Birthright Citizenship Ruling
Democrat House Leader Hakeem Jeffries claims that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the “Constitution” by ruling that “all persons born in the United States are American citizens.”
IN FACT, the Constitution grants birthright citizenship only to the children of people who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the “United States,” not everyone “within its jurisdiction” or “subject to its laws.” Here are the specifics:
- One year after the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished, a bloc of Congressmen called the “Radical Republicans” passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to ensure that “citizens” of “every race and color” had the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens.”
- To assure that former slaves wouldn’t be denied citizenship, the law required that “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.”
- To guarantee that the law was constitutional and wouldn’t be repealed “as soon as the Democrats came into power,” the Radical Republicans fought for and secured passage of the 14th Amendment, which states in part that “all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.”
- That birthright citizenship language was proposed by Republican Senator Jacob Howard, who introduced it in the U.S. Senate by stating that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” “will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.”
- The senators then debated the meaning of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction,” and Howard further explained that “the word ‘jurisdiction,’ as here employed, ought to be construed as to imply 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.”
- Driving that point home, Howard emphasized that an “Indian belonging to a tribe, although born within the limits of a State,” is not “subject to this full and complete jurisdiction.”
- As ratified, the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment contains the exact words proposed by Howard, leaving little doubt that it means exactly what he said it means.
- Reinforcing the fact that “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” doesn’t mean “within its jurisdiction” or “subject to its laws,” the next sentence of the 14th Amendment uses those terms for separate broader purposes by forbidding states from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” or denying “to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
- In today’s Supreme Court decision of Trump v. Barbara, the majority rules (5–4) that all children born “within” the “jurisdiction” of the U.S. or “within its territory” are U.S. citizens under the 14th Amendment, even if their parents are “illegally or temporarily in the United States.”
- To justify their decision, the majority appeals to an old “English common law” called the “right of the soil” in which all people “born within the dominions” of a kingdom “were considered subjects” of “the King,” even though the founders of the U.S. explicitly rejected such feudal and imperial doctrines, and the 14th Amendment was enacted 92 years after the United States “absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown.”
- To justify their decision, the majority dismisses the words of Jacob Howard and other framers of the 14th Amendment as “ambiguous” and alleges that “statements embracing the common law” are “far more frequent and explicit” without proving either of those claims to be true.
- To justify their decision, the majority mentions the 1844 case of Lynch v. Clarke 13 times, even though it predates the 14th Amendment by 24 years and is “not a precedent” of the Supreme Court or “any federal court, or any state appellate court, or even a court of law” but was “decided by a New York ‘assistant vice-chancellor’ in a court of equity’s equivalent to a trial court.”
- To justify their decision, the majority invokes the 1898 Supreme Court case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark 16 times, even though the case involved a child of legal immigrants, not illegal immigrants or tourists.
- To justify their decision, the majority appeals to non-binding dicta from Wong Kim Ark, even though Ark’s dicta contradicts itself by claiming that the 14th grants citizenship to virtually “all children here born of resident aliens” while also stating that the 14th only grants citizenship to the children of people who “are permitted by the United States to reside here.” This plainly excludes illegal immigrants and visitors who don’t reside in the U.S.
