.edu
November 21, 2025 at 2:17 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
myconstitution.bsky.social
In an opinion echoing our brief, Judge Jia Cobb held that President Trump's deployment of the National Guard to police DC is unlawful. Read our amicus brief: www.theusconstitution.org/litigation/d...
District of Columbia v. Trump | Constitutional Accountability Center
www.theusconstitution.org
November 20, 2025 at 9:55 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
myconstitution.bsky.social
#SCOTUS should not make significant substantive decisions on the shadow docket. Read more from @elizabethwydra.bsky.social in @cnn.com: www.cnn.com/2025/11/15/p...
Justice Jackson goes ‘her own way’ in Supreme Court’s SNAP fight | CNN Politics
As she oversaw President Donald Trump’s emergency Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, case this past week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson once again proved she isn’t beholden to Supreme...
www.cnn.com
November 18, 2025 at 2:35 PM
davidhgans.bsky.social
The government refusing to enforce the law and turning a blind eye to racial discrimination is literally why the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution.
mikesacks.bsky.social Mike Sacks @mikesacks.bsky.social · Nov 17
This whole piece is all the actual horribles on parade, and this one is just infuriating
November 17, 2025 at 10:08 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
myconstitution.bsky.social
Justice Jackson is "modeling the way that the emergency docket should be used." Read more from @elizabethwydra.bsky.social in @cnn.com: www.cnn.com/2025/11/15/p...
Justice Jackson goes ‘her own way’ in Supreme Court’s SNAP fight | CNN Politics
As she oversaw President Donald Trump’s emergency Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, case this past week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson once again proved she isn’t beholden to Supreme...
www.cnn.com
November 17, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
fssp.bsky.social
After the police chief in Columbia, SC murdered a Black resident in cold blood, an anonymous Black woman wrote to the govt in May 1866: "Our friends in Congress are wasting time & breath, & all the bills they may pass, will do us no good, unless men are sent here that will see these laws enforced."
Screenshot from an anonymous letter to the head of the Freedmen's Bureau in South Carolina: "It is hard I tell you. Our friends in Congress are wasting time & breath, & all the bills they may pass, will do us no good, unless men are sent here that will see these laws enforced."
November 11, 2025 at 7:50 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
myconstitution.bsky.social
"A right without a remedy is pretty meaningless." Read more from @mbeckercohen.bsky.social about the important religious liberty case in which #SCOTUS is hearing oral argument today: www.deseret.com/politics/202...
Supreme Court will hear religious freedom argument for former inmate
The justices will hear oral arguments Monday in a case involving the violation of religious rights while in prison
www.deseret.com
November 10, 2025 at 4:25 PM
davidhgans.bsky.social
Not to mention the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment was written with the problem of prejudice in mind. Read the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. Read the Black Conventions. They are all talking about prejudice.
evanbernick.bsky.social Evan Bernick, a finite mode with a smol hooman and a lorg floof @evanbernick.bsky.social · Nov 10
josh blackman contends that the equal protection clause allows discrimination against unpopular groups out of pure animus. I’ll just observe that the Court did not need Justice Kennedy to reach the opposite conclusion generations ago.
The amendment, we held, was "divorced from any factual context from which we could discern a relationship to legitimate state interests," and "its sheer breadth [was] so discontinuous with the reasons offered for it" that the initiative seemed "inexplicable by anything but animus." Romer v. Evans, 517 U. S. 620, 632, 635 (1996). In 2018, when Trump v. Hawaii was decided, the Court needed Justice Kennedy's vote. That is no longer the case. I faulted Justice Barrett for citing this aspect of Trump v. Hawaii in her Skrmetti concurrence. And I will fault the per curiam Court for citing Trump v. Hawaii in the passport case. This mode of constitutional adjudication should be jettisoned. We are no longer living in Justice Kennedy's shadow. Political majorities can disadvantage politically unpopular groups, unless there is some a constitutional prohibition.
November 10, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
fssp.bsky.social
In December 1865, 2500 Black Washingtonians petitioned Congress for the right to vote. "Experience teaches," they wrote, "that all reforms have their opponents. The same experience also teaches that apprehensions of evil arising from reforms founded in justice, are but seldom if ever realized."
Black Residents of Washington, D.C., to the U.S. Congress, December 1865
www.freedmen.umd.edu
November 5, 2025 at 2:45 PM
Reposted by David H. Gans
myconstitution.bsky.social
The tariffs case will be a test of whether #SCOTUS will actually be a check on the executive branch. Watch more from @elizabethwydra.bsky.social: www.cbc.ca/player/play/...
What's at stake for Trump with Supreme Court tariff case?
Elizabeth Wydra, a lawyer and president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, says the stakes for the Trump agenda are high with this case, while Yale Law School's Harold Hongju Koh says this c...
www.cbc.ca
November 6, 2025 at 2:31 PM