Summary
A U.S. appeals court has blocked Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship for children of non-citizen parents.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s emergency stay request, upholding a lower court’s nationwide injunction.
The ruling, made by a three-judge panel, argued that citizenship rights under the 14th Amendment are beyond presidential authority to alter.
The Justice Department is appealing similar rulings in other states, and the case may ultimately reach the Supreme Court. Arguments in the 9th Circuit case are set for June.
Does it even need to? It’s very clear wording. There is literally no argument you could make that can misinterpret the language. It’s like the singular thing in the constitution that is extremely clear language.
You seem to think they give a shit what the constitution says in the face of all the evidence to the contrary.
The problem is, if he can somehow get rid of birthright citizenship, then no one is an American.
It doesn’t just affect potential immigrants, it affects every human born in the US, past and present.
Anyone they want to be American will be American. The rules have been abandoned and you cannot just hope they’ll obey them.
“Illegal” requires enforcement.
He doesn’t have anyone stopping him. There isn’t anyone to actually stop him. He’s dismantling the oversight and just shutting down everything.
You forget, this would be another opportunity for the judicial branch to bypass Congress and “write” law, and they love that power.
Yes, I know the rules too. No, they consider themselves above the law.
Congress has too many cooks to change the Constitution properly, and likely wouldn’t pass. An executive order and crooked judgement may be testing the waters to for future dictatorship.
We’ll see, I guess. They may just as well not take it up and say that the lower courts have it right. They’re kind of unpredictable like that.
The whole issue here is that the American constitution is high level framework written in the legal jargon of three different centuries. It’s only viable if either (1) no one really cares about how the Federal government handles itself (1789-ca1850ish), or (2) there is a a tacit agreement that legal precedent and custom are actually important to get on with the business of governing (1865-2025).
The 14th amendment is extremely clear, with the sole exception of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Unfortunately, that one’s only “very” clear, and requires some very basic understanding of the legislative history and customary usage in a legal context. It basically means literally everyone present in the country with the exception of those with diplomatic immunity, invading armies, and (at that time) members of Native American tribes. There was no real regulation of in-migration when it was signed, but the debates were very clear that even “undesireable” people who could not be trusted to assimilate would be citizens merely by being born here, and no one challenged the point.
If you don’t understand anything about the history, though, or if you want to willfully ignore it because you have an idiotic textualism approach that would make Antonin Scalia cringe, then you open that back up for litigation. Then there’s the issue of Trump declaring everything an emergency and pretending that some dudes who want to cook some french fries or a single mom hoping her kids won’t get shot by a cartel are somehow equivalent to an invading army. It’s facially absurd, but the constitution being what it is, if they challenge it, then the courts have to at least consider it.
With the ascendancy of originalism at the Supreme Court, and with the right wing deciding to push a “unitary executive” theory to its ad-absurdum conclusion, they might get what they want and largely dismantle the checks and balances in the system without an official “coup” at all. This would remove the predictability that allows a system to chug along and slowly but inexorably change with the times (hardly good enough for true justice, but it at least sets some sort of floor for awfulness), and it would also seriously weaken the guardrails to having free and fair elections at all.