To paraphrase the late Winston Churchill, I had always thought prior to 2016 that at the end of the day, one could always count upon Americans to do the right thing - once, of course, we've exhausted all other available options.

We kept telling ourselves that we're supposed to be better than this. Well, we've certainly since laid THAT delusion to rest, haven't we?

On the nominally long-settled matter of birthright citizenship, four of the six right-wing SCOTUS justices took clear exception to the unambiguous wording of the Constitution's Amendment XIV, Section 1, and they made quite obvious their intent to strike it down at some point in the future, if once again given the opportunity.

Honestly, Justice Alito's quasi-fascist dissent in Trump v. Barbara, a case that would've otherwise likely garnered a unanimous 9-0 decision just 35-40 years ago, should've set off alarm bells in legal circles across the country.

Not only is the MAGA-curious Roberts Court wholly and uniquely unsuited for the harrowing and challenging times in which we're presently enmeshed, but John Roberts himself is the worst Supreme Court chief justice since Roger Taney (1777-1864). It was, after all, Taney's infamous Dred Scott decision (1857) that greased our country's rapid slide toward sectional upheaval and civil war.

Indeed, it was Dred Scott that prompted the almost immediate postwar drafting, adoption and ratification of the 14th Amendment in the first place, in order to mute and negate Taney's egregious finding that our country's Black residents had no legal standing before the bar of justice because they could never become citizens of a white and God-fearing country such as ours.

The answer, therefore, to our present predicament is NOT to pitch the Constitution aside, as though it were some obsolete and outdated relic. Rather, we need to rethink entirely the current composition of the U.S. Supreme Court.

This would include our serious consideration of SCOTUS's expansion to thirteen members to correspond with our thirteen federal appellate courts, an accompanying member term limit of 10-20 years in length rather than a lifetime appointment, and specific criteria to encourage membership diversification, so that the High Court's future makeup properly reflects that of the country as a whole, rather than the colloquial and often noxious politics of the D.C. Beltway.