U.S. Supreme Court ruling jeopardizes birthright citizenship

More on the SCOTUS decision:

….Many legal scholars doubt the Trump tactic, and argue that what the words say is what the amendment means. But the Trump administration argues that the context of the 14th amendment – part of a flurry of changes in American life after the Civil War that tore the country apart geographically, culturally, economically, and morally – means that the language reflected a specific moment in time and a specific circumstance. They argue that the 19th-century amendment doesn’t apply to far different 21st-century circumstances. 

The irony is that many of those who support that position also embrace a “strict constructionist” view of the Constitution, urging in other cases that the words of the founding American document (which includes the 25 amendments that followed) are to be taken literally, shorn of context or interpretation.

The Supreme Court’s decision actually said nothing about birthright citizenship. It merely argued that, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett put it, excesses by the executive branch can’t be stanched by excesses of the judicial branch. That means that lower-court judges skeptical of, or opposed to, Trump policies cannot invalidate those initiatives.

The fact that the court test involved the Trump birthright citizenship case opened the administration to pursue its original intention, the denial of citizenship to some children of migrants and to make them vulnerable to deportation. This was an especially important target to the administration because of its view that large numbers of migrants were having children in the U.S., or coming to the country, for the express purpose of rendering their children American citizens.

A May study by the Migration Policy Institute at Penn State University found that, if Mr. Trump prevailed, about 255,000 children born on U.S. soil each year would be denied American citizenship.

The Supreme Court likely will rule on birthright citizenship in its next term, which begins in October, though it is possible some of the suits already filed may prompt it to make a swifter ruling. …

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