Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship | Hacker News Reader

Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

apnews.com

225 pointstoomuchtodo625 comments

The most obvious read of the constitution in the world still being a 6-3 verdict shows the state of the Supreme Court today.

They are in the process of building a new country little by little. Eventually they will openly dismiss the US constitution. Things are really, really bad. We are pretty much in US‘s Weimar period. The fact all of that was predictable makes it just so frustrating to see it play out in real time

I agree. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the US balkanizes. That might not be a bad thing if it can happen peacefully.

The problem with the US balkanizing is that there's not really any such thing as a 'red state' or a 'blue state'. Every 'red state' has some blue cities, and every 'blue state' has some red rural areas. Pretty sure California has more Republican voters than any state except Texas. So partitioning on state lines doesn't really work. Maybe over time people could migrate, but using South Carolina as an example, the two largest cities in the state would largely have to empty out. The state would cease to function.

When I see all the rot on the news I really wonder what the alternative is. It’s all so absurd I just wonder if there is a point where people just move on and form a new country / government and let the other country do ufc on the lawn or whatever.

Is it? Pretty much all of the trump EOs that everyone got so up in arms about were ruled against by the Supreme Court - in fact most often by the individual Justices that that same group got equally up in arms about.

Seems like the definition of hand wringing and over drama.

I mean remember how folks thought Kavanaugh was the end of the world and it meant the end of democracy? Well he’s continually ruling against trump.

What does this even mean? The decision came out the “right” way today.

Four of the justices dissented on something that by any reasonable reading should have been a unanimous decision. That is a BIG problem because that means that almost half of the Supreme Court are off their rockers.

Correct. The only reasonable way forward is impeachment of the four justices who dissented. They are clearly corrupt.

> hey are in the process of building a new country little by little. Eventually they will openly dismiss the US constitution. Things are really, really bad. We are pretty much in US‘s Weimar period.

Why the scaremongering? What are "they" waiting for?

Without saying I believe the statement above, boiling the frog is a legitimate tactic. Think of all the things considered normal now that would have been absurd before 2016.

Surely we’re aware of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 yes? It spells out exactly what they are doing, & where they are going.

Eliminating birthright citizenship is a key component dating back decades.

https://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/report/feudalism-c...

Thanks for posting that link. I read part of it and their reasoning strikes me as contortionist. Good then that after decades, as you point out, that argument has not won out.

I would love to actually debate this issue with someone who does believe birthright citizenship is not a thing.

Durable control of elections, and maybe one or two more justices.

It’s not an ominous “they”, it’s a very well understood patchwork of actors who have been pushing for the end of American democratic, liberal system. The heritage foundation is an important component, but you can add the Thiel fellows, the GOP, evangelical fundamentalists, the right wing media ecosystem, and quite a lot more. They’ve spent multiple decades developing an interconnected infrastructure of think tank, media groups, legal advocacy groups, donor networks, political organizations. They are all working to reshape American institutions away from liberal democratic norms, towards an autocratic conservative governance model.

It’s not a new thing or something discussed in underground circles. They have been very vocal and open about their goals, and you can find a lot of investigative work in that whole movement.

Their most obvious victory so far has been the complete take over of the Supreme Court, allowing the realization of the idiotic, fascist “Unitary executive theory” concept.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_nationalism

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

If that sounds scaremongering you might want to reevaluate your sources of information for at least the past decade

It's worse than that. It's 5-4 on the read of the constitution since Kavanaugh doesn't think it violates the 14th amendment, just a federal statute.

It's worse than that. The text of the statute is literally the same as the text of the 14th amendment's birthright clause. So he's basically saying the text means one thing when it's a statute, but the exact same words might allow exceptions in the context of the Constitution.

What does "subject to the jurisdiction" "obviously" mean, keeping in mind that everyone agrees children of diplomats aren't citizens at birth, but U.S. courts have jurisdiction over diplomats for some activities?

In general countries have jurisdiction over anyone inside their territory unless there is some exception.

As far as I know the only exceptions at the time the 14th was drafted and ratified would have been people with diplomatic immunity or similar due to treaties and international agreements.

Immediate families of diplomats living with the diplomat are included in diplomatic immunity, hence their children born here would not become citizens.

Those situations you mention where US court do have jurisdiction over diplomats are: private real estate disputes; wills and inheritance; business activity of diplomats that are running a side business or practicing a profession in the US that is not part of their official duties; lawsuits initiated by the diplomat.

Even if becoming subject to such limited jurisdiction counted as being "subject to the jurisdiction" for purposes of the 14th Amendment it would not matter because newborns are not involved in those things, and so newborn children of diplomats have their full diplomatic immunity.

The exception listed in Wong Kim Ark are: Indian tribes, children of diplomats, births on public foreign ships, and children of enemy occupiers. These were basically well-understood exceptions under common law and most were discussed during Congressional debate on the 14th.

The text that SCOTUS put out today discusses this in great detail. You might agree or disagree with their reasoning, but they consider what "obvious" means in light of the text and the writings of the time plus references to old commentary like Blackstones. Maybe better to read that and assume in good faith that this is what the commenter is referring to?

> […] children of diplomats aren't citizens at birth, but U.S. courts have jurisdiction over diplomats for some activities?

AIUI, IANAL, US courts and law do not have jurisdiction over diplomats. When a diplomat the 'hosting' government agrees to immunity, so cannot be prosecuted. E.g.:

> The collision caused diplomatic tension between British and US officials. [Anne] Sacoolas fled Britain soon after the incident, and claimed diplomatic immunity with US support.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn

The 'source' country has to agree to remove the diplomatic coverage.

Incorrect: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/diplomatic_immunity

U.S. courts do have jurisdiction over diplomats for certain things, such as suits related to commercial activities.

What happens to a diplomat if they don't show up for the suit or comply with any judgment?

Is the child of a diplomat a US citizen if they are born during a diplomat’s commercial activities?

No. Even the arguments at the time the amendment was passed discuss diplomats and their family being exempt, as well as all the instances since.

If the diplomat put the baby up as collateral on a loan, prior to their birth, then I think they have to be in order for the US to be able to enforce contract law relevant to the loan.

That's more like having jurisdiction over the diplomat's property in the country than having jurisdiction over the diplomat themselves.

