Florida’s Governor is putting his legal background to work, offering observations on the contemporary relevance of what he once said was the worst decision in the history of the United States Supreme Court.

On Tuesday, Ron DeSantis weighed in on the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, relative to an executive order from the Donald Trump administration invalidating the concept of birthright citizenship as it relates to the children of illegal immigrants.

The Harvard Law graduate said the “purpose of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was to overturn the Dred Scott case, not to bestow citizenship on those present in the US against the people’s will as expressed in law.”

The citizenship clause holds that “persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Yet the position Trump, DeSantis, and others who believe in immigration restrictions subscribe to is that the children of illegal aliens are not citizens by dint of birth.

DeSantis believes the “executive order will be litigated until the Supreme Court decides the question (which it has never decided) of whether children born to illegal aliens get constitutionally-mandated citizenship.”

“The framers of the amendment clearly did not believe so,” he added.

Late last year, DeSantis said 1857’s Dred Scott v. Sandford stood out as the most egregious ruling in the history of the High Court.

“It denied the basic humanity of Dred Scott. It was instrumental, of course, in leading to the Civil War. I know there’s not everyone that is willing to admit that anymore, but that’s just the reality.”

The Supreme Court’s 7-2 decision was rooted in the argument that Scott, an enslaved Black man who was taken from a slave state to a free state, lacked standing to sue, even though he’d been moved to territory where slavery was illegal. Chief Justice Roger Taney’s decision was intended to overturn the Missouri Compromise, allowing slavery in the territories and giving slaveholders the presumption of elastic property rights, which DeSantis found morally and constitutionally abhorrent.

“Not only was it wrong, not only was it dehumanizing, it was massive judicial activism. That was not what the Constitution said, that was not what the Founding Fathers envisioned when they created the Constitution. And so they were taking their judicial power and they were trying to ‘solve’ an issue that they had no right to legislate on,” DeSantis said, calling it an example of the High Court “not only getting the law wrong, but also abandoning their entire role under the Constitution.”

Trump’s order says “the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States … when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary, and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”

It also claims “the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.  The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”

DeSantis isn’t necessarily confident that the current court would come down on the side of his and Trump’s read on birthright citizenship based on subsequent comments responding to a poster who hoped Sen. Ashley Moody would have a chance to confirm a conservative jurist to replace a “lib justice.”

“That might be necessary to get the desired ruling — I’m not sure there are currently 5 votes on the Supreme Court for the notion that the 14th Amendment does not give birthright citizenship to illegals. If there aren’t 5 votes then shutting down illegal alien birthright citizenship would require an amendment to the Constitution itself, which would be unlikely to get enacted as blue states would almost certainly refuse to ratify it,” DeSantis noted.

The Governor has not been shy about criticizing the current Supreme Court for being insufficiently conservative, even as many analyses hold that on key questions, it leans to the right by a 6-3 margin.

His critiques have extended to Brett Kavanaugh , who after he was confirmed opted to “go left,” and said that Neil Gorsuch was even worse.

As a presidential candidate, DeSantis suggested that when the next president replaces conservative stalwarts Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, picking “good judges” is not enough.

“If you replace them with one of those three, like a Kavanaugh. that moves the court to the left, doesn’t keep it where it is,” DeSantis said. “As a President, you got to know that we’re going to need justices in the mold of it, Alito, in the mold of Clarence Thomas to replace them and then any other vacancies that may occur, because if you don’t get that right, then you’re moving the court in a more leftward direction.”

He also lumped Amy Comey Barrett into the mix, telling Hugh Hewitt that while he respects “the three appointees he did … none of those three are at the same level” with Alito and Thomas.

DeSantis is lukewarm on the Chief Justice also.

“If you replace a Clarence Thomas with somebody like a John Roberts or somebody like that, then you’re going to actually see the court move to the left and you can’t do that,” DeSantis said.

As a presidential candidate, he said he expected the next President to be able to replace up to four justices and created a path to a “7-2” conservative majority

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