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The Supreme Court's Big Birthright Citizenship Decision Is the Absolute Bare Minimum - Madiba Dennie @ Balls & Strikes
https://ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/birthright-citizenship-decision-bare-minimum-opinion-recap/A razor-thin majority of the Supreme Court confirmed today that the Fourteenth Amendment means what it says: “All persons” born in the United States and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens of the United States. In January 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that attempted to unilaterally revoke that guarantee, limiting citizenship at birth to only U.S.-born children with at least one parent who is a citizen or legal permanent resident.
If implemented, Trump’s directive would have denied the rights and privileges of citizenship, like the ability to vote and freedom from deportation, to hundreds of thousands of people born in the U.S. every year. But on Tuesday, the Court held this scheme unconstitutional, ruling 5-4 in Trump v. Barbara that Trump’s order contravened the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment as it has been understood across centuries.
Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by the three Democratic appointees and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, explained that early American colonists imported the English common-law rule of citizenship by birth in a territory, but that slave states had “abandoned” that rule by making citizenship depend on “blood, not soil.” In the “odious decision” of Dred Scott v. Sandford, Roberts continued, the Court had “imposed the Southern States’ beliefs onto the Nation,” holding that the longstanding tradition of citizenship by birth did not apply to Black people.
Roberts’s opinion makes clear that Congress adopted the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War to “repudiate” Dred Scott. Roberts also quoted the amendment’s drafters, who were explicit about their aim to put the “great question of citizenship” squarely “beyond the legislative power.”
By attempting to exclude people with disfavored ancestry from citizenship at birth, Trump’s directive was a brazen effort to reproduce an antebellum white supremacist legal order that the Fourteenth Amendment and subsequent Supreme Court decisions already repudiated. Trump v. Barbara should thus have been an extraordinarily easy case; it should not have taken so long or been so difficult for the Court to affirm the constitutional foundation of multiracial democracy in the United States.
If implemented, Trump’s directive would have denied the rights and privileges of citizenship, like the ability to vote and freedom from deportation, to hundreds of thousands of people born in the U.S. every year. But on Tuesday, the Court held this scheme unconstitutional, ruling 5-4 in Trump v. Barbara that Trump’s order contravened the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment as it has been understood across centuries.
Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by the three Democratic appointees and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, explained that early American colonists imported the English common-law rule of citizenship by birth in a territory, but that slave states had “abandoned” that rule by making citizenship depend on “blood, not soil.” In the “odious decision” of Dred Scott v. Sandford, Roberts continued, the Court had “imposed the Southern States’ beliefs onto the Nation,” holding that the longstanding tradition of citizenship by birth did not apply to Black people.
Roberts’s opinion makes clear that Congress adopted the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War to “repudiate” Dred Scott. Roberts also quoted the amendment’s drafters, who were explicit about their aim to put the “great question of citizenship” squarely “beyond the legislative power.”
By attempting to exclude people with disfavored ancestry from citizenship at birth, Trump’s directive was a brazen effort to reproduce an antebellum white supremacist legal order that the Fourteenth Amendment and subsequent Supreme Court decisions already repudiated. Trump v. Barbara should thus have been an extraordinarily easy case; it should not have taken so long or been so difficult for the Court to affirm the constitutional foundation of multiracial democracy in the United States.
underappreciated that the racist and lawless position adopted by 4 justices in the birthright citizenship case a few days ago was considered and rejected by justices in *1898* who were like oh woof that's too racist and lawless even for us
— Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie (@audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app) 2026-07-03T17:05:04.595Z
ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/birth...