@robertbarnes

Yes — but I would frame it carefully: not “Kavanaugh as savior” personally, but Kavanaugh as the cleanest Rule 44 procedural gateway for saving the separate constitutional category of natural born Citizenship from being swallowed by ordinary birthright citizenship.

The mental model:

Thomas / Alito / Gorsuch = dissent-side constitutional firepower.
They can validate the historical, originalist, and structural danger.

Kavanaugh = majority-side procedural hinge.
Because Rule 44 requires a Justice who joined the judgment or decision, Kavanaugh is useful not because he is necessarily the strongest nbC theorist, but because he may be the most reachable majority-side Justice for a narrow “process integrity” correction.

The winning frame is not:

Justice Kavanaugh, please reverse the birthright citizenship decision.

The winning frame is:

Justice Kavanaugh, the Court’s opinion may have collateral ramifications for Article II natural born Citizen doctrine because the government’s handling of material historical citizenship records remains unresolved. Before the judgment is treated as settling or conflating those categories, the United States should be required to account for receipt, routing, non-transmittal, or non-use of the DaCK materials.

That is much cleaner.

Your strategy should separate three layers:

Layer 1: Birthright citizenship
The Court decided a Fourteenth Amendment / citizenship-at-birth question.

Layer 2: Natural born Citizen
Article II presidential eligibility is a different constitutional safeguard. It concerns foreign influence, allegiance, original citizenship, and Commander-in-Chief eligibility.

Layer 3: DaCK transmittal integrity
This is not merely a merits argument. It is a record-handling issue: whether founding-era public records relevant to citizenship/allegiance were placed before the United States while the case was pending and whether the United States properly handled, routed, or transmitted them.

So Kavanaugh’s “savior” role is not dramatic. It is procedural:

He does not need to adopt your whole nbC theory.
He only needs to see that the Court should not let a major citizenship opinion become a vehicle for accidentally damaging Article II nbC doctrine while a material historical-record transmission issue remains unresolved.

The best Kavanaugh pitch:

The petition does not ask the Court to revisit policy questions or accept a nonparty’s merits argument. It asks the Court to protect its own decisional integrity by requiring the United States to respond to a narrow administrative question: what happened to material founding-era citizenship records placed before the government while this case was pending, and did any failure of receipt, routing, transmittal, or disclosure affect the Court’s treatment of citizenship history?

That gives Kavanaugh a respectable institutional lane.

The strongest strategic slogan:

“Do not let birthright citizenship default into natural born Citizenship.”

Or sharper:

“Fourteenth Amendment citizenship is not Article II natural born Citizenship.”

Or for Barnes:

“DaCK is the record-integrity bridge between citizenship history and Article II preservation.”

What to avoid:

Do not make Kavanaugh the hero of a broad anti-Roberts crusade.
Do not lead with “CCP anchor babies” in the Rule 44 framing.
Do not ask him to rescue dissenters.
Do not argue as if Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas can initiate rehearing.
Do not make DaCK sound like an untimely amicus brief.

What to emphasize instead:

Administrative regularity. Historical record integrity. Avoiding doctrinal conflation. Respect for Article II as a distinct constitutional office-protection clause. Government accountability for record handling.

The practical Barnes route could be:

1. Rule 44 petition or related post-opinion filing aimed at majority-side process concerns.
2. Request for response from the United States as the immediate relief.
3. FOIA / USDC NDNY litigation to force the OSG record trail.
4. Public constitutional education: birthright citizen does not automatically equal natural born Citizen.
5. Keep Thomas/Alito/Gorsuch as validators, not procedural movers.

Bottom line:

Kavanaugh is not the savior because he is certain to embrace natural born Citizenship doctrine. He is the possible savior because he may be the majority-side Justice most able to preserve the distinction procedurally without blowing up the whole judgment.

That is the lane Barnes can plausibly work.