When the Trump administration asks the Supreme Court on Thursday to allow it to deny birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants and visa holders, its legal theory will rest on a reinterpretation of a critical phrase of the Constitution. But when you plug their preferred meaning back into the historical context in which the Constitution’s Citizenship Clause was enacted, the results are nonsensical. In other words, the crux of the government’s argument simply makes no sense.
The first sentence of the 14th Amendment, passed by Congress a year after the Civil War, is the Citizenship Clause: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” When President Donald Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his administration that would deny birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants and visa holders, he premised it on the idea that undocumented immigrants and visa holders are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. This is the phrase the government is asking the courts to reinterpret into a fictional absurdity.
if they’re not subject to the jurisdiction why are they being kidnapped and killed in ice detention camps?
Because, to the Trump administration, they’re not humans.
You’re not wrong, but that’s not the logical endpoint of the argument.
If they’re not “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” then the US has no ability to exercise any kind of authority over them, regardless of whether they’re people or property.
Under that argument, the US government legally or logically can not detain, deport, or traffic any noncitizens. It’s obviously an absurd thing to say.
Yeah but logical argument doesn’t matter, because they’ll just do whatever they want.
Wait wait, immigrants and their children are immune from prosecution under this interpretation? Diplomatic immunity for all migrants currently in the country? This might have legs
precisely. sigh.
You heard it here visa holders, you’re not subject to the jurisdiction of the US so go criming! It’s crime day every day! Rob a bank for us please, just not the one I use lol
I’m reminded of that Sartre quote again
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Honesty has never mattered to conservatives,
Why would anyone expect anything different now?
Don’t forget conservatives started the Civil War to protect their access to unpaid labour in the form of people treated no better than animals. They may have swapped political parties between 1865 and 2025, but they REALLY want that free labour again!
It really wasn’t originally about ending slavery. It was about the North’s right to not return the South’s “property” (humans).
And then it became about disposession of all slaves from their owners without compensation, because everyone realized that reforming slavery does nothing but give power to slavers who would just wait 60 years to build the political capital to reverse the reforms and have their medieval torture back.
Sound familiar? It’s what we did with robber barons and now we’re watching the second half in real time. Revolution is the only solution. In slavery and today, there is no reforming this system to “protect” anyone except the owners. Godspeed to the abolitionist.
Funny how every state that succeeded listed defending the institution of slavery as a reason for leaving the union and subsequently joining the confederacy.
I think the most accurate statement is the Confederate states left the Union to preserve the institution of slavery. The Union originally only sought to bring back the Confederate states and end the open rebellion. Lincoln was much more interested in restoring the Union than ending slavery, and in the early part of the war would have absolutely allowed slavery to continue if it meant ending the rebellion. Thus, restoring all states to the United States. However, as the war progressed it became clear there would be no easy resolution. Through the Emancipation Proclamation he was able to break the power behind southern production, the slaves, and push forward abolition. A cause he personally was always favorable towards, but unwilling to sacrifice the Union for.
I hate when they only list the part with what he is arguing. The whole thing is:
“All 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. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Notice the use of person over citizen at the end and further jurisdiction means “The authority that an official organization has to make legal decisions about somebody or something.” So his argument is that the us cannot enforce anything on some people which sorta makes them super citizens. Heck better than diplomatic immunity. I mean you all have seen the trope of the criminal crossing a border and the law enforcement saying. I would like to stop him but its not my jurisdiction. He is arguing super immunity for folks.
Lastly man googles gemini. Besides the gulf of you country here idiocy I got this from it initially:
"plaease give me the section of the constitution on citizenship
I’m not programmed to assist with that."
When challenged it gave the information but its obvious to me that google is bending over backwards to suck the administrations cock. Of course they want their cake and to eat it to so it caves when challenged.
One day they’ll run out of immigrants…
And then other groups will be targeted. If your family has been here longer than America has been a country, you still got your citizenship because you were born here.
If trump can take it from immigrants, he can declare any targeted group is no longer citizens either.
That’s not even getting into how they’re trying to tie “allegiance” in out of thin air.
Not voting trump could be labeled as not showing allegiance to America, and boom, no citizenship for you.
Shits getting fucking serious
As a non American, but with friends and family there, I think you need civil war 2.0. I don’t say this lightly as I grew up in a country ravaged by a civil war and subsequent wars. However, the left is trying to play by the rules while the Trump and his handlers are ripping up the rule book and seem to be unstopable. Maybe when the dust settles your constitution needs fixing, to keep lobbyists, billionaires and corporations out of politics.
Once caveat, lobbying is actually a good thing. Lobbying is just educating elected officials about a goal you’re trying to accomplish.
For example, my SO lobbied our state government about a bill to keep non-violent offenders with children out of jail.
What’s bad is bribery masquerading as lobbying.
You are of course correct, I meant corporate / political lobbies (looking at you AIPAC and big pharma, tobacco et al). I think the biggest issue of course is that major lobbyies are, as you stated, nothing but bribery. I remember in the early 90’s when John Major was elected PM of England, he’d previously failed a bus conductors exam and worked as a bank teller, in the US, if you’re not ultra rich it’s practically impossible to make any headway in politics.
Its such a stretch for an administration that has repeatedly failed hard to support its arguments with even coherent sentences. Not even kidding, the initial suits about mass firings, some US attorney said out loud that he had no evidence all government employees were criminals, but they just are because they are.
The Constition also has a pesky part that says all people within the county are subject to it’s laws, meaning that no one in the US is exempt from them by virtue of being a non-citizen. Seriously, do tourists not have to follow laws?
Bold of you to think he knows anything about history
All 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.
I admit that I’m not sure how to interpret this in a way that includes freed slaves, people born in the Confederacy during the Civil War, but not everyone else born on US territory, but the implication of having two separate clauses is still that a person may be born in the United States but not subject to the jurisdiction thereof. I think that the Trump administration’s arguments seem like a stretch, but so is asserting that the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” clause means nothing.
If they were not subject to to the jurisdiction of the United States, how would the United States have the authority to deport them?
Your interpretation of “subject to to the jurisdiction of the United States” is the one that would make this clause meaningless in the context of the amendment. A sovereign government has that sort of authority over everyone in the country, so presumably the amendment is talking about something different or otherwise there would have been no point in explicitly including the clause at all.
Foreign sovereigns, foreign ambassadors, foreign armies, and Native Americans were the only categories of people capable of existing both in the United States and outside of its jurisdiction at the time of the 14th ammendment’s drafting.
Native Americans living in the united states have been found, in certain senses, at certain times, to not be subject to the jurisdiction thereof.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Federally_recognized_tribe
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_country_jurisdiction#History
To be fair to Trump, Kamala would have done the exact sams thing.
Right?