Well we know “subject to the jurisdiction” is not equivalent to “is a citizen”, otherwise they would’ve used that term instead of being cute with it and leaving excess room for interpretation. If congress wants to define what “subject to jurisdiction” means, then they have every opportunity to.

Have you read the congressional debate around the that amendment to the Amendment? If you have and it's not clear, I'm not sure what else can be said.

Given that the most universally agreed to counter examples are diplomats and invading armies, I'd say a reasonable non-lawyer interpretation is that "subject to the jurisdiction" excludes people who are in some way under the authority or control of a foreign government even while in the US. They may be physically here, but they're presence is on behalf of a foreign government that has jurisdiction over them even while in the US. US law might apply to them in varying ways depending on their status, but there is still a distinction that does not exist for other visitors. Maybe less about the question of whether US law applies at all and more about if US law applies equally beyond the 14th amendment and if any other government can lay claim to authority.

You could potentially apply this to temporary tourists as well, but the linkage between them and the government of the country they are coming from is much weaker since their presence typically doesn't have them acting on behalf of the foreign government or with any special legal distinction.

I'd also pose the same question back to you, what's a reasonable definition of "subject to the jurisdiction" that excludes everyone except US citizens, as many conservatives want, or at least only extends to legal permanent residents?

Any interpretation that excludes non-citizens leaves us in a situation where we've disclaimed legal jurisdiction over the behavior of those individuals. The reductio ad absurdum there would be that they aren't subject to any laws of our country anymore.

That's partial jurisdiction at best.

I guess the obvious answer would be the same as the last decades, while anything else would be called "surprising."

Which is is fine, you can change the constitution, but thats for parliament to do.

>Which is is fine, you can change the constitution, but thats for parliament to do.

To which Constitution are you referring? And which "parliament"?

The US Constitution can only be changed by votes by both supermajorities in both houses (House of Representatives and Senate) of Congress and the legislatures of 3/4 of the several states. We don't have a "parliament."

Are you referring to Canada's Constitution? Australia's? AFAIK, the UK has no Constitution and changes to Ireland's Constitution requires a national referendum.

Please do elucidate. Thanks!

I don't think it's obvious. Like why do you think the dissenters are wrong to question what is meant about being "subject to the jurisdiction thereof"? The intention was to prevent former slaves from being deprived of citizenship so what is an argument to say this obviously includes someone who arrives for birth tourism? Why doesn't this include children of diplomats, as one example, if it's such an all encompassing law?

Because when you are in a country, you are subject to it’s jurisdiction. Can you be arrested for petty crimes? Yes? Then you’re under that country’s jurisdiction.

That's what the justices said. That has generally been how modern courts interpret it, with a textualist interpretation. But that was not the original intention of the law which I already stated. So to go back to my original point, it's not an obvious conclusion.

Don't agree that any of these cases are "most obvious" given that it's gone all the way through various appeals courts to the supreme court - and that's the mission of the Supreme Court, to interpret all the various situations for these cases and how they apply constitutionally.

Here is the full text of the relevant section of the 14th:

> All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Please point to the section where it says "this only applies if the parents are citizens".

The reading which the court affirmed is incredibly obvious. Republicans and xenophobes like to pretend it isn't, but the text is very simple.

The word jurisdiction is where it gets confusing. The meaning of that word does not map 1:1 to its modern usage.

To wit, if we read it as "subject to the laws of the land", then the invading army exception does not make sense, invading soldiers are subject to the laws of the United States and have been tried and convinced of violating them. Note, diplomat exception still makes sense, they _are not_ subject to the laws of the land.

So, how do you define jurisdiction in this amendment in a way that covers both invading soldiers and diplomats? I don't think it is super straightforward.

To put good faith on the table, I ultimately agree with your opinion here that birthright citizenship is settled and the vast majority of folks arguing against it are doing so in bad faith. But I also recognize the text of the amendment has holes to my eyes and could be updated for clarity.

> To wit, if we read it as "subject to the laws of the land", then the invading army exception does not make sense, invading soldiers are subject to the laws of the United States and have been tried and convinced of violating them. Note, diplomat exception still makes sense, they _are not_ subject to the laws of the land.

I don't agree with your assertion here. Do you have more details on the claim that "invading soldiers [...] have been tried and convinced of violating them [US Laws]"?

As I understand it, invading soldiers are not subject to the laws of the United States nor are they protected by the bill of rights - instead they are enemy combatants and subject to military force. You don't arrest and charge active combatants, you fight them. If they surrender they become prisoners of war and would be covered under the treaties that apply to POWs, not civilian laws. They don't become citizens by surrendering.

I suspect the gray area would be around terrorists and stateless combatants, but the general principle that "people who are operating under the orders of a foreign government are not subject to the laws of the united states, but rather bound by the treaties between the US and their foreign state" would still apply.

> I suspect the gray area would be around terrorists

Maybe this is a gray area in theory, but practically speaking I don't think it matters. The child has nothing to do with the parent's choices in life, do they deserve to be treated any differently than any other child born in the US?

It doesn’t cover diplomats either because courts do have jurisdiction over diplomats for certain non-criminal matter.

> vast majority of folks arguing against it are doing so in bad faith

What’s “bad faith” about it?

In my view: the lack of engagement with the historical record. This topic - and the meaning and expected outcomes of the wording for the amendment - were discussed and debated as part of the open record. Senator Cowan thought the phrasing created a loophole for birthright citizenship, and the amendment creators explicitly, overtly, repeatedly agreed with his interpretation of the phrasing and defended it as deliberate policy.

As I posted elsewhere, you can read some of this for yourself: https://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/libertyandjusti... (CTRL+F "If my friend from Pennsylvania" for a quite pertinent line).

Members of American Indian tribes were born in the United States after the 14th amendment was passed but it took an act of Congress to make them citizens. The question of jurisdiction is a very real one that isn’t nearly as cut and dry as you’re implying it to be.

You're trying to impute complexity to a thing in order to achieve a goal that is not achievable. The 1866 Congress that debated the amendment understood and intended that Indian tribal nations would not be covered by the clause because they were separate nations not under the jurisdiction of US law. Here's an example of the debate [1] where they discuss it. Far from making your point, examples like this make it obvious that everyone involved in framing the amendment thought deeply about what "jurisdiction" meant, which is why you can't just assign new meaning like "yeah it means parents have to be citizens."

