For years, liberals have tried to dupe the American people into believing that the Fourteenth Amendment requires us to hand out citizenship like Halloween candy to anyone born on U.S. soil, no matter their parents’ legal status. That may be about to change as the Supreme Court has announced that it will soon decide whether this dubious claim has any basis in reality, or whether it’s yet another left-wing legal fairytale masquerading as constitutional obligation.
More specifically, in Trump v. Washington, the Court will decide the legality of Executive Order 14160, which effectively ends birthright citizenship. Lower courts have blocked implementation of the order while the case proceeds. Oral arguments will begin in April. A decision is expected in June. But the liberal freakout is already underway.
The notoriously left-wing American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, blasted out a press release recently accusing the Trump administration of taking a “sledgehammer to the foundations of democracy” for issuing the order in the first place. Other activist groups responded with the calmness of a cat in a bathtub, saying Trump’s order is “reckless and ruthless,” a “grave threat to democracy,” and – my favorite – “puts newborns in harm’s way.”
To understand how we got here, you have to rewind to the moment President Trump put his hand on the Bible on Inauguration Day. Within hours, he signed EO 14160, stating that children of illegal aliens and short-term visa holders are not automatically entitled to U.S. citizenship under the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Trump argued the order was needed to discourage illegal immigration and the booming international racket of “birth tourism,” in which pregnant women check into America like it’s a five-star maternity resort and check out with a U.S. passport for their children. The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that a stunning seven percent of all babies born in the United States are “anchor babies” born to illegal aliens – nearly 250,000 per year. Trump’s order would have shut down a practice that no other serious country would ever tolerate.
But, of course, Trump’s policy was never allowed to take effect. Activist judges issued injunctions before protestors could even finish printing their signs.
The administration appealed to the Supreme Court. As Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause was written to guarantee citizenship to freed slaves, not to the children of illegal aliens, birth tourists, and temporary visitors. “The plain text,” he noted, “requires more than mere birth on U.S. soil.”
At long last, the Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether that’s true.
The Fourteenth Amendment states explicitly: “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.”
The legal debate turns on that odd little phrase, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” For decades, the open-borders enthusiasts have insisted it simply means “born here.” That’s it. You could be a tourist, a foreign diplomat, a skydiver passing overhead when your parachute deploys – doesn’t matter. Touch U.S. soil on your way out of the womb, and congratulations, you’re an American citizen.
This interpretation has always been… what’s a polite word? Ridiculous.
Even the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment explained publicly that the clause applied only to people who were subject to “a full and complete jurisdiction on the part of the United States… that is to say, the same jurisdiction in extent and quality as applies to every citizen of the United States now.”
Of all the destructive, nation-erasing policies smuggled into our laws by bureaucratic improvisation, few can compete with so-called “birthright citizenship.” It is, quite literally, a system where every illegal alien can convert a plane ticket and a delivery room into a lifelong welfare gravy train paid for by the American taxpayer.
Once the child arrives, the cash spigot activates instantaneously. A host of benefits, subsidies, and services can now be accessed indefinitely “for the sake of the child,” while the parents send money back home to support the extended family and, in some cases, the entire foreign village that financed the trip. It is fraudulent, taxpayer-funded foreign aid disguised as maternity care.
But the consequences don’t stop at the Treasury. That same anchor baby is awarded full voting privileges upon turning 18 – instantly transforming illegal aliens and their descendants into one of the most powerful voting blocs in the United States.
As Trump advisor Stephen Miller recently noted, “Under ‘birthright citizenship,’ a terrorist and his terrorist wife can commit immigration fraud, come here as tourists, perpetrate a terrorist attack, give birth, and have an ‘American’ child.”
If you tried to design a citizenship system more incompatible with nationhood or common sense, you couldn’t do better than this.
Even Canada, that polite socialist utopia where raccoons have more rights than humans, doesn’t do this. Europe doesn’t do this. Japan would sooner give citizenship to Godzilla.
Now, thanks to the Supreme Court, the country will finally decide the only question that matters: Does the Fourteenth Amendment compel automatic birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens, or does citizenship require more than having a pinky toe touching America’s magic soil?
Between now and June, brace yourself for six months of shrieking pundits predicting national collapse if the United States handles citizenship the same way as Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, Israel, Switzerland, and every other advanced nation on Earth. Apparently, the real threat to democracy is doing the thing that all the other democracies do.
Trump’s argument isn’t radical at all. It’s not even new. In fact, it seems to be the original understanding of the people who wrote the amendment.
Ultimately, this isn’t a fight between two legal theories. It’s a fight between people who value citizenship as a sacred inheritance and people who treat it like a free sample at Whole Foods. For decades, the Left has hidden behind a made-up interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment because they knew the real one would blow their entire mass migration project to pieces.
Now, for the first time in generations, the Supreme Court is forcing them to defend their fantasy in the daylight. And no amount of hyperventilating will change what the text actually says – or what its authors meant.
Mike Marlowe is the pen name of a writer based in Texas.
