In a long awaited ruling, the court affirmed by a 6-3 margin the constitutional right of birthright citizenship, that anyone born in the US is a citizen irrespective of the status of the parents. (There are small exceptions such as the children of foreign diplomats.)
The US supreme court has upheld birthright citizenship, which provides nearly all people born in the country with citizenship, ruling against a central piece of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.
“Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause,” the ruling says.
…The supreme court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 had ruled Black people were not US citizens, but “a separate class of persons”. But the 14th amendment which reversed the Dred Scott decision, was adopted in 1868 during the reconstruction era after the US civil war, to codify the rights of Black Americans – and confer citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”.
The majority opinion walks through the plain meanings of citizenship, from English common law into slavery and then emancipation, and then into efforts to undermine citizenship, including the Chinese exclusion act.
Roberts writes that the “odious” decision in Dred Scott denied citizenship to Black people, arguing then that it was “blood, not soil” that decided citizenship. That was overturned via the 14th amendment, which the court affirmed on Tuesday in upholding birthright citizenship.
…In her concurring opinion, [Ketanji Brown] Jackson writes that the 14th amendment’s “universalist aims should forever be the death knell for this kind of claim – one that seeks to make bloodline the marker of birthright”.
“The America that was reborn from the rubble of the Civil War simply does not countenance that inequitable result,” she wrote. “Thankfully, a majority of the Court remembered this today, and has dutifully preserved the most basic animating principle of our Nation’s founding – that all human beings are created equal – once more.”
…The Trump administration argued the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means babies born in the US to people who are not lawfully present in the country are not citizens. The executive order says this includes when neither of a person’s parents were US citizens or lawful permanent residents, or if a parent has legal, but temporary, status.
Trump is still seeking the power to more easily strip citizenship from naturalized citizens.
This was one of two cases where the court went against Trump’s wishes, another one being a 5-4 ruling that Trump could not summarily fire a member of the Federal Reserve, though they did allow him to fire without cause the heads of independent agencies or commission, overturning 90 years of precedents.
In a blow to transgender rights, the court ruled 6-3 that states can bar transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports, continuing the assault on the rights of this already victimized group.
The court also struck down some limits on campaign spending. Since huge amounts of money, both open and dark, already flood US elections, this may not have much practical effect.
There is no doubt that this is a very right-wing, radical Supreme Court, willing to give sweeping power to the president, even one who has clearly demonstrated a vindictive nature, willing to use the immense power of the government to attack anyone who opposes him while enriching himself and his family and friends. When you have someone like Trump who violates every norm that usually restrains presidential actions, it becomes even more important to ensure that the safeguards of the constitution are strictly interpreted and enforced. The court has abandoned that role.
The Orange Turd should be made a citizen of Europa and exported there.
The ‘can’t fire the Fed Chair’ ruling has been described elsewhere as the ‘Trump can do whatever he wants as long as it doesn’t affect my retirement funds’ ruling, as the Court’s attempt at finding narrower and narrower protections for the Fed Chair (without protecting any other commission that has otherwise relied on mostly non-partisan continuance to maintain their oprations) makes it clear that this isn’t a matter of principle, it’s just the recognition that firing the Fed Chair and replacing him with a know-nothing toady will result in the economy cratering hard very quickly in ways that would affect even rich people who normally believe themselves immune to that.
Josh Marshall at TPM has been banging the drum about needing to reform of the court as one of the earliest steps taken by a new administration: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-supreme-courts-corruption-must-be-broken
Sunday @3, I absolutely agree. I was hoping that Biden would do, but it’s one of the first things that needs to be done.
Strict, enforced, ethical standards, expanding the number of justices, term limits, locking them in their bedrooms, whatever it takes.
This is particularly poignent for me, as Japan has not only never accepted soil but only blood as the basis for citizenship. they just made it illegal to !desecrate the Japanese flag”. (Please go have a flag-burning party in front of the Japanese embassy!)
Our rights are being taken away and nobody seems to care.
It’s good that Trump was not able to unilaterally compromise the constitution (…this time…), but I’ll note USA’s birthright citizenship is a considerably more generous arrangement than what I have seen elsewhere. In particular, in Australia, a person born onshore only gains citizenship if, at the time of birth, at least one parent is an Australian citizen, or is a New Zealand citizen, or has a permanent visa. All children of temporary visa holders simply get the temporary visa the parents hold, or no visa at all if neither parent has a visa at birth.
(A child that is born onshore and not granted citizenship at birth will acquire citizenship on their tenth birthday, provided they were residing primarily in Australia for that decade.)
I believe New Zealand and Japan have similar arrangements, and I have heard some other places are less generous still.
Holms, Jus soli at the level that exists in the USA is very common in the Americas, very uncommon on other continents.
@tony and Holms, as anat says, birthright by location is more common in The New World.
But, remember, when these people wrote the 14th Amendment, they were trying to fix slavery, the worst thing that ever happened and something that isn’t even fully fixed today. So, they had to try anything, they ended up with jus soli.
(anat’s Wiki article says, in South and Latin America, during the centuries of brutal slavery and colonization, by adopting jus soli, the colonizers may have been trying to encourage more European colonizers to immigrate and displace the native peoples. Thanks a lot.)
The dangerous part is that 3 US Supreme Court justices were willing to let Trump remake the clear and unambiguous language of the US Constitution to suit his whims. Not just any president but Trump, who they already know is untrustworthy. And the only problem a 4th saw with it was that other laws prohibited what he wanted to do. Changing the Constitution and how it’s been read for well over a century was okay with him but laws that use it as a foundation were not.
It’s hard to make up idiocy like this.
Keep in mind when the rest of us want something like say equal pay for women we have this whole long convoluted process to go through. Trump is a single more brazenly stupid idiot in a robe from being able to do it because he writes a memo.
It’s only 5-4 in favor of the Constitution about birthright citizenship, because Kavanaugh may have joined the majority vote so it is 6-3 on record for the plaintiff but as near as I can tell he doesn’t believe in it as far as the Constitution says?
lanir and seachange, yes.
I’ve long thought that lawyers craft arguments given conclusions, at least when wearing their advocate or judge hats. The “textualists” on the court are probably better described as apologists for the cult of Trump.
@billseymour: Honestly I prefer when they call themselves “originalists” because their shenanigans make me want to be very, very “originalist” about the role and power of the US Supreme Court.
For anyone that isn’t aware, the early US Supreme Court basically conjured its role and authority out of thin air. I don’t know the history in enough detail to say why anyone at the time allowed this to happen but up until recently it has let them function as a co-equal branch of the government and provide a meaningful check on the power of the legislative and executive branches. They have some very notable failures in this such as the slavery upholding Dred Scott decision and the Korematsu decision that green lit Japanese internment camps during WWII. But as far as I’m aware it’s only this current court that is quite so determined to hand power to the executive branch. Aside from deciding who gets to be a citizen based on his whims or running the Federal Reserve the way he’s run the Kennedy Center the Supreme Court seems content to let him do whatever he wants. With the enthusiastic cheering of Republicans in Congress in the background.
One of the first things Biden did was ruling out adding more judges to the supreme court. Even the neoliberal Dem governor Gavin Newsom wants to change the SCOTUS now, as we have seen what a travesty it is.