I really urge you to read the original debate. It isn't like the handwritten notes we get from the 1700s; it's typewritten and the Senators are so thoughtful and utterly precise about what they meant. It's ELI12.

[1] https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc30867/m1/12...

Have you read through that link?

I'm not taking a side here, but it injects a couple more words that could imply something else:

[Mr. Howard] (Sen. from MI)

"This amendment which I have offered is simply declaratory as what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States.

This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of embassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.

It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States."

(Apologies for any typos as this was hand written.)

I kept reading pages, and there's plenty of other questionable conclusions:

[Mr. Conness] (Sen. CA)

(Acclaimed for his pro-Chinese immigration views.

Wiki: "In the Senate debate on the 14th Amendment, Conness said “We are entirely ready to accept the provision proposed in this constitutional amendment, that the children begotten of Chinese parents in California … shall be citizens.”

from the link:

"Now, I will say, for the benefit of my friend, that he may know something about the Chinese in future, that this portion of our population, namely, the children of Mongolian parentage, born in California, is very small indeed, and never promises to be large, notwithstanding our near neighborhood to the Celestial land. The habits of those people, and their religion, appear to demand that they all return to their own country at some time or other, either alive or dead. There are, perhaps, in California today about forty thousand Chinese--from forty to forty-five thousand. Those persons return invariably, while others take their places, and, as I before observed, if they do not return alive their bones are carefully gathered up and sent back to the Flowery Land. It is not an unusual circumstance that the clipper ships trading between San Francisco and China carry at a time three or four hundred human remains of these Chinese. When interred in our State they are not interred deep in the earth, but laid very near the surface, and then mounds of earth are laid over them, so that the process of dis-interment is very easy. That is their habit and custom; and as soon as they are fit for transmission to their own country they are taken up with great regularly and sent there. None of the bones are allowed to remain. They will return, then, either living or dead. "

(Sadly the site is now offline.)

An additional section from the page provided that I found odd:

[Mr. Cowan] (Sen from PA)

"So far as the courts and the administration of the laws are concerned, I have supposed that every human being within their jurisdiction was in one sense of the word a citizen, that is, a person entitled to protection; but in so far as the right to hold property, particularity the right to acquire title to real estate, was concerned, that was a subject entirely within the control of the States.

It has been so considered in the state of Pennsylvania; and aliens and those who acknowledge no other allegiance, either to the State, or to the General Government, may be limited and circumscribed in that manner.

I have supposed, further, that it was essential to the existence of society itself, and particularly essential to the existence of a free State, that it should have the power, not only of declaring who should exercise political power within its boundaries, but that if it were overrun by another and a different race, it would have the right to absolutely expel them."

Can you link to the portion of the debate where everyone agreed on what “under the jurisdiction of” means?

The issue was contentious then as it is now. They wouldn’t have spilled so much ink on the topic if it wasn’t. Your link is proving my point.

What in the dissenting opinions definition of jurisdiction did you disagree with?

literally on the tin

That's not a good characterization. All of he lower courts basically laughed it out of the court room. The fact that the Supreme Court even took the case on is pretty questionable.

The Trump administration found not one judge or panel of judges who agreed with their opinion ... until SCOTUS, where it found three.

Including Clarence, whose "hilarious" dissent says that undocumented persons are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, which might be of note to ICE.

“Unperson” vibes. If their existence is illegal, then they have no rights. Clarence would never consider that the definition of who is or is not legal would expand, though. Too busy driving his RV to the airport to fly to an island retreat.

It is totally obvious: every single court told the Trump administration to go f* themselves, and Trump appealed and appealed again until it reached the Supreme Court.

> Don't agree that any of these cases are "most obvious" given that it's gone all the way through various appeals courts to the supreme court

Every single court on the way to SCOTUS correctly said "the fuck?!"

> Federal judges in each of the district courts issued preliminary injunctions to block the order from taking effect anywhere in the country. Judge John C. Coughenour, presiding over Washington v. Trump, called the order "blatantly unconstitutional". Government appeals challenging the injunctions were rejected by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._Barbara

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._CASA#Background

it's on the tin

It's tricky because dissenting doesn't necessarily mean you'd reach the opposite conclusion in every respect.

In this case, I really doubt even the most conservative justices believe "birthright citizenship means whatever an Executive Order says it does." At a minimum, we know they aren't signing on to the reasoning the 5 in the majority used. And then we can learn whatever they feel like saying in the dissent, but a dissent is just an essay with no force of law.

But since we have the dissent opinions, it's not tricky at all to see why they are dissenting.

Alito and Thomas straight up believe that the constitution does not provide birthright citizenship and the executive order is valid. Gorsuch mostly agrees but makes an exception if the parents plan to stay in the US. Kavanaugh agrees that birthright citizenship is not provided by the constitution, instead he argues its a federal statute that congress can overturn (but the president cannot)

https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow...

Literal calvinball by the conservative justices. None of that is in the constitution.

Thomas and Alito complained that they were being impeded from setting executive policy. Very easy to understand the argument that this court is too small.

If it said “regardless of the citizenship status of the parents” they would still find a way to disagree.

The joke that Supreme Court judges are high priests interpreting the constitution as if it was holy scripture was in fact accurate description all along

Per Thomas's dissent:

> The Court today takes the extraordinary step of holding facially unconstitutional the President’s Order excluding from citizenship the children of foreign temporary visitors and illegal aliens.

If you shift from being a living constitutionalist to a strict textualist based on the case in question, then what you really are is a machiavellian.

Kavanaugh's dissent is kinda hilarious in this context.

> The original constitutional principles do not change absent a constitutional amendment, but the relevant principles— both the rules and exceptions alike—must be faithfully applied not only to circumstances as they existed in 1787, 1791, and 1868, for example, but also to modern situations that were unknown or unanticipated by the Constitution’s Framers.

This, of course, doesn't include machine guns.

I've laughed ever since United States v. Jones (2012), the GPS tracker-stuck-to-vehicle case.

The justices actively debated what the historical equivalent of 24/7 digital tracking would look like in 1791. This prompted the famous hypothetical of an officer secretly squeezing into the trunk of a horse-drawn carriage to track someone's movements over several days.

The issue here is that there's no practical way to ever update the Bill of Rights in the 21st century. Bug or feature?

