Morning Joe 7/1/26 | 🅼🆂🅽🅱️🅲 Breaking News Today July 1, 2026

I do actually think there's a really big silver lining here. And that's the simple fact that a lot of legal experts expected this case to go the wrong direction by seven to two or even eight to one. The fact that this case was a five to four decision effectively means that the concept of birthright citizenship, which is an absurdity to the 14th amendment, that concept is hanging by a thread. And so what I take from that is, yes, we've got to fix the immigration system even more we have to be even more aware of who's coming into our country to make sure that they're not benefiting from this atrocious Supreme Court ruling. But it also means that we have to keep fighting, Laura, because we actually have an opportunity to reverse this decision, just as we reverse so many bad decisions throughout the generations. That is Vice President J.D. Vance on Fox News last night, reacting to the Supreme Court's decision to uphold birthright citizenship. We'll have much more from that ruling in just a moment. Plus another big win for a Democratic socialist candidate, this time in Colorado, defeating a 15 term incumbent in the Denver area. We'll tell you how she did it and what she believes. Also ahead, we'll dig in a new reporting on the massive into the billions amount of money President Trump has made from cryptocurrency just since returning to the White House this year. The numbers are staggering. Good morning. Welcome to Morning Joe. It is Wednesday, July 1st. Yes, we've made it to July with MS Now contributor Mike Barnicle and MS Now senior legal reporter Lisa Rubin. Good morning to you both. Get to the Supreme Court in a minute. But just quickly, Mike, the amount of money this new reporting that we're getting from the filing of Donald Trump, the president of the United States, has made just since he came back to office in January of last year, up into two billion dollars plus. A staggering amount of money that he has made personally. And that story was followed earlier this week by the story about his sons and the secretary of commerce's sons, Howard Lutnick's sons, making money off of deals that the United States government is involved with in foreign countries. It's incredible what is going on, the level of corruption that is going on in Washington. Remember the outcry when Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma while his dad was vice president of the United States. Peanuts compared to what we're seeing. We're going to get into the details of that in just a moment. But we will start with the Supreme Court ending its term yesterday by upholding birthright citizenship. That ruling comes in response to President Trump's executive order seeking to end automatic citizenship for babies born in the United States to people who are in the country either temporarily or illegally. The ruling was 6-3 with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority, reaffirming the long settled understanding of the 14th Amendment that anyone born in the United States is a citizen with very limited exceptions. Roberts wrote, citizenship then and now was the right to have rights, to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to every free born person in this land. Roberts concluding, quote, we keep that promise today. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented, arguing President Trump's order was constitutional in his own dissent. Alito called the case one of the most important decisions in the history of the court and that the court, quote, has made a serious mistake. Alito adding the 14th Amendment conferred citizenship on only those children who at birth owe allegiance solely to this country. Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed the order is illegal, but only under federal law, not the Constitution. The Trump appointee wrote Congress could enact new legislation to establish exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country. So, Lisa, this is the big one we talked about yesterday when you previewed the final day that we'd be watching for any surprises in either the decision or the vote here. I think there are a bunch of surprises here. I mean, there are 194 pages worth of some surprises here, Willie. Let's start with Justice Kavanaugh, who stakes out a ground here that I think was not well anticipated by the oral argument. He's essentially siding with the majority, as you just noted, but not on constitutional grounds. I was explaining last night Justice Kavanaugh's reasoning to some of our colleagues in the elevator, a bunch of 20-somethings who work in the newsroom. And they looked at me so quizzically, and I said, that is the plainest I can explain it. And if it doesn't make sense to you right now, it doesn't make sense to me either. So let me try to explain to our viewers. Justice Kavanaugh saying the equal protection, I'm sorry, the citizenship clause of the equal protection clause doesn't foreclose Trump's executive order forbidding birthright citizenship to certain people. But a statute that uses almost identical wording does. And you might be wondering, how is that possible? He says that's because the statute was enacted after the Supreme Court's last case on birthright citizenship, which carved out a number of sort of exceptions and admitted of no others. And he says because of that, we should interpret Congress to say there are only a few instances in which people born in this country aren't citizens. And if Congress wants to change it, that's up to Congress. How he can take, though, almost identical wording in the Constitution and a federal statute and interpret them differently might leave a lot of people scratching their heads, particularly when he all but invites Congress to change the law if they feel differently. The other big, though, surprise here is Justice Alito, who does dissent from the