This week, the Trump administration doubled down in its fight against birthright citizenship. The usual alliance of pundits, professors and press lined up to declare any challenge to birthright citizenship as absurd. Yet the administration seemed not only undeterred, but delighted.

There is a reason for that euphoria: They believe that they cannot lose this fight.

The legal case against birthright citizenship has always been tough to make, given the long-standing interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in federal courts and agencies. Many in academia and the media have shown unusual outrage toward anyone questioning the basis for birthright citizenship as a legal or policy matter.

This is perhaps best evinced by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe's profane tirade the last time Trump raised this issue years ago: “This f---ing racist wants to reverse the outcome of the Civil War.”

Putting aside that the Civil War was fought over slavery, not immigration, many at the time would have disagreed that this was one of the outcomes of either the Civil War or the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Fourteenth Amendment starts and ends as a model of clarity, stating that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” are “citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” However, sandwiched between those two phrases, Congress inserted the words “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Those six words have perplexed many since they were first drafted.

For some, the line must be read as a whole and guarantees that anyone born within the United States becomes an American citizen. For others, the six words cannot be read out of the amendment as superfluous. They argue that this indicates that the parents must be here in a legal status, either as citizens or legal residents.

This division was........

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