  > no practical way to ever update the Bill of Rights in the 21st century

What on earth do you mean? The practical way is the same as it always was: subsequent amendment. The fact that it requires consensus is a feature.

This reads the same way as people who say things like “we just have to accept that Congress is broken and can’t pass new legislation.” Like hell we do!

>The justices actively debated what the historical equivalent of 24/7 digital tracking would look like in 1791.

Redcoats in your home, comparing notes with all the other redcoats who live in your buddies house and hassle your bartender, watch the comings and goings of everyone else around town, etc, etc.

> The issue here is that there's no practical way to ever update the Bill of Rights in the 21st century. Bug or feature?

Of course there is, it is just being done - the constitution is being rewritten out right now by supreme court. All you need is a majority on a 9 person commission.

>The issue here is that there's no practical way to ever update the Bill of Rights in the 21st century. Bug or feature?

Given that this isn't an issue in any other modern democracy, I'd say "bug."

Well it's a feature in that the ratification rules were part of an intentional illicit rewrite of the constitution. We could make it easier to modify like other nations, but that also makes it easier to repeal.

I think the fix is to require more political parties to be involved, so a 51% majority of a single party can't remove federal laws whenever they have a majority. Then you wouldn't need an amendment to solve controversial problems.

Radio, TV, cameras

That said, breech loaders were used by the British during the Revolutionary War (the Ferguson Rifle) and multiple shots from a single barrel using multiple "touch holes" was well known.

And then there's Puckle's gun.

The Gatling gun also predates any widespread gun control.

Notably, the Gatling gun is still legal almost everywhere, including California (lulz!).

If that is legal, what is the actual point of 99% if the rest of the bans, etc?

Fully automatic guns maybe not, but the founding fathers definitely knew about repeating firearms, they had more than a few offers to purchase them, both for military uses and as private citizens. They just denied to because it was expensive to purchase and maintain.

No. While originalists and textualists purport to refuse to extend any principle into the modern day ("no right to privacy in 3A, 4A, etc"), one they do is that 2A doesn't merely apply to arms of the day, but also to modern arms. It's... pretty blatant.

Humans are rationalizing animals, not rational ones.

Machine guns are illegal in the US. SCOTUS has never ruled there is an individual right to own machine guns.

Yes, that's precisely the point.

The textualists turn out not to be so textualist when they feel like it.

How doesn’t include machine guns?

Keep reading!

> In Second Amendment cases, this Court applies the Amendment to semi-automatic handguns even though those did not exist in 1791 or 1868.

"Shall not be infringed" apparently applies to unimaginably better weaponry, but they couldn't have anticipated immigrants being pregnant.

Does the right to bear arms extend to stuff like MANPADS, tanks and fighter aircraft?

It's not so clear cut to me (looking from outside).

It makes sense to interpret some cases in historical context and others not, because some cases are not as much affected by the difference in context.

That's not being machiavellian - that's avoiding an one size fits all approach.

This is true, but then one should be able to assume that the justice wouldn't neatly fall along partisan lines whenever they choose to be an originalist or not. When it always toggles on and off ever so conveniently along partisan boundaries, that's when it looks dubious.

My favorite argument (presented by a constitutional scholar) against originalism is that a constitution interpreted precisely as written by wealthy, landed 18th century white men disenfranchises every person who is not a wealthy, landed 18th century white man, roughly in proportion to how much they share in common with such a person.

Edit: the scholar is Kate Shaw. She presents her arguments a lot more coherently than me, seeing as it’s her life’s work. I advise you read her scholarly work or watch her interviews especially on Originalism rather than try to squeeze an argument out of me.

Following the implications of this argument leads to some pretty hairy places. If a person is incapable of reasoning outside of their class/race/gender/etc position, then how is a fair law even possible? Or perhaps the argument implies that people like that constitutional scholar have reached a state of purely detached enlightenment, and thus are exempt from this logic?

You misunderstand, or I didn’t explain it well, because you’re making the same argument that the constitutional scholar is making against originalists.

By narrowly interpreting the text exactly as a WL18CWM would have interpreted it (e.g. black people are not people), they’re not leaving room for interpretations of the constitution that would provide equal rights to people who are not WL18CWM:

  - The constitution grants rights
  - The authors have a bias (WL18CWM)
  - Originalists essentially ignore this bias, leading to fewer or restricted rights to people who are less similar to WL18CWM

>If a person is incapable of reasoning outside of their class/race/gender/etc position, then how is a fair law even possible?

An entirely fair law might not be possible, at least as long as people with specific class/race/gender interests overwhelmingly influence it. But a somewhat fair law or a law fairer than another, is.

And, at least as I understand it, the scholar doesn't say that nobody is ever "capable of reasoning outside of their class/race/gender/etc position" in general. Just that those making the constitution weren't that good at it.

A reasonable initial place to draw the line might be "owns slaves".

Yeah... It all falls apart under the bare minimum observation that woman and non-white people were property. And that even white men who did not own land were treated as second-class citizens.

We have no concept of free speech, due process, or individual rights in Asia where I’m from. Where I’m from, if the community doesn’t like you, we can just drive you out of the community. Am I “disenfranchised” by having to live in a liberal democracy created by white men?

Well, the same white men created Jim Crow and seggregation.

If you were a black man would you have been disenfranchised when those laws were in force?

I'd say yes.

The fact that it was/is worse elsewhere, e.g. in some places in Asia, doesn't make the critique (of how white Constitutional/law makers historically disenfranchised certain demographics in the US) invalid.

Those rights came to exist in the west in response to kings and tyrants doing whatever they wanted at the expense of their subjects. Also because communities sometimes do bad things to people not able to simply drive away. Pretty sure Asia has had it's share of human rights abuses.

You seem to lack an understanding of technical legal terms in US courts, which is frankly pretty usual even for US citizens.

"Franchise" is the right to vote. Disenfranchisement is legal prohibition against voting. Social behaviors have nothing to do with it.

"Jus soli" is a legal term in English, defined by the chief authority (Black's Dictionary of Legal Terms) as rights achieved by one's place of birth (instead of by one's parentage).

Diplomats are only partially subject to civil law as you have claimed. There is also no practical leverage available to the courts if their funds are not stored in places subject to US jurisdiction. So, a minor backing for your claim, but one that is not in practice applied, nor considered relevant by precedent in regards to the XIVth.

