The Fourteenth Amendment is clear, unless you are a lawyer paid to pretend that “born in the United States” is a metaphor for “born in a country club with the right membership dues.”
We have reached the point in the American experiment where the user agreement is being rewritten in real time, and the terms of service are becoming increasingly hostile to the users. On January 20, 2025, mere hours after taking the oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” It is a title that deserves a Pulitzer Prize for euphemism. It frames citizenship not as a right or a covenant, but as a commodity, a limited-edition luxury good that loses its market value if you let just anyone have it. The order directs federal agencies to deny automatic birthright citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to parents who are neither U.S. citizens nor lawful permanent residents.
In a sane legal environment, this order would have been laughed out of the room before the ink was dry. The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is one of the few parts of the Constitution that is written in plain English. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It does not say “All persons born to citizens.” It does not say “All persons born to people Stephen Miller likes.” It says “All persons.” It was written in blood after the Civil War specifically to ensure that former slaves and their descendants could not be denied citizenship by the states that had enslaved them. It is the bedrock of our modern concept of belonging.
But we do not live in a sane legal environment. We live in a timeline where the Supreme Court has agreed to hear an expedited appeal of this order, setting up a showdown next spring that will determine if the text of the Constitution actually means what it says, or if it means whatever five justices with a penchant for 17th-century witch trial jurisprudence decide it means.
The lower courts, to their credit, blocked the order immediately. Multiple federal judges looked at the text, looked at 150 years of precedent, and issued injunctions that essentially said, “You cannot be serious.” But the administration appealed, and the Supreme Court, rather than letting the injunctions stand and allowing the case to wind its way through the normal process, has decided to fast-track it. They want to settle this now. By June, we will know if the United States is still a nation of laws or if we have transitioned fully into a nation of loopholes.
The Gentrification of the Womb
The premise of the executive order is that birthright citizenship is a “magnet” for illegal immigration and that it devalues the citizenship of everyone else. This is the economics of the country club applied to human rights. The logic suggests that my citizenship is somehow worth less because a baby born to a farmworker in Fresno also has it. It treats rights like a pie; if someone else gets a slice, mine must be smaller. It is a scarcity mindset applied to the soul of the nation.
But let’s look at the practical mechanics of what the administration is proposing. They want to turn every maternity ward in America into a border checkpoint. Imagine the scene. A woman goes into labor. She rushes to the hospital. But before she can get an epidural, she has to produce a passport. She has to produce a green card. She has to prove that her genetic material is authorized to be on American soil. If she can’t, or if her status is in that gray area of “pending” or “processing,” the baby born ten minutes later is… what?
This is the nightmare scenario that the ACLU and allied civil-rights groups are screaming about in their class-action challenge. If you strip birthright citizenship, you create a caste of “stateless” children. These are babies born in America who are not Americans, but who may not be citizens of their parents’ home countries either, depending on those nations’ laws. They are ghosts. They have no social security number. They have no passport. They cannot go to school. They cannot get healthcare. They exist in a legal void, physically present but legally invisible.
The administration’s lawyers will argue about “statutory hooks” and the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” They will twist themselves into pretzels trying to argue that a person subject to U.S. laws, U.S. taxes, and U.S. courts is somehow not subject to U.S. jurisdiction. They will cite obscure treatises from the 1800s. They will invoke the “original intent” of the framers, conveniently ignoring that the framers of the 14th Amendment were explicitly trying to expand citizenship, not restrict it.
This is the intellectual rot at the heart of the modern conservative legal movement. They claim to be textualists. They claim to care about what the words say. But when the words say “All persons born,” they suddenly become creative writers. They start looking for the subtext. They start looking for the invisible asterisk that says “*terms and conditions apply.”
The Bureaucracy of Cruelty
If the Supreme Court upholds this order, the immediate political fallout will be nuclear. But the administrative fallout will be worse. It will require a massive expansion of the federal bureaucracy to track the lineage of every infant born in the country. We claim to hate the “Deep State,” yet we are proposing a system where the government needs to verify your pedigree before you are allowed to legally exist.
It will invite sweeping state and congressional countermeasures. Blue states will try to issue their own documentation. Red states will try to deny services to the “non-citizen” infants. We will have a patchwork of laws where a baby is a person in California but contraband in Texas. It will spawn mass litigation over standing and class certification that will clog the courts for a generation.
And for what? To solve a problem that doesn’t exist? The “anchor baby” myth has been debunked more times than the flat earth theory. Immigrants do not come here to drop a baby and get a free pass. They come here to work. They come here to survive. The citizenship of their child is a byproduct, not the goal.
