Summary
Donald Trump has pledged to end birthright citizenship through an executive order if re-elected, targeting the 14th Amendment’s provision that grants citizenship to all born in the U.S.
Critics argue this policy would defy the Constitution, specifically its post-Civil War intent to ensure citizenship for former slaves.
Legal experts widely agree that the Amendment’s language includes children born to undocumented parents, but Trump’s proposal could lead to an immediate legal battle.
The policy would require federal agencies to verify parents’ immigration status, complicating access to Social Security numbers and passports for U.S.-born children.
See, logic would dictate that this would be immediately laughed out of court since a change of this magnitude would require a Constitutional Amendment. The 14th amendment does not say it only applies to certain people or under certain circumstances.
Then I remembered what timeline we’re in. Trump will have this gleefully rammed through Congress, and the Supreme Court will uphold it based on the long-standing legal principle of “Yeah, but they’re brown…”
And this is how Trump invalidates the Constitution. Not by decree. But by spending 4 years sidestepping the Constitution and telling his base that it’s just an outdated piece of paper with a bunch of guidelines that can be safely ignored the minute they become inconvenient. Or at least, inconvenient for Republicans.
And he’ll do it to thunderous applause.
It’s been a week but feels like people are finally getting it.
There’s no checks and balances left, of all we have to hope is a line written on some paper many years ago, we’re fucked.
There is one left, but we’re not allowed to talk about it.
oof, bleak.
Will there be enough Republicans in the House and Senate to pass laws like that without Democrat support? All they’ll have is a simple majority in both.
SCROTUS “reinterpreting” all the laws is the fascists’ best bet, I think.
Yes. Simple majority is all that’s needed in the House on most if not all matters anyway. And the only thing that would be in the GOP’s way would be the filibuster, which they can hand-wave away any time they want with a simple majority vote.
And keep in mind. They can just make up the rules as they go along now. They can literally play Calvinball with the Constitution. If Trump demands it, and the House and Senate vote for it, and the Supreme Court rubber stamps it, and the majority of state governments either go with it or at least don’t oppose it…who’s gonna stop them?
If Trump feels like saying that the 14th no longer applies to brown people because fuck you that’s why, and Congress votes in favor of a law that says the 14th no longer applies to brown people, and the Supreme Court says “Yep, fuck brown people.”, then that’s the law of the land regardless of what we think of it, because we individually do not have the power to stop it, and collectively just voted in favor of it.
And keep in mind…there’s nothing stopping Trump from replacing “the 14th no longer applies to brown people” with “Women no longer have the right to vote” or “Freedom of the Press does not apply to those critical of the Trump administration”. If no branch of government is willing to uphold and enforce the law, the law may as well not exist. The same goes for your rights and protections.
Those Democrats have careers and families they care about. It doesn’t take much pressure to own a few of them. Especially without checks and balances and add in some bootlicking appointees to the three letter agencies.
They’d need more than a few, though, more like dozens. It’ll just be all-out fascism without even a pretense of legitimacy at that point.
I’m pretty certain all out fascism is what we’re going to have. A handful of Democrats are not enough to hold democracy together. I don’t think it will be long before there’s not even a pretense of that being the case.
I’m unfortunately inclined to agree.
It does have one circumstance:
I’m trying to figure out how they will argue that immigrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”.
If they aren’t, then border patrol would have no grounds to detain them. ICE could not deport them…
Try this on for size: Trump follows Texas’s lead, and declares them to be invaders. Enemy combatants aren’t subject to the laws of the nation they are invading.
Trump can argue that Border Patrol is performing a military role, rather than a law enforcement role.
I’ve only heard that applied to foreign diplomats. Because the parents have diplomatic immunity, they and their children aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
I think I figured it out… Diplomats are not actually the only persons who can be within American borders without being subject to American law. Another category is “Enemy Combatant”.
Remember that Texas has declared immigrants to be invaders.
Considering it’s how his followers already use their Bible, we can assume they have the same level of “reverence” for the constitution.
To be fair the 14th amendment was really only intended to give freed slaves citizenship. Which is something I’m sure the Supreme Court will cite as part of “original intent” they justify so many rulings with.
“Actually, we find that the 14th amendment really only applies to foreign white people, as the original founding fathers were slave owners who did not view either black or native american people as actual people, and certainly would not have granted them citizenship. Given the original intent of the Founding fathers, not only do we rule that the 14th amendment only applies to foreign white people, but we are simultaneously invalidating the Civil Rights act of 1964, reversing the previous Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, and striking down the 19th amendment as an unconstitutional violation of the original intent of the Founding Fathers.”
– This supreme court, very possibly.
So were the 1800’s wave of European immigrants, that most white americans descended from, mostly naturalized or did they just use the 14th amendment too? I’m not be factious, I actually don’t know but always assumed it was the former.
Well, it was the 1800s, so I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of the time they just took the person’s word for it in the rare situations where it mattered, and how successful you were was probably based on how rich and white you looked. Think of it…how the hell was someone in Atlanta, Ga. supposed to prove or disprove whether the man standing in front of him was or wasn’t born in Boston, Ma? It’s not like they could call and verify or something. Probably little more than “Yeah, you look like you could be from Boston. You’re good.”
It was the state’s burden to prove otherwise.
Thank you my good man.
Easy - declare that kids of illegal immigrants aren’t subject to the jurisdiction of the US, then the 14th amendment doesn’t apply!
Of course you’d probably still need legislation to do that, if not an amendment.
I think he wants us to shit ourselves in public about this stuff so he can mock us, but the grandiose gestures he’s throwing around right now are mostly just laughably stupid. I’m still preparing for the shitstorm but I don’t think the big noises he’s making now are telegraphing the real plays.
The only hope I hold onto is that we need a constitutional convention anyway. If this convinces states to actually trigger an Article 5 convention, then I’m all for it.
No. No, no, no, no, no, a thousand times no.
Trump has returned to power. He has both houses of Congress under his thumb, and control of the Supreme Court. A majority of states are Republican controlled, with many state governments having GOP supermajorities. People such as Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are in positions of influence, and people like RFK and Bald Dracula Stephen Miller are going to be filling top government positions.
**These are the people who would be writing up a new Constitution. ** Democrats would largely have the privilege of sitting on the sidelines and having about as much input in the process as a 3rd string quarterback calling plays at the Super Bowl. A Constitution written by these people would make the Handmaid’s Tale seem like a liberal paradise by comparison.
Trump is already taking a giant shit on the Constitution and he hasn’t even been sworn in yet. The last thing we need to do is make his job infinitely easier by calling for a Constitutional Convention any time in the foreseeable future.
Have you seen our states?