{"id":314,"date":"2026-06-30T16:39:39","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T16:39:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=314"},"modified":"2026-06-30T16:39:39","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T16:39:39","slug":"the-supreme-courts-5-4-vote-in-the-birthright-citizenship-case-is-a-scandal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=314","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court\u2019s 5-4 Vote in the Birthright Citizenship Case Is a Scandal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is part of <\/em>Opinionpalooza<\/em>, Slate\u2019s coverage of the major decisions from the Supreme Court. Keep up with all of our Supreme Court coverage and analysis by <\/em>signing up for weekly email roundups<\/em>. The best way to support our work\u2014and unlock exclusive legal analysis\u2014is by joining <\/em>Slate Plus<\/em>. (If you are already a member, consider a <\/em>donation<\/em> or <\/em>merch<\/em>!)<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Trump Just Got the Supreme Court to Do Project 2025 for Him<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that the first sentence of the 14th Amendment means exactly what it says: Birthright citizenship is the nation\u2019s fundamental law, and Donald Trump cannot repeal it via executive order. The vote was 5\u20134. This outcome is, of course, a relief. But the margin is a scandal. It is nothing short of stunning that Trump came one vote away from convincing the Supreme Court to repeal the bedrock of the Reconstruction Amendments based on a brazenly partisan contortion of their text and history. A view held only by fringe, far-right nativists until very <\/em>recently has secured support from four of the nine members of the court: Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. This is a shocking development that should upend all expectations that this Supreme Court can be trusted to apply the most basic constitutional guarantees when a Republican president seeks to nullify them. If a theory flatly rejected by all serious legal scholars and historians can come one vote away from success, no rights are safe. Everything is on the table.<\/p>\n

Start with the good\u2014because it really is worth celebrating, however cautiously: Chief Justice John Roberts\u2019 majority opinion in Tuesday\u2019s case, , gets it exactly right. The United States inherited universal birthright citizenship from England and maintained it after the Revolution, with the glaring exception of slavery. Southern states refused to acknowledge the citizenship of Black Americans, and the Supreme Court notoriously embraced their view in 1857\u2019s Dred Scott<\/em>. That evil decision helped precipitate the Civil War. Once the slave power had been vanquished, the Reconstruction Congress sought to enshrine birthright citizenship in the Constitution so it could never be stripped away again. It did so in 1868 through the 14th Amendment, which states that \u201call persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens\u201d of the nation.<\/p>\n

Roberts walked through the congressional debates over the amendment to show that its framers recognized their handiwork would apply to the children of immigrants. These debates also revealed that the phrase \u201csubject to the jurisdiction thereof\u201d had a particular meaning: It allowed \u201cnarrow exceptions\u201d for the children of \u201cforeign ministers\u201d and certain \u201cIndian tribes over whom the United States had ceded a part of its territorial jurisdiction.\u201d In other words, the government relinquished its authority to subject these individuals to the full force of its authority \u201cto preserve its relationship with a foreign sovereign.\u201d But \u201cno such intersovereign concerns,\u201d Roberts explained, \u201capply to children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States.\u201d Their parents are subject to the jurisdiction of the government, and so, \u201cunder the Constitution, they are citizens at birth.\u201d Trump\u2019s attempt to take away their citizenship is therefore unconstitutional.<\/p>\n

This holding should have been 9\u20130. Yet it was somehow 5\u20134, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the three liberals joining Roberts in full. His account is the only remotely plausible reading of the 14th Amendment and its historical record. Indeed, the Supreme Court already reached the same conclusion in 1898\u2019s Wong Kim Ark<\/em>, as Roberts stressed. The same court that blessed \u201cseparate but equal\u201d in Plessy v. Ferguson <\/em>was able, in Wong Kim Ark<\/em>, to see that the children of immigrants receive automatic birthright citizenship.<\/p>\n

Read more The Supreme Court Sure Loves Forking Over More Power to Donald Trump<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet on Tuesday, four justices resisted that obvious conclusion. Justice Kavanaugh wrote that Trump\u2019s executive order is unlawful under a federal statute that mirrors the 14th Amendment, but not under the amendment itself; he asserted that temporary or unauthorized immigrants today are \u201crelevantly similar\u201d to foreign ministers in 1868, so Congress could deny their children birthright citizenship if it wished. Meanwhile, Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch would have upheld the order against the plaintiffs\u2019 facial challenge, holding that it is not <\/em>unlawful in its entirety. Thomas and Gorsuch would have written words into the amendment that are not there, requiring parents to have \u201cdomicile\u201d in the United States and \u201cprimary allegiance\u201d to its government in order for their offspring to receive birthright citizenship. Alito argued that a child must not be \u201csubject to any foreign power\u201d to receive the promise of the 14th Amendment\u2014so if their parents\u2019 foreign citizenship gets passed on by descent, they do not become U.S. citizens at birth.<\/p>\n

All of these views would have radically curtailed the constitutional promise of birthright citizenship, creating a permanent caste of people\u2014many stateless\u2014who are born in the U.S. but unable to exercise basic rights of citizenship. They would be vulnerable to detention and removal simply because of their parents\u2019 immigration status, deportable to a foreign nation in which they have never set foot. The implementation of this scheme would be ghastly: As the Trump administration already acknowledged, it would require officials to interrogate parents just after birth, forcing them to supply sufficient proof of \u201cdomicile\u201d and \u201callegiance,\u201d and denying their children citizenship if this proof could not be produced. Infants could be deported shortly after birth. Those who remained would have to live in the shadows, never able to legally work or secure basic protections of lawful residency.<\/p>\n

The Framers of the 14th Amendment sought to ensure that the United States would never again tolerate an underclass of people denied full equality by accident of birth. It is certainly encouraging that Roberts and Barrett offered a full-throated vindication of this foundational guarantee. But it is profoundly disturbing that four justices rejected it. Few Supreme Court cases are as straightforward as this one. Rarely does history point so clearly to one outcome. And yet the dissenters each sought to roll back the Constitution to make room for Trump\u2019s nativist agenda. If they are willing to sacrifice birthright citizenship for this president, what other rights might they toss in the fire? What provision of the 14th Amendment is safe from destruction? They need only nab one more vote to constitutionalize Trump\u2019s vision of America as a caste system in which an entire class of (overwhelmingly nonwhite) people are excluded from the national community. This is not just a rejection of equal citizenship. It is a roadmap straight back to Dred Scott<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Read more The Mail-Ballot Case Squeaked By<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is nothing short of stunning that Trump came one vote away from convincing the Supreme Court to repeal the bedrock of the Reconstruction Amendments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[56,74,64,23,11,73,15],"class_list":["post-314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jurisprudence","tag-brett-kavanaugh","tag-constitution","tag-immigration","tag-john-roberts","tag-jurisprudence","tag-opinionpalooza-2026","tag-supreme-court"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Supreme Court\u2019s 5-4 Vote in the Birthright Citizenship Case Is a Scandal - Home Move Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=314\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Supreme Court\u2019s 5-4 Vote in the Birthright Citizenship Case Is a Scandal - 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