decision, but also says birthright citizenship in the Constitution is a floor, it's not a ceiling. And we have humanitarian issues in this country presented by those people who are not yet citizens. So according to Justice Alito, if you want to change the composition of who counts as a citizen in this country, that too is up to Congress. So on one hand, you've got Justice Kavanaugh saying, if you don't like who's a citizen, you can limit it. And on the other hand, you have Justice Alito, who also disagrees with the majority's ruling on the Constitution, saying if Congress wants to confer citizenship on more people in this country, it has the latitude to do so. And maybe it should do so. And so in both respects, big surprises here. Other big surprise, big debate between Justices Thomas and Jackson about who is meant to benefit from the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. Justice Thomas believes that it was really intended always just to help the citizens of slaves, but says it was never meant to confer citizenship on people who are temporarily here or unlawfully here. Justice Jackson really taking a big issue with that and says, the fact that we have consensus about what the central motivation of the 14th Amendment was doesn't justify, and I'm gonna read here her words, Justice Thomas's myopic treatment of it, that the whole point of the 14th Amendment was an anti-caste, anti-subordination reset, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery. In other words, don't you dare use the experiences of black Americans to drive a wedge between us and other people in this country who want to be here and should be here by virtue of the Constitution. This obviously has been an obsession, perhaps, of President Trump for some time now, getting rid of birthright citizenship. Now it becomes, I think, a political question, as the justices said, if you wanna change this, go to the Congress. Speaker Johnson said, condemn the decision. We heard J.D. Vance condemning the decision. Even some of the justices talking about birth tourism, that this just encourages people now to come here, have a baby, and move along. Again, those are political questions, but I guess one of the big questions a lot of people have is, this has been in the 14th Amendment for all these generations. Why now this sudden, almost revelation by some people that, oh my God, this is a terrible thing? Well, I think part of it is what they see on the ground, right? This documentation, at least according to the conservative legal movement of birth tourism, which came up at oral argument. And there was an exchange between John Sauer, the Solicitor General, and Chief Justice Roberts, where John Sauer basically said, there are 8 billion people in this country who are a plane ride away from being birth tourists and therefore giving citizenship to their country. And John Roberts' retort to that was, well, it's the same old Constitution, Mr. Sauer. But I think the other thing, and this is sort of like zooming out and looking at the Trump administration writ large. This is an administration where what used to be fringy theories about how to interpret the Constitution suddenly fall into the mainstream. So we think about the Unitary Executive Theory, which used to be something that nobody really talked about, has definitely been pushed to the Similarly, some of the ideas that motivated January 6th and some of the legal strategies underpinning it, things that people like Ken Chesbrough and John Eastman were propounding, those were things nobody talked about until they started talking about them. And now all of a sudden, they have major currency within the Republican Party and certain facets of the conservative legal project. The Unitary Executive Theory is essentially an all-powerful executive that gets to consolidate all sorts of powers in the executive that we might have thought about in other times as more equally balanced between the three branches. It's interesting that the lives of so many people, people not yet born, people who are here now, came into conflict in the court this week. You get temporary protected status rulings. You have the 14th Amendment that we're talking about. It's just interesting all of these people, most of these people, I would assume, are living right on a very thin line. I think that's absolutely true. And I think it also speaks to the multifaceted approach of this administration to solving what they perceive as policy problems. If you're thinking about the policy problem being undocumented immigration to this country, they have attacked it in all sorts of ways, through a birthright citizenship executive order that's now been found to be unconstitutional, but also by cutting off temporary protected status to people from all sorts of countries by starting these waves of crackdown on undocumented people in cities all throughout the country. It's not just that they choose one door to open. It's literally, as our colleague Chris Hayes once said to me in a similar context, it's like they go down the hallway of a hotel and they kick down, open every single door that they can to get at a problem that they believe exists and should be eradicated. The president saying yesterday in a post the decision is too bad for the country, but that it will be easily fixed through Congress. It won't be so easy, but he certainly will try. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court also struck down long time rules that place limits on just how much national political party committees can spend in coordination with candidates. It's a six to three decision there. The court ruled the Federal Election Campaign Act enacted in 1974 violates the first amendment rights of political parties, Republicans, including Vice President Fance and the National Republican Senatorial Committee brought the challenge to court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion, which reads in part, in short, constitutional text, history and precedent established that the political party coordinated expenditure limits violate the first amendment. This decision is expected to give Republicans a financial edge in the upcoming midterms because the party's committees have much more cash on hand than Democrats do and can deploy that money without being hindered by previous caps and limits. So 24 hours ago, when you sat with us, Lisa, you were looking ahead to this and saying, if this goes the way it looks like it might go, and it did, this will fundamentally change money in politics. And here we are. Absolutely. And it will be the death, I think, of the independent super PAC and the rise again of party apparatuses. And if you're a major donor in this country or somebody who bundles and you're thinking about where to give your money in excess of sort of the individual contribution limits right now, all of a sudden, the major parties became a much more attractive place to spend it. I will also say it's a huge advantage for the RNC. While the Senate committees and the House committees of the Republican Party have a cash edge over the equivalent on the Democratic side, the amount of cash on hand for the RNC overall compared to the DNC is staggering. The DNC is in debt. The Republican National Committee carrying over one hundred million dollars right now in cash on hand. So going into this next midterms election cycle with this decision in hand, this is not a good place for the Democratic Party and its subordinate committees to be. How does it affect the flow of money and the flow of contributions? Well, I think one of the concerns that the dissenters have, Mike, is that what it will do is basically allow people to circumvent individual limits by giving well in excess of what you could give to a candidate by giving it to a party committee. So right now, individuals can give over one hundred thousand dollars to a party committee. It may be that because that party committee can now coordinate with a candidate, if you really want to donate, donate, donate to Mike Barnacle, you may have incentives to do so through his party rather than through super PACs. I've heard people in the political sphere say that this maybe doesn't affect the overall sum of money and the political system, but rather where people are giving it and who has control of it. Right now, the chair of the Republican National Committee, I understand a man named Joe Gruders, and I apologize to him and our viewers if I've mispronounced his last name. He's probably the happiest person in all of Washington right now. Yeah. And you compare this with the 2010 Citizens United decision as well. Just one more step in the dismantling of campaign finance laws in the country. One more. The Supreme Court also decided to uphold two state laws barring the participation of transgender female athletes from girls' and women's sports teams. In another 6-3 decision, the justices ruled against two transgender students who challenged restrictive laws in West Virginia and Idaho. In his opinion, Justice Kavanaugh argued the laws do not violate either the 14th Amendment or Title IX, but did express sympathy for transgender girls and women who want to play sports, writing their desire to compete warrants respect, adding they should not be ostracized or vilified. Although the ruling directly concerns only West Virginia and Idaho, it is likely to affect 25 other states with similar bans. And isn't that one of the points here, Lisa, that this now will be used, interpreted across the country, as effective ban on transgender girls in sports? Absolutely. And that's particularly true, Willie, because one of the challenges or one of the questions that the two plaintiffs presented here was not just that the bans were unconstitutional writ large, but they said they're unconstitutional as applied to us because we could meet exceptions. There are reasons that because we've experienced, we didn't experience puberty associated with our biological sex, we took puberty blockers, that biologically we didn't go through the sorts of advantages that you traditionally might think of as associated with being born biologically female. In fact, it's not clear that we have any competitive advantage whatsoever. These states should be forced to look at us as individuals, and the court denied that as well. This is also a case where I think some cases you look at and you say the justices don't have any personal experience with this, right? They're not bringing their full selves to bear on the court. This is one where it's unmistakable that Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote for the majority, is speaking of something that's deeply personal to him. He's the father of two daughters, both of whom are now college age, both of whom played high school athletics. And he talks about what the impact would be on women and girls in this country who play high school sports if the ruling had gone the other way. And he has this whole thing at the end about women and girls who play sports caring deeply about competition and making sure that every opportunity that they win is one that they get fairly. But he says every competitor who wins a race or competition deprives another athlete of that victory or medal or prize. Every team that wins because of an added player means that another team has lost because of that added player. So from his perspective, the impact on not only safety of the athletes, but on competitive fairness is a huge one. And the last thing I'll say, Willie, is that when Brett Kavanaugh is expressing that the court and other people reading this should have respect for everybody who was involved in this litigation, that doesn't come out of nowhere. That is a direct response to Justice Thomas, who in dissent says some things that are not rooted in