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Is birthright citizenship safe from Trump?
It’s more complicated than it should be.
Patrick Reis was the senior politics and ideas editor at Vox. He previously worked at Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, Politico, National Journal, and Seattle’s Real Change News. As a reporter and editor, he has worked on coverage of campaign politics, economic policy, the federal death penalty, climate change, financial regulation, and homelessness.
Welcome to The Logoff: The Supreme Court heard arguments about a birthright citizenship case today that are really about two questions: Does President Donald Trump have the power to end a core American ideal? And how much power do lower court judges have to block Trump’s agenda?
What’s going on with birthright citizenship? On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship, the principle that people born in the US (almost always) immediately become US citizens. Trump’s order is an obvious violation of the 14th Amendment, and states successfully sued in multiple lower courts to block it, starting a process that brought it to the Supreme Court today.
Is the Supreme Court going to uphold birthright citizenship? None of the justices defended Trump’s anti-birthright order during arguments, and several of them suggested it was blatantly unconstitutional.
So what’s the issue? The hearing was less about whether the order was constitutional than about whether lower court judges had overstepped their authority when they blocked the policy nationwide. Multiple Supreme Court justices today seemed sympathetic to that argument, suggesting some limits on these nationwide injunctions could be coming. But we won’t know for sure until the ruling comes down, which could take weeks.
What’s the big picture? Long-term, birthright citizenship appears almost certain to survive. That’s important, because birthright citizenship is critical to the concept that America is held together by a shared commitment to our democratic system, rather than by genetic inheritance.
But if the Supreme Court limits the scope of the judges’ order, it may mean that some of Trump’s policies — even ones that are eventually found unconstitutional — get to go into effect while they work their way through the legal system.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
Yesterday I wrote about how we can make life better and are doing so all the time. Today I’m excited to surface another example: a new “gene-editing therapy” treatment that has given this baby a second chance at life in what the New York Times describes as “medical history.” As one doctor put it: “It really is sort of limitless in terms of what the possibilities are.” And that’s something worth celebrating. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow.
