The Supreme Court has always insisted that the justices are good friends and get along well, despite the bitter partisan nature of many of the issues they decide. But with many of the justices sniping at each other over concurrences and dissents in Tuesday's landmark decision blocking President Donald Trump from revoking birthright citizenship, that has never been deeper in doubt, court observer Dahlia Lithwick told MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace on "Deadline: White House."

Wallace called Lithwick's attention to the "personal nature" of what some justices were saying. "I mean, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, making no secret about how she sees the dissent. Samuel Alito is calling the majority, quote, 'wrong.' What stands out to you?"

Jackson, said Lithwick, put on "a clinic on how to do constitutional text and history and originalism and how to do it right ... but she's very clear, this is a direct response to what she thinks Justice Thomas has just gotten woefully wrong in his dissent, and in a sense, that feeling that she has to take him on on his own terms."

This sort of exchange spilling out in public is not unheard of, Lithwick continued, "but I think you're right to say, aggregated over the last few weeks ... there just seems to be a sense that trust is broken among the justices, and that there is a feeling that the skin is very thin and that everything is personal and everything is expressed personally."

Wallace then noted a passage from Jackson's concurrence, specifically calling out Thomas' double-talk in claiming the 14th Amendment was a race-conscious reparation as an argument for why it doesn't confer birthright citizenship, after he spent years tearing down every race-conscious program for minorities he could get his hands on, from voting rights to college admissions.

"She seems to be getting at something that kind of hovered over the voting rights decision as well," said Wallace. "What is this about?"

Jackson, replied Lithwick, is the closest thing the court has to a "progressive originalist" and is "very committed to the principle that if you are going to say you're a textualist, an originalist, that the meaning of the drafters of the Reconstruction amendments matters, then be true to that."

"I think that for her again, the only word I can keep using is gaslighting," she added. "That this very cramped, very forced, utterly ahistoric, utterly indefensible reading of the Reconstruction Amendments — to her, she experiences it like a wound."

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A Fox guest called Justice Samuel Alito an "anchor baby" on live television Tuesday, but the attack is almost certainly false.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that day to uphold birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump's executive order to restrict it. Alito was one of three justices who dissented.

Charles Kuck, an immigration attorney with Kuck Baxter Immigration, was on LiveNOW from Fox, a sibling channel of Fox News, discussing the ruling when he made the claim.

"So, yes, I get where the opponents of this are coming from, but somebody pointed out to me something really interesting today: Justice Alito, who wrote his own dissent in this case, is, in fact, an anchor baby," Kuck said. "His parents were not U.S. citizens when he was born, much like Ted Cruz and other prominent Republicans who are immigrants or the children of immigrants. This amendment is what really makes us America."

In his dissent, Alito argued that children born to noncitizen parents are automatically claimed as nationals by their parents' home country, making them "subject to a foreign power" rather than the United States.

Alito's father arrived in the U.S. from Italy as an infant in 1914. By the time his son was born in 1950, he held a master's degree from Rutgers and worked as a public high school teacher in New Jersey, a job that has long required U.S. citizenship.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was born in Calgary, Canada, to a mother who was already a U.S. citizen.

Kuck made clear he supports the ruling itself.

"So I, for one, applaud the Supreme Court. I wish it were a 9-0 decision, but we'll take what we can get," he insisted. "Now the law is clear, and we can move on, hopefully, to fixing our broken immigration system instead of arguing about a constitutional amendment that was settled 160 years ago."

Secretary of State Marco Rubio does fit the definition of "anchor baby" that Kuck used.

Rubio was born in Miami in 1971 to Cuban immigrant parents, according to Newsweek. His parents didn't become U.S. citizens until 1975, four years after he was born.

A Republican-controlled House panel on Monday refused to allow a floor vote on a bipartisan amendment to prevent closer integration of the American and Israeli militaries, which human rights organizations say would deepen US complicity in Israeli war crimes.

“This is unconscionable,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who led the proposed amendment alongside Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), said in a video posted to social media on Tuesday. “They’re not even giving us a vote on the amendment.”

Khanna vowed that “Thomas and I will continue to fight to make sure we don’t compromise American sovereignty.”

Watch:

The Khanna-Massie amendment would have removed the US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative from annual military policy legislation currently moving through Congress. The initiative, laid out in Section 219 of the House’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), instructs the Pentagon to “designate an executive agent... responsible for synchronizing cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel, to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation.”

On Monday, the House Rules Committee unveiled a list of NDAA amendments that it decided would get a full House vote, and the Khanna-Massie proposal was absent. Ben Freeman noted at Responsible Statecraft that the rules panel made its decision “after no debate” on the amendment.

“By rejecting the Khanna and Massie amendment, the Rules Committee on Monday ensured the American public would not even get to see how their representatives would vote on this pivotal issue,” Freeman wrote. “This is despite unprecedented levels of public distrust in the Israeli government and widespread public outrage directed at these proposals.”

The fight to block the US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative—which is enthusiastically backed by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC—is not necessarily over.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said earlier this month that lawmakers “must” strip the initiative from the NDAA, signaling a possible fight over the provision in the upper chamber. A summary of the Senate version of the NDAA states that the legislation would establish “the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, coordination, and industrial cooperation between the US and
Israel.”

Leading human rights organizations, including Amnesty International USA and Human Rights Watch (HRW), have urged lawmakers to reject the cooperation initiative, with the latter group warning that the proposal would “deepen US military cooperation with Israel while walling that cooperation off from further congressional oversight.”

“Israeli forces’ widespread war crimes, crimes against humanity, and its ongoing acts of genocide in Gaza should give the United States pause about closer military association,” said Akshaya Kumar, HRW’s director of crisis advocacy. “Instead, Section 219 proposes to deepen entanglement, in a way that makes the risks of complicity ongoing. Legislators still have a chance to strip this damaging proposal out.”