case law. They're not rooted in the text of the Constitution or its history. They seem to be rooted in a deep antipathy towards transgender people. And that is why you see the sixth justice majority saying here that no student athlete. And again, I'm reading from the majority decision on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender deserves to be ostracized or vilified. They go out of their way to say that, I think specifically because of Justice Thomas. Fascinating dynamics internally there. And with that, Lisa Rubin, your court term ends. Thank you for walking us through an incredibly consequential couple of days. Thank you so much. We always appreciate it. Coming up next, we'll get into the politics of the birthright citizenship decision. Also ahead. Clearly, birthright citizenship has been abused. I haven't had a chance yet because I've been busy every second of the day to read the opinion. But I just saw an excerpt from the great Justice Barrett Thomas, who said that at the original drafting of that language, it was meant to citizenship. And now it's being used to devalue citizenship. I think he's with the president, as we know, House Speaker Mike Johnson yesterday criticizing the Supreme Court's decision on birthright citizenship. Let's bring in senior writer at the Dispatch columnist at Bloomberg Opinion, David Drucker, and publisher of the newsletter, The Ink on Substack, Anand Giridharadas. Guys, good morning to you both. Anand, I'll start with you in reaction to the Supreme Court upholding birthright citizenship. You reposted a personal essay you wrote for The Ink, in which you write this, quote, for all of the dangerous things President Trump has proposed in his first days, the assault on birthright citizenship strikes me as so fundamental. Because it's an attack, not just on a policy question of how and when passports are given out. It's an attack on the idea that anyone can be part of this, that this is a nation of becoming. So fundamental is this culture of becoming that even Trump cannot escape. But I'll let you flesh that out a little more, Anand, and just get your broader reaction to what we saw in the court yesterday. It was an important ruling and a good day in this country, which is not something we can say all the time these days. You know, I am a birthright citizen, I will say, first of all. I am a citizen. My parents were immigrants. They were legal immigrants at the time, but they were immigrants. And my citizenship came from being born on American soil, specifically the soil of Cleveland. And the reason this ruling is so important is birthright citizenship is not just this legal principle, right? It is deeply connected to what it is a sort of cultural idea, right? That this is a nation of becoming, that people can become of this. And it's worth noting that there's a lot of other countries that have immigrants, France, Germany, many places in the world that don't have this principle. And what it changes is there's no notion that what the country is Americanness, the way we accept that Americanness is altered, right? That people can become American, that Americanness can be altered by the blood of people who come here. You go to France, that's not the idea. The idea is Frenchness is this fixed thing. It's these cheeses. It's this blood. It's your grandparents having had to be here. You can sit over here. And I know this because after my parents moved to America in the 1970s, at the end of the 80s, they had an idea of doing it again. They were well established in Cleveland, and they said with my sister and I, let's immigrate again. Let's move to France. And I remember watching them when I was seven years old, watching them arrive in France, navigate France, and watching it dawn on them that they weren't gonna be able to do it again. They were allowed to live there, but they would never be able to become of this. And so this idea of the capacity in this country that we allow people to become American, it shapes the notion that we are a country of becoming, that we are a country of creation, that we are a country that welcomes new ideas. We're a country that is not so scared of our culture evolving, that we need to lock people out. And I will say, Donald Trump, the part you quoted, Donald Trump may claim that he wants to sort of seal us off from the world, but two-thirds of his own wives are imports, two-thirds of his own wives. And I just want to say to the president, even though I was born in this country and Melania Trump was not, she is every bit as American as I am, and I will never question that. David Drucker, we heard the reaction there from Speaker Johnson. We heard from J.D. Vance yesterday. We heard from the White House saying this is one of the most dangerous and destructive decisions in the history of the Supreme Court, President Trump saying, well, it's too bad, but now let's move this conversation to the Congress where we can change this. Obviously, that's an uphill climb. But can you speak to just how salient this issue of birthright citizenship has become under President Trump in conservative circles? Yeah, so I think a lot of this, Willie, just has to do in one part with the frustration about illegal immigration and the inability of the United States to get its immigration system functioning properly and under control. Of course, Republicans have been a large part of that because they've resisted legislation to overhaul immigration law time and again. But I think for certain people on the right, it's become, it's sort of Lisa was talking about the Chris Hayes theory of going down the hotel corridor and kicking open every door, looking for a way to deal with the problem. This has been one of those. And it's really counterproductive from a public policy standpoint in that there's very little birth tourism that goes on. And if you wanna just look at it from what these births