The Court has mistaken a border for a people. That is the central error of today’s birthright citizenship decision.
The majority treats citizenship as if it follows automatically from the physical event of birth inside American territory. But the American constitutional tradition has never understood citizenship as a mere fact of location. It has understood citizenship as a legal and political bond between a person and a sovereign people and that was true at the Founding.
The Constitution gave Congress power to establish a uniform rule of naturalization because citizenship could not be left to accident, confusion, or local manipulation. Hamilton wrote in Federalist 32 that a uniform rule had to be national because citizenship defines membership in the nation itself. Madison made the same point in Federalist 42, criticizing the Articles of Confederation for allowing loose state rules to convert alien inhabitants into citizens with rights across the Union.
The Founders did not think citizenship was a border trick. They treated it as a matter of sovereign judgment.
The Fourteenth Amendment did not erase that premise. It was adopted to repudiate Dred Scott and secure citizenship for freedmen who were born here, lived under American authority, owed no allegiance to a foreign power, and had been wrongfully excluded from the American people.
That is why the text does not stop at birth. It requires birth in the United States and subjection to the jurisdiction thereof.
The majority makes that second requirement nearly useless. It says jurisdiction means little more than being subject to American law while present here. But everyone inside the country is subject to American law in that sense. Tourists are. Foreign students are. Temporary workers are. Unlawful entrants are. That proves the government has territorial power over them. It does not prove they have entered the political relation of allegiance and membership.
Thomas and Alito, as usual, got it right. The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” was not idle drafting. It preserved the distinction between presence and belonging, between control and allegiance, between being governed while here and being incorporated into the people of the United States.
The majority collapses all of that. It imports the broadest version of English subjecthood, strips it from the American founding, runs it through Reconstruction, and then declares the result constitutionally inevitable. Ridiculous.
Dred Scott denied citizenship to those who were already part of the American people. Today’s Court commits the opposite error by treating constitutional membership as a consequence of mere territorial birth.
Citizenship is not a hospital record. It is not a souvenir of geography. It is not created by crossing a border and giving birth.
Citizenship is allegiance, protection, obligation, and membership in a sovereign people.
The majority forgot the people.
https://t.co/9q09vM217S
Arkansas has the only law in the country that’s successfully kicked a Communist Chinese company off our farmland - and a judge just blocked it.
Our foreign adversaries have no right to American land. We will appeal this ruling and protect our state.
Elon is on a rampage to take out Senate RINOs
Good
We finally have an extremely wealthy political billionaire fighting for the MAGA team
Combine that with our MAGA social media ecosystem filled with influencers and podcasts with hundreds of millions of followers and we now have political nuclear warhead arsenal
RINOs have been warned!
I believe this is true. I’ve had a whistleblower in Europe telling me this for over a year. Up to 90% of our money to Ukraine was stolen. Half was laundered back to corrupt American politicians (Democrats and some Republicans too) and the rest into Eastern Europe.
BREAKING: RNC Chairman, Michael Whatley announces that the RNC is filing multiple lawsuits against the state of California for accepting mail in ballots 7 days after Election Day, and taking almost a month after Election Day to stop counting ballots.
🚨 RUDY GIULIANI: “The reality is I have no cash. If I want to call a taxi, I can't do it. I don't have a credit card; I don't have a checking account. I have no place I can go take cash out.”
What the left has done to America’s Mayor is an absolute TRAVESTY.
We can’t let them do this anyone else. EVER.
God bless you, @RudyGiuliani