But the cruelty is the point. The goal is not to fix immigration policy. The goal is to send a signal. The signal is that America is closed. The signal is that even if you are born here, even if you take your first breath of air in a hospital in Ohio, you do not belong if your blood isn’t the right kind of blood. It is a rejection of the civic nationalism that has defined the American experiment—the idea that being American is a matter of creed and location, not ethnicity—in favor of a European-style blood-and-soil nationalism.
The Originalist Trap
The expedited briefing schedule means we are going to spend the next few months listening to very smart people make very stupid arguments. We will hear about how the 14th Amendment was only meant for former slaves, not for the children of Mexican laborers. We will hear about how “jurisdiction” implies a political allegiance that a baby cannot possess.
It is gaslighting on a constitutional scale. The authors of the 14th Amendment knew exactly what they were doing. They debated this. They knew that “all persons” meant everyone. Senator Jacob Howard, one of the architects of the clause, explicitly said it applied to the children of aliens. The precedent was settled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898.
But precedent is just a speed bump to this Court. We saw that with Dobbs. If they want to get to a specific outcome, they will bulldoze the history to get there. They will cherry-pick the quotes. They will ignore the reality.
The stakes are enormous because this isn’t just about immigration. It is about the power of the executive to rewrite the Constitution. If the President can revoke a constitutional right by signing a piece of paper, then we don’t have a Constitution. We have a suggestion box.
If the Court upholds this, it opens the door to stripping other rights. Can the President redefine “freedom of the press” via executive order? Can he redefine “due process”? Once you establish that the plain text of the Constitution is subject to the whims of the current occupant of the White House, the whole structure collapses.
The Value of Scarcity
Let’s go back to that title: “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.”
It reveals so much about the worldview of the people running the country. They view rights as currency. They believe that if too many people have rights, the value of their own rights goes down. It is the logic of the crypto-bro applied to democracy. They want to create artificial scarcity to pump the price of their own status.
But citizenship isn’t Bitcoin. It doesn’t lose value when more people have it. It gains value. The more people who are invested in the American project, the stronger the project becomes. The “value” of citizenship is in the shared commitment to the law, not in the exclusivity of the club.
By trying to restrict it, they are actually devaluing it. They are turning it into a privilege granted by the state, rather than a right inherent to the person. A citizenship that can be denied by a bureaucrat is not a right; it is a license. And licenses can be revoked.
This is the ultimate irony. In their attempt to “protect” citizenship, they are rendering it worthless. They are transforming it from a constitutional guarantee into a political favor.
The Waiting Game
So now we wait. We wait for the briefs to be filed. We wait for the oral arguments next spring, where the justices will ask hypothetical questions about Roman law and the definition of “allegiance” in 1868. We wait for the ruling in June.
And while we wait, tens of thousands of pregnant women are looking at the calendar with terror. They are wondering if their child will be born in time. They are wondering if their baby will be an American or an anomaly.
The practical mechanics of record-keeping and potential statelessness guarantee immediate political fallout regardless of the Court’s ultimate doctrinal holding. Even if the Court strikes down the order, the damage is done. The idea has been mainstreamed. The threat has been made. The fear has been instilled.
We are watching a stress test of the American soul. Are we a nation that welcomes the newborn, or are we a nation that asks to see their papers before we cut the cord? Are we a country that believes in the potential of every child born on our soil, or are we a country that condemns them for the sins of their parents?
The legal fight will be technical. It will be about clauses and commas. But the moral fight is simple. It is about whether we believe that a baby is a person, or if we believe a baby is a legal problem to be solved.
The administration has made its choice. They have chosen to view the maternity ward as a battlefield. They have chosen to view the infant as an invader.
Now it is up to the Supreme Court to decide if they agree. And given the recent track record of this Court, none of us should be sleeping well. The “originalists” are about to decide if the original words of the Constitution matter, or if they only matter when they serve the conservative agenda.
If they rule against the plain text, they will have completed the transformation of the Court from a legal body into a political one. They will have proven that the law is nothing more than power dressed up in a robe.
And the millions of us watching will be left to wonder: if the Constitution doesn’t protect a baby born here, who does it protect?
Receipt Time
The invoice for this constitutional vandalism is going to be astronomical. It will include the legal fees for the years of litigation. It will include the cost of the new bureaucracy needed to police the womb. But the real cost will be paid by the children. It will be paid by the child who grows up in the only country they have ever known, only to be told they don’t belong. It will be paid by the communities torn apart by fear. The receipt shows a surcharge for “Nativism” and a massive deduction for “Humanity.” And the fine print at the bottom says: No returns, no exchanges, and no refunds on lost rights.