I'm sorry you're being attacked so vociferously in this thread, as you are arguing in good faith with the knowledge you have, but your knowledge base is insufficient for the confidence you show.

No, and politely, wtf is that logic?

You are disenfranchised when your judicial branch interprets law in a way that disproportionately benefits only the people who are most similar to the authors.

Also, how wealthy are you? Why did you bring up your race instead of how much land you own? Why pull the culture war into this? Certain interpretations of the constitution disproportionately benefit people who own a lot of land.

You don't have to be a constitutional scholar to see it's bullshit.

Just the fact that originalism implies an ability to perfectly know what the dead from 1788 meant with each word in every situation. It's a ludicrous proposition.

"absent a constitutional amendment"

There's a difference between textualist and originalist. There isn't a dichotomy between textualist and living-constitutionalist frameworks only but the two former may overlap. Also the same reasoning you are using applies to people who are living-constitutionalists and suddenly become textualists.

https://pacificlegal.org/originalism-vs-textualism-vs-living...

Who did that?

"strict textualist" bro the 14th amendment is not vague

The crazy thing here is that 4 supposedly conservative Supreme Court justices wanted to overturn over a century of precedent on how the constitution was interpreted.

They took this case so they can appear to be reasonable while doing wild stuff in other cases.

Exactly. Notice the ruling after ruling from the Supreme court strengthening the power of corporations and moneyed interests.

The poor and rich alike have a deep-seated cultural aversion to poor people. It's no use warning about inequality when a sleazy billionaire wins the popular vote. Nobody is listening. They have to experience the bad results first-hand.

Our entire history of a nation is the people fighting against the ruling minority of tyrants. Look at how fast SCOTUS struck down the civil rights act of 1875 (only 8 years).

Look at how quickly slavers used the federal government to uphold slavery, the fugitive slave act was one of the first things Congress signed and took zero time enforcing against the will of the people.

Look at how quickly business leaders fought against Americans trying to better their working conditions.

The US constitution was designed to impede societal progress by stripping power from the people. The "reverance" people have for the "founders" doesn't help either, acting like a document written to embolden slavers as sacrosanct is beyond pathetic.

What about the constitution specifically?

You are saying this like there are other of nations that didn’t need to struggle for equal rights, workers’ right etc.

You need to ask a real question because I have no idea what you are trying to say by beating around the bush, this is about the SCOTUS which is a US branch for the US government.

You can be pro/fine with legal immigration (and moderate/non-partisan) and still not think birthright citizenship is a good idea (like I do).

Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship. It creates perverse incentives.

Reminds me of legal abortion: practically everywhere in the world has it. If you are not in that vast majority you should be taking a very close look at yourself/things.

So yes, let's amend the constitution. It's been a while and we do it on average every ten years or so. I have personally not ever been involved in one.

It's not really a question of what's a good idea. It is in the text of the Constitution, about as plain as it can possibly be. If you want to change it, you have to change the Constitition.

Ironically, the same Court members who most often claim the plain text of the Constitution to support their ideas are the ones who put the most effort into finding a tortured reading of the 14th Amendment.

I thought so too. Then I read the arguments about the passage of the amendment. The people passing clearly stated that, say, the children of ambassadors wouldn't be eligible. It was mainly aimed at clearing up the questions about the various Native Americans who may have considered themselves independent. It wasn't about opening the doors to anyone.

It was about slaves. Native Americans didn't get birthright citizenship until the Native American Citizenship Act of 1924.

it was not (solely) about slaves; this was debated in Congress during the process of drafting the amendment and resoundingly put down by contemporary legislators.

from Justice Jackson’s concurring opinion:

> Senator Edgar Cowan, for example, argued that German immigrants’ children born in Pennsylvania should be citizens, but Chinese immigrants’ children should not—because Germans and Chinese were different. In response, Senator Trumbull emphasized that the law he had drafted drew no such distinctions. Undeterred, Senator Cowan would warn again—this time during debates on the Fourteenth Amendment—that the Citizenship Clause would let Chinese immigrants “overrun” California and “double or treble the population” of that State. Senator John Conness of California, where anti-Chinese sentiment was arguably most pronounced, responded that “the children begotten of Chinese parents in California . . . shall be citizens.” In fact, he said, the Civil Rights Act had already declared “that the children of all parentage whatever . . . should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States.” No Senator rose to agree with Senator Cowan or dispute what Senator Conness had said. And no Senator said what the principal dissent says today: that the text at issue conferred citizenship only on freed Blacks and those in analogous situations.

- - -

further down, Justice Jackson cites the most forthright example of how blisteringly ahistorical the Republican party’s arguments are on this topic:

> During the ratification debates, Senator Cowan took aim at the Roma people too, characterizing them as undeserving of birthright citizenship because they “wander[ed] in gangs,” “infest[ed] society,” and “impos[ed] upon the simple and weak everywhere.” And again, Senator Conness dismissed Senator Cowan’s prejudices: “The only invasion of Pennsylvania within my recollection was an invasion very much worse and more disastrous to the State, and more to be feared and more feared, than that of Gypsies. It was an invasion of rebels [at Gettysburg].”

Please re read his comment. He’s saying the constitution should be amended.

I think it was edited to add that?

No, it wasn't. I had it in there from the get go. I did not edit my comment for any reason, I don't think at least. Like I said in the original comment, you can be moderate/non-partisan and think this is a bad idea. You can think Trump's an idiot and still think birthright citizenship is a bad idea. That's all.

SCOTUS has not had anything remotely close to a plain text reading since the 1930s and probably longer. "Shall not be infringed" was changed to "if an infantry rifle was made after 1986 then magically it can be infringed" and (until about a week ago when it was overturned) "if you smoke a left-handed cigarette actually the second amendment doesn't exist." The 1st amendment protects freedom of speech but yet it's legal to ban appeals to "prurient interest" even though no such exemption is mentioned. "Interstate commerce" has been changed to mean basically "commerce" and interstate is now interpreted as if it was put there for funsies since everything can be construed as affecting something else in the universe even though the historical context makes clear that's not how the text was interpreted by the writers.