add to the country in any event, we have declining birth rates. It's gonna make it harder for the government to pay the social safety net in coming decades if this isn't reversed. And so that's something on the one hand that I think this comes from. There's obviously as well a nativist streak in certain corners of the right. And they have an issue not so much with birth tourism and the birthright citizenship that comes from it, but who it is exactly that's coming here and doing that. I thought one of the most important parts of the ruling aside from the one that mattered the most was the fact that the president's executive authority was struck down. The president has tried to gather so much authority in his executive pen and just simply avoid going to Congress altogether. And the fact that it wasn't just an unconstitutional thing that he wanted to affect, but the way he tried to affect it was also struck down, I thought really mattered. And I wanted to say one thing on the campaign finance ruling. For people that have lamented the rise of partisanship and extreme candidates and politicians on both sides of the aisle, this ruling actually gives the parties more power while leaving untouched contribution limits, including the party committees, including the aggregate limits for people who are wealthy. Where you can only get so much a year no matter which committees you parse it out to. And the Democrats are very good at raising money, particularly with the congressional campaign committees. The RNC, DNC difference is a consequence of who's in the White House right now in part. And so there's a lot to feel good about in that decision if you think our politics has become unwieldy and partisan and extreme. And that money can now go straight through the parties. We'll see how that plays out. And back to the birthright citizenship quickly, it was a 6-3 decision. Again, Chief Justice Roberts saying that the court keeps the promise today that every freeborn person in this land can be extended citizenship. Another big story this morning, newly released financial disclosure forms show President Trump made more than $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency related income last year as president. According to the 927 page disclosure, President Trump earned $635 million from his meme coin. He also pulled in more than $500 million from token sales and $65 million from selling equity stake related to World Financial Liberty, a crypto company he co-founded with his sons. Trump also continued to make money from his real estate holdings, including $121 million from Trump National Doral, $77 million from Mar-a-Lago and $39 million from Trump Tower, Chicago. The form show another $80 million coming in from various legal settlements with companies including Meta, ABC, CBS and YouTube. When asked for a statement, the White House responded that Trump quote, proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world, adding the president never engaged in any conflicts of interest. Forgive me for chuckling through that on. And this is staggering, these numbers, and it's just out in the open. There used to be concerns to George W. Bush when his dad was president. People were concerned that he sat on the board of an oil company, that there might be influence there. We mentioned Hunter Biden in Burisma. There was concern his father was vice president of the United States. In this case, though, you have Donald Trump, who's obviously has his hand on the scale, this thumb on the scale of cryptocurrency policy, profiting to the tune of $1.4 billion. And when you put it all together, just in this year and a half of his second term, more than $2 billion coming into him. It's staggering. It's corrupt. And Willie, like the skilled and seasoned newsman you are, you segued from the birthright citizenship story to this story. But I would argue it's the same story. And here's why. The story about this corruption and self-dealing is what is really going on in the United States, the fleecing of the United States by this president and his cronies and his oligarch friends. And what people do when they want to fleece a country in the way that he is, is distract most people and try to get them to not look up at the very powerful people who are through our institutions, and instead to look sideways at the guy next to them. Look at that immigrant over there. Look at that black person over there. Look at that homeless person over there. The project of Donald Trump is to fleece this country and make money for himself through crypto, through sneakers, through whatever else, and to trick all of us into thinking that someone who came here from Mexico, trying to work on a farm in the hope of giving their children a better life is our problem. It's really, really important to not be distracted and to look up at stories like that corruption and not sideways. David Drucker, the New York Post editorial board this week, before these filings even came out, published a piece with the headline, Hunter Biden style sleaze is just as slimy when the Trump boys do it, talking about the president's sons. It reads in part, insider deals, finder's fees, and backdoor introductions to family members are business as usual in third world banana republics. But these slimy practices have now been normalized in the White House to the shame of the nation. The Trump sons are part owners or investors in companies neck deep in a key defense contract in Central Asia. It stinks to high heaven. Democrats in Congress are pressing for an investigation into Trump's sweetheart deals. If they take the House in the midterms, these hearings are surely coming. It would behoove the Trump administration, writes the New York Post and the nation as a whole. If the president gets ahead of the growing scandal, acts transparently and cleans up the whole mess before it swamps his final two years.