Nearly Half Of State AGs Ask SCOTUS To End ‘Birthright Citizenship’

The attorneys general of 24 states filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting the Trump administration’s attempt to stop the invasion-through-legal-loophole of “birthright citizenship.”

Attorneys general Jonathan Skrmetti, R-Tenn., and Brenna Bird, R-Iowa, led the charge alongside nearly every Republican state attorney general in the country with the 37-page brief asking the nation’s high court to side with the Trump administration’s argument that the 14th Amendment clearly does not allow for any person born on American soil to automatically become an American citizen.

After President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office properly interpreting the 14th Amendment, and discarding ridiculous left-wing arguments about “birthright citizenship” — which have allowed illegals to stay in the United States with anchor babies for decades — Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon sued in order to protect illegals over Americans.

“The idea that citizenship is guaranteed to everyone born in the United States doesn’t square with the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment or the way many government officials and legal analysts understood the law when it was adopted after the Civil War,” Skrmetti said in a press release. “If you look at the law at the time, citizenship attached to kids whose parents were lawfully in the country. Each child born in this country is precious no matter their parents’ immigration status, but not every child is entitled to American citizenship. This case could allow the Supreme Court to resolve a constitutional question with far-reaching implications for the States and our nation.”

After the four states sued, low-court tyrants in the federal judiciary decided to issue nationwide injunctions, which was met with a major rebuke at the Supreme Court. However, the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the challenge to “birthright citizenship” at the time, but is expected to decide whether to take the case in the coming weeks.

The brief shows the history surrounding the ratification of the 14th Amendment and its Citizenship Clause from the 1860s through the early 1900s, laying out the proper understanding of the clause before it was twisted by opportunistic leftists who wanted to destroy the country by importing culturally unrecognizable people who refuse to assimilate.

“Birthright citizenship” incentivizes illegal immigration, which inherently takes a toll on states both through sapping government resources meant for Americans and degrading culture and community.

“Recent years have seen an influx of illegal aliens — over 9 million — overwhelming our nation’s infrastructure and its capacity to assimilate,” the brief states. “Conferring United States citizenship requires a more meaningful connection than mere presence by happenstance or illegality. That connection, originalist evidence repeatedly instructs, was parental domicile.”

The attorneys general dismantled the left-wing states’ primary argument, which relies on a case from 1898, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, where a baby was born on American soil to two Chinese nationals and was deemed a citizen. The brief argues that using Wong Kim Ark actually “cuts against” the argument for “birthright citizenship,” because the parents in the case were legally allowed in the United States and, as the 14th Amendment states, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

Children born of illegals who have been able to evade law enforcement are unequivocally not.

The intertwined nature of the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1866 and the 14th Amendment’s purpose to “ingraft” its protections, coupled with the legislative history of the two, show that its drafters and ratifiers never intended for it to be used to import countless illegals.

Indeed, the 1866 CRA counted as citizens only those “not subject to any foreign power.”

The law stated that “‘all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States,’ no matter their ‘race and color’ and ‘without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude.”

The 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause and the 1866 CRA worked in tandem to overturn the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which declared that U.S.-born descendants of slaves were incapable of obtaining citizenship because their ancestors were considered property upon ratification of the Constitution.

“The provisions also sought to redress the ‘systematic denial of civil rights to freed slaves’ by prohibiting race-based discrimination in the conferral of citizenship or provision of civil rights,” the brief states.

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Statements from the 39th Congress, which passed the 1866 CRA, make even more clear that the children of illegals were not intended to be included in the Citizenship Clause.

Illinois Sen. Lyman Trumbull, who was the primary author of the law, used language explicitly excluding the children of “persons temporarily resident” as part of that Congress’s goal “to withhold birthright citizenship from those who did not owe a complete, permanent allegiance to the United States and who were not part of the ‘American people.’”

Rep. John Bingham of Ohio, who was the primary author of the 14th Amendment in the House of Representatives, said “every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural-born citizen.”

Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan explained how the Citizenship Clause was interrelated with the 1866 CRA, noting it “will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, [or] who belong to the families of embassadors [sic] or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States.”

To the last point on those born to ambassadors or foreign ministers, even the left agrees, which undercuts their overarching argument that mere presence in the country should result in citizenship.

If the Supreme Court ends up taking the case and rules in line with the true understanding of the 14th Amendment and the Citizenship Clause, the Trump administration could start turning the corner on removing the true number of illegals in the country, including those who were erroneously given the ability to stay under the theory that their parents could just get them across the border before going into labor.

The other states that joined the brief are: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

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