The birthright citizenship decision was a victory for democracy – and a warning

This week’s Supreme Court decision protecting the birthright of citizenship is rightly hailed as a victory for American research.

Others, however.

Take a look at the MAGA world and you’ll quickly find Trump representatives and elected officials expressing the kind of anti-immigrant sentiments that were once considered intolerable in society.

These include proposals that go so far as to prevent pregnant women from traveling to the United States for fear that they may give birth here, and – no joke – one notable commentator wrote that requiring immigrant women to be sterilized may be the solution.

Trump’s Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller said after the decision that the children of immigrants may not be “fit to continue or be able to inherit this country.”

“We have people from all over the world, from Third World nations, nations that wouldn’t do it on their own, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone travel by plane, and they can just enter the country, get a child in the hospital, be paid by me and you, and that child automatically becomes a citizen,” said Miller.

Before you tell me that the Supreme Court has spoken and this is a done deal, it doesn’t matter if there’s complete Miller mush, let me tell you about Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s written opinion and why it’s important. If read correctly, it is a warning of what comes next – a war to rewrite history to serve political ends.

“The stakes were long and the stakes were high,” Jackson wrote of the creation of the 14th Amendment in 1866, which has long been understood to grant citizenship to any child born on US soil and was the focus of this case.

Still, he wrote, despite the impossibility of the American Civil War rising to the challenge of inclusiveness, the amendment was always intended to do just that — because free Blacks, newly freed but denied citizenship, “struggled for a shared humanity.”

Another world MAGA interpretation of this amendment and this history was the background of this case.

To oversimplify, the 14th amendment was originally a response to the Supreme Court’s decision, the Dred Scott case, which stated that freed Black slaves could not become US citizens. The MAGA world argued that the authors of the 14th amendment never intended more than that – citizenship for former slaves and their descendants.

While agreeing with the court’s majority, Jackson also wrote his own brief that makes an important point: Without a history that includes the Black experience – as many of the arguments in this case do – we have been left out of the suffering that has shaped our values ​​and given us the empathy needed to become a mixed society.

Black history – any non-white history, really – is a history of resistance and a road map to recovery from this dark age of hate.

It’s hard to call someone a citizen if you take away their humanity – which is exactly what this case was trying to do by dividing the groups that would fight for equality and rewrite history with only words that fit the agenda of the current administration.

It was disappointing that the court, whose individual justices drew upon arguments from a thousand sources without their old adherence to original opinions, did not call for such removal with force, and it was left to Jackson to do so.

Jackson took the narrow view that Black people – and white legislators sympathetic to their cause – were thinking only of themselves when they made the 14th amendment and attacked it directly, saying that if we look at what black people were saying at the time, the main purpose of the amendment is obvious.

“This alternative account pits Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates of the Fourteenth Amendment did not,” Jackson pointed out in a version of the MAGA events. “Emancipated Blacks are fighting for the common humanity of all people.”

He wrote that “that universal idea of ​​citizenship and being a citizen, finally won the day.”

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

Trumbull then argued with Congress that this amendment should have included – even those called “gypsies” and Chinese immigrants, who faced extreme discrimination, especially in California.

One congressional opponent of the measure warned that if it passes, Chinese immigrants will “overrun” California and “double or triple the population.” At the same time, the Roma would probably continue to “wander in groups” and be “homeless, pretending they have no land, no place to live, establishing themselves as illegals wherever they go, and their only merit is the universal fraud,” he warned.

Asked whether the amendment would grant citizenship to the two disputed immigrant groups, Jackson said Trumbull had offered no apology “unquestionably,” echoing the broader views of Douglass and others.

“A child of an Asiatic is as much a citizen as a child of a European,” Trumbull said (and Jackson quoted, drawing on an amicus brief by Evan Bernick of Northern Illinois University and Jed Sugerman of Boston University).

“There’s a lot of disruption in the courtroom that shows the deterioration of America’s chambers,” Sugerman, the professor, told me Wednesday. “When it comes to history and origins, you should read more than your favorite founding fathers.”

So the history of the 14th Amendment is there – equality not just for Black Americans but for American immigrants – but it required Jackson to write his own opinion to put it on the court record.

Pro-Trump legal scholars have performed Olympic-level gymnastics in the case to reveal what the authors of the 14th Amendment meant by the term “subject to regulatory authority” — words that MAGA says were intended to secretly deport undocumented immigrants.

Instead, Brown reminded us that outside of those white-only conversations when the amendment was drafted, it was the activism of Black people — their blind quest for equality — that shaped the final words that granted citizenship to all children born within our borders.

Solidarity – the unbreakable strength of American democracy.

After the decision, Trump wrote on social media that Congress could write a law that reduces the right to be born as a citizen. Some experts say that won’t work, but I’m here to say that Trump has done a lot of things that experts have said won’t work.

More chilling, and more specific, were additional comments from Miller.

“It’s disgusting,” he said of the decision.

But “because of the courage and leadership of President Trump, we are now on the cusp. Yes, we faced setbacks, but because of his courage alone, we are on the verge as a nation of being in a position to end this evil once and for all, and that is what we must fight for.”

Miller and his friends want to rewrite history to ensure their vision of America’s future.

Jackson alone on the court gave us both a warning and a way – a reminder that our history has indisputable truths despite politics, and we erase them at our peril.