Every other amendment including the 1st, 2nd, etc even when explicitly spelled out the courts magically pull something out of their ass to "torture it." Yet the 14th amendment birthright citizenship, who's "history and tradition" was to right the wrongs of slavery, somehow has to be read absolutely in black and white.

Personally I am amenable to the plain text interpretation of the 14th, 1st, and 2nd, but lets not pretend that is the game SCOTUS or even most of government and society is playing. The constitution is referenced more as a religious document by all the above to mean whatever it is they say it means.

An aside, but it’s a bit funny to focus on the plain-text reading of “shall not be infringed” and not “a well-regulated militia.”

Give me a plain-text explanation as to why a well-regulated militia can be infringed from having a 1987 select fire infantry rifle but not a 1985 one, both of which are probably the most bread and butter arms you could possibly consider as part of a well-regulated militia. (This despite the plain-text ascribes the right to "people" not the militia, and in any case US code defines virtually every able bodied citizen male as part of the militia). The NFA determinations by SCOTUS don't make sense even if the amendment said it was the militia's right rather than the people's.

Note: There are ~30ish countries that provide citizenship to anyone born within their national borders (many with restrictions, for whatever that may mean). Largely, this covers a spotting of countries across the globe, but is almost universally true within the Americas.

As far as I can see it is almost entirely countries in the Americas plus Pakistan that have real birthright citizenship. Everywhere else has some restriction such as stateless parents, or multiple generations born in the country, or a minimum period of residence or similar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

Hate to be that guy, but this a pet peeve of mine that pisses me of...

The term "birthright" means "a right that is derived from the circumstances of your birth". Virtually ALL countries grant citizenship by consequence of the circumstances of birth, but what circumstances they consider vary. For some countries, the circumstance is "birth happened in the soil of the country" (jus soli), for others, it's "birth was to parents who are citizens of our country".

I said "virtually", because there is one SINGLE exception. The Vatican. Ok, there's the SMOM, but do they even count?

In this context it is a synonym for jus soli - birth happened on the soil of the country.~

Birthright has a few other meanings in wider contexts: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/birthri...

Does it really matter if we add one more, especially as it is now a well established usage?

And how many of those countries have an illegal immigration problem? I bet that most of them would quickly remove that loophole if people actually started to exploit it.

Root cause it. The USA does not have an illegal immigration problem. It has a "huge, slow immigration bureaucracy" problem that makes the legal path so slow and difficult that people are incentivized to gamble on illegal paths.

Not even this. The USA has a labor shortage that is filled by workers who used to migrate seasonally until it was no longer allowed, thus creating a perverse system that encouraged business owners to look the other way and immigrants to stay instead of leave.

A long time ago, the southwestern part of the USA was Mexico, but a certain destiny manifested itself and changed that. It seems like this didn't affect day-to-day life due to a generous treaty for a while until some Americans decided they deserved the land there more than the people who were there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation#Cession_o... -- see the part about 1930 removals.

Obviously, the people who were kicked out were performing some useful economic function, so the USA decided to have it both ways: The Bracero program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracero_Program

This program of importing cheap labor had an expiration date, and it was allowed to expire in the 60s. Guess what happened then?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9017686/

> Despite the forced removal of Mexicans during the 1930s, as soon as the United States entered the Second World War, authorities approached Mexico to negotiate a binational treaty that arranged for the annual entry of legal workers for seasonal labor in U.S. agriculture (Galarza 1964; Calavita 1992). The resulting Bracero Program lasted from 1942 through 1964, and its effect on the likelihood of migration is readily apparent in Figure 3. Between 1940 and 1945 the probability of U.S. migration rose nearly seven times, going from 0.003 to 0.020 before leveling off briefly and then rising to new plateau of 0.029 from 1956 to 1959. In 1960 Congress began to phase out the Bracero Program, finally letting it expire at the end of 1964, bringing the probability of migration down to 0.017.

Why did they let it expire? presumably to increase demand for American labor. A laudable goal to be sure, but is that really what happened? Surely people stopped crossing the border to do labor here and Americans started getting hired more.

This whole thing is beyond messed up and the fact that this history is essentially erased (I wasn't taught this in school) absolutely boils my blood.

There exist a large number of legal pathways to permanent residency in the US, some of which do take unreasonably long; employment-based green card applications for Indian nationals famously have a decade-long waiting period. They should be reformed and improved.

But a big part of the problem is that many people do not have a legal pathway available to them, and either don't believe that or don't wish to accept it. So they spend years carefully pursuing every bit of due process they're entitled to, and those stories become part of the "slow immigration bureaucracy", regardless of whether the result was ever really in question. This is where immigration reform proposals have generally gotten bogged down; some people strongly feel we should resolve this by creating a general legal pathway, others feel we should resolve it by expediting removals, and both groups are very hesitant to agree to a proposal that doesn't resolve it at all.

Having a difficult and selective immigration process that rejects the vast majority of applicants is not a problem. It is exactly how an immigration system should work. We want the best.

A right enshrined in the Constitution is not a "loophole".

Most countries with a standard of living that even barely better than their neighbors have an immigration problem. There is a whole continent call Europe that is fighting off migrates and last I checked, birthright citizenship is not a thing there.

People who abuse birthright citizenships are, by definitions, not illegal immigrants. But even if you count all of them as 'unwanted' immigrants - how many % of total immigration to the US is result of those birthright laws?

You are wrong about that. If an illegal crosses while pregnant, gets detained, and then gives birth the day after while in detention, that baby is 100% a US citizen.

Think two steps ahead, people aren't born right out of the sky. It encourages people to illegally enter for their citizenship baby and the parents remain illegal until ~21 years later when they can have the kid sponsor them. In the meantime the parents get free WIC even if they're illegal.

Imagine being 18 and suddenly discovering you have to prove the citizenship status of a parent you've never met or else you'll be deported to a country you've never been to and who's language you don't speak

Imagine a country extending citizenship to a whole group of people for no reason other than the location of their birth, and then allowing said people to access the benefits of citizenship, including the ability to receive welfare benefits, vote, and run for office.

That sounds like a great idea. The more citizens of your country the better. Note that US citizens pay taxes no matter where they live. So it's not a free ride by any means.

I don't have to imagine it. I live there. It's the richest and most powerful country on the planet. I hope you get a chance to live here someday!

I live in that country which happens to be the global hegemon.

