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.
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.