Birthright citizenship ruling was a win for democracy — and a warning

This week’s narrow Supreme Court decision protecting birthright citizenship is rightly being hailed as a triumph of the American experiment.

By some, at least.

Take a look at the MAGA world and you’ll quickly see that Trump surrogates and even elected leaders are expressing the kind of extremist anti-immigrant sentiment that was once, not so long ago, considered intolerable in public.

These include proposals that go as far as banning pregnant women from traveling to the US for fear they might give birth there, and – no joke – one prominent commentator writes that a solution could be requiring the sterilization of female immigrants.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s Homeland Security adviser, said after the decision that children of immigrants “may not be qualified to continue or carry on the legacy of this country.”

“There are people all over the world, from Third World countries, who would never have invented the wheel, let alone air travel, let alone medicine, let alone modern technology, and they come into the country, have a baby in the hospital, paid for by you and me, and then that baby automatically becomes a citizen,” Miller said.

Before you tell me the Supreme Court has spoken and this deal is done, let me tell you about the case of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, though there is more disgusting Miller mush to be had. written opinion and why is it important? Read correctly, this is a warning of what comes next: the struggle to rewrite history to serve political purposes.

“The odds were long and the stakes high,” Jackson wrote of the creation of this system. 14th Amendment The 1866 law that has long been understood as granting citizenship to every child born on U.S. soil is the focus of this case.

Yet, he wrote, even though post-Civil War America was unlikely to confront the problem of inclusivity, change should always do just that—because free Black people, recently emancipated but denied citizenship, “fought for the common humanity of all people.”

An alternative interpretation of this change and this history in the MAGA world was central to this case.

To greatly simplify, the 14th Amendment was actually a response to the Supreme Court decision; Dred Scott trialThis said, freed Black slaves could not become U.S. citizens. The MAGA world argued that the authors of the 14th Amendment never intended anything more than that: citizenship for former slaves and their descendants.

Agreeing with the court’s majority, Jackson also wrote his own brief, which made a vital point: Without a history that includes the black experience—as many of the arguments in this case do—we miss out on the suffering that shapes our values ​​and provides us with the empathy needed to become a pluralistic society.

The history of black people – indeed, the history of people of color – is the history of resistance and the road map out of this dark age of hatred.

It is difficult to call someone your citizen if you take away his humanity; That’s what this cause is trying to do, by dividing those fighting for equality into factions and rewriting history with only voices that match the goals of the current administration.

It was disappointing that the court, whose individual justices revolved around arguments from numerous sources other than their previous commitments to ideas of originality, did not voice this deletion more forcefully, and that it was left to Jackson to do so.

Jackson took the narrow notion that Black people and white legislators sympathetic to their cause had only themselves in mind when drafting the 14th Amendment and attacked it directly; He argued that if we looked at what Black people were saying at the time, the larger purpose of the amendment would become clear.

Speaking of the MAGA version of events, Jackson said, “This alternative explanation pits Black Americans against immigrants when Fourteenth Amendment advocates do no such thing.” “Free Blacks fought for the common humanity of all people.”

“The universalist vision of belonging and citizenship,” he wrote, “ultimately won the day.”

The 14th Amendment was largely written by Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, and drew much of its foundation from the legal arguments of Black intellectuals, including the most influential Black statesman of the era, Frederick Douglass.

Trumbull later argued in Congress that the amendment should be inclusive even for so-called “gypsies” and Chinese immigrants, who face extreme racism, especially in California.

A congressman who opposes the measure warned that if the law passes, Chinese immigrants will “overwhelm” California and “the population will double or triple.” He also warned that Roma would probably continue to “wander in gangs” and that “they will have no homes, they will behave as if they have no land, they will live nowhere, they will settle as trespassers wherever they go, and their only virtue will be universal fraud.”

When asked whether the amendment would grant citizenship to these two controversial immigrant groups, Jackson notes that Trumbull “undoubtedly” made no apology, again drawing on the universalist ideas of Douglass and others.

“The child of an Asian is as much a citizen as the child of a European,” Trumbull said (and Jackson, quoting an amicus brief by Evan Bernick of Northern Illinois University and Jed Sugerman of Boston University).

“There is a serious depression in the field that reflects the collapse and echo chambers in America,” Professor Sugerman told me on Wednesday. “When it comes to history and authenticity, you have to read more broadly than just the founding fathers you like.”

So the history of the 14th Amendment is there—equality not just for Black Americans, but for immigrant Americans as well—but Jackson had to write his own opinion to put it in the court records.

Legal scholars aligned with Trump did Olympic-level gymnastics in this case to parse what the authors of the 14th Amendment meant by “subject to jurisdiction”; The words MAGA claimed were meant to covertly exclude undocumented immigrants.

Instead, Brown reminded us that, outside of the whites-only debates when the amendment was written, it was actually Black activism — their demand for colorblind equality — that shaped the final words granting citizenship to all babies born within our borders.

Solidarity – the unbreakable strength of American democracy.

Following the decision, Trump tweeted on social media that Congress can write a law that abolishes birthright citizenship. Some experts say it won’t work, but I’m here to tell you that Trump has accomplished a lot of things that experts said wouldn’t work.

More chilling and direct, There were other comments from Miller.

“This is disgusting,” he said of the decision.

But “because of President Trump’s courage and leadership, we are now on the precipice. Yes, we have had a setback, but only because of his courage, as a nation, we are on the precipice of being in a position to end this travesty once and for all, and we need to fight for it.”

Miller and those like him are trying to rewrite history to justify their vision of America’s future.

Alone in court, Jackson offered us both a warning and a way; It reminded us that despite politics, our history contains indisputable truths and we erase them at our own risk.