Seems to work fine. Dozens of countries do this. It's not some weird hypothetical nor is the US some bizarre outlier.

The fact that a guy like Trump was ever elected in the first place would imply it is not working fine. Half of the electorate supports his anti-immigration policies. In an alternate universe where immigration laws were properly enforced he may never have been elected.

Further, just because something has never been an issue in the past doesn’t mean it won’t be in the future. The US is an outlier in being the only large and wealthy country that does this. Not many people are flying to Pakistan to give birth to secure Pakistani citizenship for their children.

There is no problem having mechanisms in place for edge cases where the child has been abandoned, parents both dead and so-on.

I appreciate that you can look at the current political climate and imagine that such edge cases would be handled in a compassionate way.

yes because DACA recipients do not live in fear of conservatives trying to remove them from their homes. (this)[https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/during...] was literally 3 weeks ago

i dont agree with the person you are responding to, but theres a difference between not being a citizen and being deported.

This sounds dangerously apartheidy.

A belief held by the majority does not make it better simply for that fact. Not that long ago, the majority view was that slavery was a great thing, so I think you should see that argument falls fairly flat.

Offering birthright citizenship makes the US better than 95% of the other countries. Not worse.

> Offering birthright citizenship makes the US better than 95% of the other countries. Not worse.

No arguments why its better, just stating it as if its fact.

Most countries do not have it because it creates many preverse incentives (such as anchor babies). This especially in countries which are targets of immigration (such as the US).

> Not that long ago, the majority view was that slavery was a great thing

A bit of a tangent, but is that actually the case? The highest estimate I have seen puts slave ownership at 5% of the population while the lowest puts it at 1%.

Obviously just because somebody doesn't own slaves doesn't mean they didn't support the system. There could be economic or legal reasons they couldn't own a slave.

I am just not sure that it was actually a majority view at any point in time in the US.

People are pretty expensive (they're literally worth a lifetime of free labor). 1 slave would've been like 3 complete years income for an average free white southerner to purchase, plus ongoing expenses obviously. So they basically end up in the hands of upper class people who have a steady need for lots of manual labor. Doesn't mean that everyone else around was not benefiting from the economic surplus, or was not supportive of the institution.

The US has always been a country of immigrants; the Constitution recognizes and enshrines this fact. Amending this rule requires a federal supermajority (66% in House and Senate) or a state majority (66% of state legislatures vote in favor of said amendment). Given how difficult it is to find consensus on even the most banal issue, it's unclear whether there would be sufficient support to ever amend.

> Amending this rule requires a federal supermajority (66% in House and Senate) or a state majority (66% of state legislatures vote in favor of said amendment).

This is actually just the first step - to propose an amendment.

To ratify it requires 3/4 of the state legislatures (or state “conventions”) to vote in favor.

https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution

As a non-US citizen, birthright citizenship has always struck me as strangely unique to America - in my mind it comes from a time when it was actively trying to populate the continent (something not a lot of countries have wanted to do, I guess).

Roll forward a few hundred years and the context has changed, so it seems reasonable that the law should too? But I guess it shouldn't be surprising that this is no bueno for SCOTUS, which has an infinite hard-on for Originalism [0] - I certainly can't imagine the conservative justices are ruling based on humanitarian grounds.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism

Most countries in North and South America have unconditional birthright citizenship for persons born in the country.

I take it you are not British? The British Empire had birthright citizenship, and up until 1948 (except for Ireland) citizens of all Commonwealth countries were simply British subjects.

Afterward it was possible to be, for example, a Canadian citizen, but it was still the case that "Prior to the [the British Nationality Act 1981] coming into force, any person born in the United Kingdom or a colony (with limited exceptions such as children of diplomats and enemy aliens) was entitled to [Citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies] status" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Nationality_Act_1981

Birthright citizenship is not unique to the United States, it’s common to certain kinds of former colonies.

I mean, it tracks with "no taxation without representation". Getting rid of birthright citizenship has the chance to create a separate *multi-generational* class of people that aren't given the same rights in society.

Most of the Americas for just that reason - and because the countries immigrants came from did not want their kids to have citizen ship and the right to come back.

Given the US is one of the most (the most?) successful countries in recent human history, shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't the 95% be looking at the US and seeing what to copy?

To be fair a lot of it had also to do with the sheer immense amount of vast, mostly unused ,fertile land available in north America. I sincerely doubt the American experiment would have worked this well if they had rowdy neighbours and infighting due to resource constraints. For almost 200 years the solution to most things in the USA was to get a chunk of either their people or immigrant to move to the neck of the woods to find fortune

But the success hasn't ended since the unused land became taken; in fact, the US became a superpower after the westward expansion era. My point is that looking at conditions today, the US still continues to succeed (by some definition of success) and other countries should try to emulate the aspects of the country that leads to that success. IMO one of the big factors is how well immigrants assimilate in the country, and birthright citizenship is a part of that.

I do agree with you that US success in the 19th century was due to many factors that are not relevant today.

Not getting wrecked in major land wars during the 1800s and 1900s also helped

> sheer immense amount of vast, mostly unused ,fertile land available in north America

it was not "available", it only became "available" after we killed off nearly all the inhabitants and stole their land

Define successful?

(You'll probably want to avoid metrics like happiness indices and life expectancy though)

At a minimum, it's been a place that people wanted to come to, more than they wanted to come to anywhere else in the world. That's successful as measured by people.

(Or at least, people wanted to come until the last couple of years...)

Fair point. Mainly I agree with the sibling comment: the revealed preference of many people around the world, including many people from the richest countries in Europe, is to move the United States and then settle permanently. I think that means a lot.

Obviously you can also say that the US is geopolitically successful because of its global military and diplomatic dominance, but I account zero value to this.

Nobel prizes? Manned moon landings? Reserve currencies? AC units per capita?

We don't really amend the Constitution every ten years. We got 10 all at once, immediately after the Constitution was written. They were amendments only because there was debate about whether including them would deprive people of even more rights by omission.

Of the remaining ones, two cancel each other out, and several others (including the most recent) are trivial. The Constitution has not been meaningfully amended in half a century, and it seems wildly unlikely that it ever can be.

95% of countries weren't formed by settling on somebody else's land and excluding the original inhabitants from citizenship for several hundred years. The American project is what it is because of millions of migrants who settled there for the perverse incentives of free land via the Homestead Act.

