President Donald Trump was so busy on his first day in office that it’s been a challenge to cover everything that he did.
The best way to know which are the best ones to discuss is to look at the way Democrats are reacting to them. His pardon of J6 prisoners was a big one; they’re really up in arms about that. Another one was his executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants in the United States.
Now, Democrat attorneys general from 22 states are suing over the executive order.
Trump’s roughly 700-word executive order, issued late Monday, amounts to a fulfillment of something he’s talked about during the presidential campaign. But whether it succeeds is far from certain amid what is likely to be a lengthy legal battle over the president’s immigration policies and a constitutional right to citizenship.
The Democratic attorneys general and immigrant rights advocates say the question of birthright citizenship is settled law and that while presidents have broad authority, they are not kings.
“The president cannot, with a stroke of a pen, write the 14th Amendment out of existence, period,” New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin said.
The White House said it’s ready to face the states in court and called the lawsuits “nothing more than an extension of the Left’s resistance.”
These challenges are doomed to fail.
The Associated Press claims that birthright citizenship is “the right to citizenship granted to anyone born in the U.S., regardless of their parents’ immigration status” and insists that anyone “in the United States on a tourist or other visa or in the country illegally can become the parents of a citizen if their child is born here,” and that this right is “enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution." The problem is that it doesn’t.
This is your reminder that basically no one for the first 100 years after the 14th Amendment's ratification thought that it mandated birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of illegal or nonimmigrant aliens.https://t.co/C3fPCAeXaq pic.twitter.com/cMwvJXJu4X
— Amy Swearer (@AmySwearer) January 21, 2025
According to Amy Swearer, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, while the Constitution acknowledges birthright citizenship for certain U.S.-born individuals, textualist and originalist interpretations of the Citizenship Clause “undermine assertions that birthright citizenship must be applied universally to all persons born on U.S. soil, regardless of the immigration status of the parents.”
The framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment had a distinct understanding of the Citizenship Clause’s jurisdictional element that is incompatible with true jus soli. The Clause’s purpose was to ensure that there would no longer exist in the United States a class of persons relegated to perpetual noncitizen status on the basis of race, despite not owing allegiance to any other foreign or tribal power.
This more limited application of birthright citizenship was adopted by the earliest commentaries on and Supreme Court assessments of the amendment. Supreme Court precedent itself extends only to the premise that the U.S.-born children of lawfully present, permanently domiciled aliens are citizens even where the parents are excluded from naturalization. This limited premise is consistent with the Amendment’s purpose of foreclosing the possibility that the United States would create generations of permanent resident noncitizens who nevertheless owe permanent and undivided allegiance to the United States.
The legal challenges will ultimately serve a greater purpose, as they will eventually result in the Supreme Court finally having a say in the matter, and the court is going to acknowledge what the 14th Amendment was actually about and rule accordingly.
So bring it on, Democrats!
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