{"id":739642,"date":"2026-07-02T20:56:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T20:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/739642\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T20:56:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T20:56:09","slug":"supreme-court-upholds-birthright-citizenship-rejects-trump-order","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/739642\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship, rejects Trump order"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the Gettysburg Address<\/a>, President Abraham Lincoln affirmed what America\u2019s founders believed\u2014that the \u201cnew nation\u201d began with the Declaration of Independence<\/a>, not with the military defeat of Great Britain or even the ratification of the Constitution. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration is both an opportunity and a duty to reflect on its principles and its continuing significance for the present and future of the country.<\/p>\n

In the first sentence of the document\u2019s second paragraph, we are told that it is the right of the people to reform or replace institutions that have failed to promote their \u201csafety and happiness.\u201d The first words of the Constitution, \u201cWe the people,\u201d rely on and affirm this proposition.<\/p>\n

But what is, and who are, the \u201cpeople\u201d? Whatever may have been the case in 1776, the ratification of the Constitution offered a clear answer: The people are the citizens of the United States. But this raises a further question: Who is a citizen? The Supreme Court\u2019s infamous Dred Scott<\/a> decision held that African Americans were not and could not become citizens. Americans fought a bloody civil war in part to overturn this decision.<\/p>\n

Three years after the guns fell silent, they ratified the 14th Amendment<\/a>, which declared that \u201cAll 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.\u201d Because foreign diplomats were outside the country\u2019s jurisdiction, children born to them in the United States did not become citizens. Nor did Native Americans, who at that time were considered to be subject to the jurisdiction of tribal governments. (The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924<\/a> gave Native Americans dual citizenship in both the U.S. and their tribes of origin.) With these and a few other exceptions, the general rule was clear: If you were born in the United States, you were a citizen of the United States.<\/p>\n

Although this rule was challenged from time to time after the adoption of the 14th Amendment in 1868, it was reaffirmed in the Immigration and Nationality Acts of 1940<\/a> and 1952<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0acknowledged as the law of the land for 157 years. But in 2025, President Trump issued an executive order<\/a> stating that children born in the United States to parents who are temporarily or unlawfully present in the country are not \u201csubject to the jurisdiction\u201d of the United States and therefore do not qualify for citizenship under the 14th Amendment or the Immigration and Nationality Act, which uses the same language. The president\u2019s executive order was quickly challenged and soon reached the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

The court decided the case of Trump v. Barbara<\/a> on June 30. Writing for a five-member majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that both English common law, which Americans had adopted, and the public meaning of the 14th Amendment\u2019s text affirmed the long-held proposition that being born on American soil is a sufficient condition for citizenship. The majority therefore struck down President Trump\u2019s executive order as violating the Constitution, so understood.<\/p>\n

In a concurring opinion, Justice Kavanaugh argued that while the constitutional issue \u201cis not straightforward, much as we might want it to be,\u201d the president\u2019s executive order went beyond the bounds of existing statutes by adding two new limits to the one that Congress has codified. To achieve his goal lawfully, the president would have to persuade Congress to amend these statutes.<\/p>\n

The remaining three justices mounted a frontal attack on the majority decision. In a 91-page dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas mobilized historical evidence which, he argued, supported the conclusion that being born in the United States was not sufficient to confer citizenship. In addition, he argued, individuals had to establish \u201cdomicile\u201d in the United States to demonstrate their \u201callegiance\u201d to the country and become subject to its jurisdiction. In his opinion, Chief Justice Roberts pushed back against this assertion, arguing that citizenship and domicile were unrelated legal categories.<\/p>\n

In his dissent, Justice Thomas pointed out\u2014accurately\u2014that in recent years, several legal scholars had assembled historical evidence supporting his account of the 14th Amendment\u2019s original meaning. He did not mention, however, that some originalist scholars using the same methods had reached the opposite conclusion. In 2025, for example, John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, two originalists and supporters of a strong executive, published an article<\/a>, \u201cThe Originalist Case for Birthright Citizenship.\u201d Reviewing the evidence, they concluded that the best reading of the 14th Amendment\u2019s \u201ctext, structure, and history\u201d supported the traditional understanding of citizenship\u2014the very view that the chief justice\u2019s majority decision reaffirms.<\/p>\n

President Trump seems to have taken Justice Kavanaugh\u2019s concurrence as an invitation. In a statement<\/a> on Truth Social, he called on Congress to pass new legislation affirming his view of birthright citizenship. But members of Congress with experience in constitutional law, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), understand that the legislative route will be futile as long as a majority of the Supreme Court rejects the president\u2019s executive order on constitutional grounds. \u201cYou got to amend the Constitution to fix this,\u201d Rep. Johnson said<\/a>. \u201cThe long fight for a constitutional amendment begins now,\u201d Sen. Lee affirmed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Given today\u2019s deep political polarization, however, it is almost impossible to muster the supermajority needed to amend the Constitution. It is not clear that even a bare majority of Americans are prepared to support a fundamental change in the longstanding practice of birthright citizenship. Both parties would like to change the Constitution to overturn Supreme Court decisions they don\u2019t like. Both are likely to be disappointed for some time to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln affirmed what America\u2019s founders believed\u2014that the \u201cnew nation\u201d began with the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":739643,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,966,37830,3200,1340,37822,23392,37829,14099,23393,3,4265,37828,23394,23395,14100,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-739642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-article","tag-center-for-effective-public-management-cepm","tag-commentary","tag-congress","tag-courts-law","tag-demographics-population","tag-fixgov","tag-governance-studies","tag-immigrants-immigration","tag-news","tag-north-america","tag-presidency","tag-society-culture","tag-u-s-government-politics","tag-u-s-states-and-territories","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=739642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/739643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=739642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=739642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=739642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}