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by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
July 1, 2026
My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!
Key points addressed:
The Birthright citizenship mistake
Counting ballots received after Election Day
Protecting women’s sports: huge win for our girls!
Overturning the case that created the Deep State
Why the SAVE America Act matters more than ever
It’s 16 minutes of in-depth analysis you won’t want to miss. Watch, like, and share!
Here’s our full discussion:
Frank Gaffney: We’re back, and what a delight to be able to say on any given occasion that the chairman of the board of the Institute for the American Future, and one of the emerging preeminent pundits of our time, Rod Martin, is in the house. He is, of course, a serial entrepreneur and a man whose writings, as well as his other public musings now at RodMartin.org, where you can find The Rod Martin Report, which I encourage you to subscribe to. It’s a fabulous resource.
Rod, I haven’t had a chance to see what you will say in writing about the new decision by the Supreme Court on birthright citizenship, but I get to have you say it to us before you put pen to paper on the subject, or mouse to pad, whatever you do to make this magic work. Thank you for joining us as always, my friend. It’s good to have you back. As we speak, we’ve just had the ruling handed down, so I wanted to get your immediate reaction, sir.
Rod D. Martin: The ruling came down about five minutes ago. It is certainly disappointing, but it’s important to keep perspective. It doesn’t put us in any different position than we were ten minutes ago. It is just a bad decision. It really is a bad decision.
I was holding out hope, based on the Mississippi ruling and the IEEPA tariffs ruling, that they were just being pedantically textualist, which is actually, if you’re going to have a fault, a pretty good one to have. We want the Supreme Court to be extremely textualist.
Well, that theory gets a little bit blown out of the water by this birthright citizenship case. There is simply nothing in the Fourteenth Amendment that in any way pertains to illegal aliens who just happen to show up and have a baby. It’s just not there.
The proofs of that are multiple, but let’s just start with a couple. The Wong Kim Ark case, which is cited in support of birthright citizenship, involved the child of two legal residents of the United States. It clearly was not dispositive on the question of illegal aliens.
Second, the children of foreigners here in some limited capacity, such as the children of diplomats or the children of soldiers training at Fort Bliss, are explicitly exempted under statute. If the Supreme Court wishes to actually carry through on this, honestly, kind of pathetic ruling, they would have to make all the children of diplomats born in the United States U.S. citizens by right. It’s absurd. It’s not the law. It’s not in the Fourteenth Amendment.
I’m very disappointed in Barrett and Roberts, who are the two supposedly conservative justices who came down on the wrong side of this, along with the three communists. It is a really disappointing decision, but in a week of mostly really great decisions.
Frank Gaffney: I do want to talk about a couple of others, Rod. Amy Coney Barrett, of course, was the author of another, I think, deplorable decision on the whole issue of Election Day and mail-in ballots. Talk us through that one, if you would, please.
Rod D. Martin: The Mississippi case is interesting because what they said, and by the way, make no mistake, I’m with the dissent. I totally agree with the dissent.
Frank Gaffney: For the record.
Rod D. Martin: But I didn’t have a big problem with that ruling because what they were doing there actually was textualist. They were looking at the statute. The statute said when the votes had to be cast. The statute doesn’t say when they had to be counted.
There is a practical problem there that our side is kind of ignoring, that sometimes these things actually do take a while. We saw that in Florida in 2000. Even if Al Gore hadn’t done all the things he did, it still would have taken longer than just Election Day to get a final count. And the Court was clear that ballots must be postmarked no later than Election Day.
The statute in question is a little vague on a point that honestly didn’t even exist until the creation of this insane mail-in ballot scheme. The real answer there is to just tighten the law. Barrett’s ruling is actually very clear: Congress has an absolute right to fix this. It’s just that the current state of the law isn’t this, in their view.
I disagree with their view. I think it’s very clear what Election Day is. Maybe Amy Coney Barrett doesn’t. But nevertheless, that was not as bad a decision.
On the other hand, as you know, we just had two off-the-charts amazing decisions, both 6-3. One upheld the bans on transgender athletes in girls’ sports in Idaho and West Virginia. That is a huge win.
Look, transgender sports is not about LGBTQ rights. Even if you’re for the LGBTQ agenda, you should be against this, because this is simple, fundamental fairness. We don’t let NFL teams play peewee teams. We don’t let heavyweight boxers fight featherweight boxers. There’s a reason. It becomes unsporting. They aren’t actually competing on skill in those situations. They’re competing on strength.
We don’t need that. No one wants to see that. It’s ridiculous, and it just eviscerates the future of girls who want to compete in sports, which is a terrible, terrible thing. So the Supreme Court ruled correctly on that.
The bigger one, the big kahuna, the one that matters this week, is the overturn of Humphrey’s Executor. The Slaughter case is fantastic. Humphrey’s Executor is a 91-year-old case being overturned, the key case that prohibits the President from firing federal employees simply because Congress says they don’t want them to.
That is a step toward a parliamentary system on a certain level. But what it really did is it created the Deep State as we know it.
