one who has no love for Trump, let's be clear on that point--discussed the dissents.
That's where the obvious push to end birthright citizenship found residence.
His point was that the discussion there didn't mostly involve those here illegally and their children. Yes, there bits that did involve it but those often reached ludicrous conclusions that others didn't pick up or endorse. What was common among the discussions and the one real point of agreement was concerning those here temporarily, and explicitly here temporarily, with every intent to return to their country and so doing on schedule, and their children who might only spend a few days or a week in the US before going home to their real 'home country' to be raised. In other words, what's often termed "birth tourism." If anything, that's what almost lost "birthright citizenship," aka jus soli.
Maybe it's the camel's nose, but most of the other readings have either impossible conclusions--all those born to those who illegally immigrated are "stateless", for example, which is way, way cray-cray--or have pretty much at best mentions by some one legislator as being a possible meaning of 14A. While dismissing the 'stateless' bit as what the 14A can't mean has a lot of 'we need it to mean X, so that's what it's going to have to mean', which is a lousy way, I think, of understanding what the text of a law means, the entire discussion requires so many categories and delineations that didn't hold in the 1860s as to render historical parallels for some situations ludicrous. In the absence of immigration law, who could be an illegally immigrated person? And a precedent quoted in the majority opinion specifically referred to a case where an immigrant couple that had lived here for 4 years and who while here had a child were the parents of a US citizen, a child that didn't need to be naturalized. Were the couple illegally immigrated or not? Easier to ask how many angels not only dance on the head of a pin, but specifically how many can do a chilean cueca on the mythic pin's head. (Sorry, am listening to Agustin Barrios.)
Disturbing is one dissent that said that jus soli was quite per the 14A, but violated a Congressional statute. Another said Congress could remedy the issue by statute, no amendment needed. I'm not sure how that would work and the pundit didn't punditize any further, perhaps because this was reviewing the opinions and not really punditry. Sometimes pundits just read texts and take them at face value, within risking spinning them beyond what their integrity could bear.
That makes the majority opinion rather less earthshaking and the dissents rather less fractious, meaning the fault line isn't nearly almost an 8.0 on the now subject-to-desuetude Richter scale, but maybe a 3.3.
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