The Supreme Court Has Never Heard a Case As Easy As This One |
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
On January 20, 2025 — his first day back in the White House — President Donald Trump issued an executive order purporting to override the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Trump v. Barbara, a direct challenge to the constitutionality of that order.
That the birthright citizenship argument is scheduled for April Fool’s Day makes a grim sort of sense, because the argument itself is a sick joke. Trump is claiming that he has the unilateral power to create a permanent, hereditary legal underclass unseen in America since before the Civil War. In doing so, he is rehashing grotesque legal arguments that every branch of government has rejected for generations, and placing himself at odds with the plain text, history, and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Congress adopted the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War in significant part to repudiate the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford. That 1857 case held that the longstanding principle of citizenship by birth categorically did not apply to Black Americans, whether free or enslaved, and that they could never become citizens of the United States. Eleven years later, in order to reject this holding and to place the citizenship of disfavored minorities beyond political dispute, Congress declared in the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment 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.”
In 1898, 30........