Frank Gaffney: I have to ask you to pause. We have a break that I have to take, but I want to come back to this because I think this is central to where we are as a nation and where we go from here: whether that Deep State is able to operate with impunity. As we’re being told by the left, it’s just somehow sacred writ that those independent agencies, despite the fact they don’t appear in the Constitution, are integral. We’ll talk about that momentarily.
Second Segment:
Frank Gaffney: We’re back, and so is Rod Martin, the author and just grand poobah of The Rod Martin Report. It’s a tremendous resource, which I strongly commend to you. You can find it at RodMartin.org.
Rod, just finish up your thoughts on this idea of the Deep State somehow being mandated despite it appearing nowhere in the Constitution, and the significant infringement on the Article II powers of the President.
Rod D. Martin: You have two completely, diametrically opposed views of how humans should be governed.
One is the constitutional system that the Founding Fathers gave us, where you have elections at a regular interval, and if the people want to peacefully overthrow their government, they can, all the time. I mean just over and over and over.
The other view is technocracy, which is just a thin veneer on aristocracy, because the idea from Woodrow Wilson and FDR and the rest has always been that the American people are too stupid to rule themselves. We need experts to do that for us.
So they made the federal bureaucracy unfireable and unaccountable. They empowered it with legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and it’s run that way for decades. If you wonder why we’ll have an election and nothing seems to change, that’s why.
There’s one President. There are about 5,000 political appointees. And before Trump got started, there were 2.8 million federal civilian employees who were just doing whatever the heck they wanted without any accountability or any possibility of being fired by the President.
This extends well beyond the independent agencies issue. This is really at the heart of the bureaucracy itself.
They chipped away at the judicial power of the independent agencies in Chevron in a fundamental way. The Chevron case was just an abomination because it prevented, in most cases, you from ever appealing an administrative decision to an Article III court. That’s gone, but it took 40 years.
Now we have the President able to fire people in these agencies. Article II, Section 1 is clear: “the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States,” not in whoever Congress decides to hand it to. That creates an imbalance in the separation of powers at best. Only Congress gets to legislate. Only the President gets to execute. They don’t always have to agree on what that looks like.
That’s the system the Founders gave us. It should mean that when we have an election and you want change, a President should be able to come in and fire your postmaster, fire whoever at the Bureau of Labor Statistics is doing a bad job, or fire Federal Trade Commissioners.
Of course, the one footnote is that they also came down on the same day yesterday with the Cook ruling. I’m not overly concerned about the Cook case. They said he can’t fire or can’t remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board, and they gave a bunch of squishy gibberish, honestly, about the longevity of the Federal Reserve and its unique place.
It does disturb me that Roberts and Barrett were part of that too, but they specifically said that the ruling is only valid while litigation is pending. My guess is that when this case finally reaches the Supreme Court on the merits, they’re going to rule consistently with Slaughter, and this is going to be a huge, huge win.
Frank Gaffney: Rod, I guess what you’re saying is that this is of surpassing importance: an arrangement notwithstanding all of the other arrangements that the Founders went to such great lengths to elaborate, namely checks and balances. This empowering of the technocrats, as you put it, or the federal bureaucracy, or the Deep State, or the permanent state, or whatever you want to describe it as, for which there were really no checks or balances.
I guess Congress theoretically could undo what it had previously done, but that didn’t seem to happen very often. They couldn’t get rid of individual people, so they’re there forever and they’re just going to keep doing what they were doing. That’s what we saw at USAID. Tony Fauci comes to mind as an example of this.
Rod, isn’t this really restoring the Constitution and the Founders’ ideas about making sure that there was no dominant entity in that carefully constructed arrangement?
Rod D. Martin: Yes. That’s the entire point.
I see otherwise sensible conservatives online telling us that this is just undermining Congress’s authority. No. What they’re calling for are the Articles of Confederation. The Founding Fathers did away with that. They created co-equal branches, and that means that the President actually has power.
By the way, the decision says this explicitly: the President is not all-powerful. Not even close. There are all kinds of restrictions on his power. But he has all of the executive power, and that is the law.
There’s a line in the Slaughter decision that says “whatever may be left of Humphrey’s Executor is hereby overturned.” This is a huge, huge win for our Constitutional system.
Frank Gaffney: Rod, just going back to the voting issue for a moment, because this is so fundamental to our federal system, our system writ large. Are you troubled in particular about the idea that election days are sort of open-ended and could be even more open-ended under this ruling? Should that be a subject of, as you suggested, legislative attention?
Rod D. Martin: It’s just dumber than a box of rocks. The dissent was brilliant on this, as you would expect from Sam Alito. This is a no-brainer. Election Day is a day. Everybody knows this.
But Barrett’s decision makes clear Congress can fix this. If they pass the SAVE America Act, this gets fixed. Full stop.
Frank Gaffney: Let’s make sure that happens. Rod Martin, we have to leave it at that for the moment. God bless you and the great work you do at RodMartin.org. I know you’ll keep it up, and we’ll talk to you again next week.