Constitutional amendments are generally made with the purpose of granting rights to the people, not taking them away. The US once made the mistake of making an amendment to take away rights (banning alcohol), but then another amendment restored the right to get drunk.

> Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship. It creates perverse incentives.

I typically find that the people using this logic don't seem to apply it to laws like universal healthcare, parental leave, or paid-time off. The lack of those benefits creates perverse incentives to already living citizens, not hypothetical future citizens. Why not focus on them?

Birthright citizenship is one of the best things we have going for us. I see no reason why we should treat people differently depending on whether or not they have an imaginary stamp labeling them as special (IE, as citizens). Birthright citizenship ensures the problem of unequal representation is fixed over time. A self-fixing function, if you will.

I think what you mean to say is that as a result of this ruling the voice of Americans can be diluted over time so that your preferred political outcomes can happen. Not everyone in my country believes that the concept of the nation state is stupid and should be done away with. I understand that there are many who do think this, and I have to live amicably among them, but it doesn't mean that I need to pretend that your ideas are good for me and my kin.

Sounds like you want to have unequal representation. Or rather, you want to keep your privilege by preventing other people from gaining equal footing. You are right that this is a pretty central element of American society. However, I think we're at our best when we concede that this sort of thinking is counter-productive in the end. Cooperation is really the core mechanism for societal growth, so any efforts to prevent cooperation (in this case, by creating a subclass) is eventually self-defeating

It does mean you need to pretend that. Reagan has a famous quote about it.

I mean, it's a free country, nobody can make you accept an idea you don't want to. But the nativist ideas you've adopted are not considered by most Americans to be acceptable. If you go around telling people that immigrants aren't real Americans, you will not be accepted even in many conservative circles. Even much of the Trump movement views nativists as useful dupes; the Vice President and Secretary of State, for example, clearly would not welcome your theories that their kin are diluting "the voice of Americans".

> Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship.

Closer to 82% actually, depending on how you count countries. Almost every country in the Western hemisphere has it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

> Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship

The map of which countries have jus soli is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

>Jus soli is the predominant rule in the Americas; explanations for this geographical phenomenon include the establishment of lenient laws by past European colonial powers to entice immigrants from the Old World and displace native populations in the New World, along with the emergence of successful wars of independence movements that widened the definition and granting of citizenship, as a prerequisite to the abolishment of slavery since the 19th century.[5]

>There are 35 countries that provide citizenship unconditionally to anyone born within their national borders.

The United States is different from 95% of countries. We're the place you are supposed to flee to when those other countries oppress you. That's just not the history of a place like Italy or Japan.

My great great grandparents left Quebec in search of a place where they could earn enough money to make it. They immigrated to America. They lived in communities of other Quebec emigrants and spoke French their whole lives. They never pursued American citizenship. Without birthright citizenship, would my great grandma have been American? OK then what about my grandpa? What about me? I'm not sure if any of my immigrant ancestors formally pursued American citizenship.

>It creates perverse incentives.

It also helped vault America into being the wealthiest country in the world.

> It creates perverse incentives

Perhaps advantageous, America has been the product of these incentives and still sits atop the world on most hegemon metrics. It amazes me how many people complain about the post-WW2 world order America built and benefits from more than any other country.

The US is unlike most other countries in that it is built on the recent genocide of the native population, with ~most of the current population being immigrants in the last 400 years.

Under what moral rules do genocidaires get citizenship but not, say, refugees?

> Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship.

most of the countries in the Americas do

> let's amend the constitution

go ahead and give it a try. I'd start with getting rid of the 2nd Amendment, then we can talk about the 14th.

Do you have US citizenship? How did you acquire it?

If you inherited it from your parents, how did they acquire it?

Usually strong opponents to birthright citizenship are just a few generations removed from someone who got theirs via birthright.

I, for one, believe in American exceptionalism. This country is different in many ways and its success is due to that difference. I don't think that the US should actively aim to "revert to the mean".

Why do you think it's not a good idea?

Why should I give a shit what 95% of other countries do? 99% of other countries are worse in every way that matters

There's about 193 countries in the world, your number would mean there's less than two countries that are better in every way that matters.

I can name ten countries off the top of my head that are better in every way that matters to me.

The USA ranks near the bottom of developed countries in every metric but the metrics related to money.

US is 23rd in happiness globally which is far from the bottom. For example UK, France, and Italy all rank lower.

So your claim is wrong.

This has nothing to do with whether it is a good idea. The question is whether the 14th amendment plainly says that this is the law of the land in the US, which it plainly does.

That three Justices chose to attempt to gaslight us about this is a disgrace. I'll never trust their judgement again.

Its a terrible idea to give citizenship to the chidlren of birth tourist. It makes no sense that someone defrauds the US government to get their child citizenship then you do nothing about it.

Is it "defrauding" if someone's just following the rules, though? And, at that, is it worth building your citizenship rules around something incredibly rare? (Estimates seem to think it's something like 15k babies a year.)

Looking at the dissents (Justice Gorsuch) it appears that he would consider illegal immigrants’ kids are citizens, but kids of legal non-immigrants are not based on the fact that one is a temporary visitor and another is not!

So, when I enter as a tourist, I'm not in jurisdiction? Sweet! Crime time!

Genuine question.

Isn't this statement aimed at citizenship tourism or whatever its called?

I used to live in a state where some new friends had told us about places that facilitated pregnant women's trips to the US solely for the purpose of staying and giving birth in the US so the child could become citizens. They then head home. I have no idea how prevalent this is.

If people really want to stop this kind of birth citizenship tourism they must vote for people who will pledge to amend the constitution using the proper democratic process.

But today's climate is so hostile to any kind of rational discussion about how to change laws. One faction just wants to deny citizenship right now to any people they seem not "american enough" while the other faction cannot possibly entertain any change to the current system or else It would concede something to the populist faction

Yes, the Justices in dissent have an ideological opposition to "citizenship tourism" and are working backward from that to find it to be out of scope of the Constitutional language. But that's wrong, that's not their job.

I had a friend from Shanghai who did this. It’s completely legal, you can have a proper tourist visa and be pregnant when you enter the USA, there are hospitals in SoCal that even cater to anchor babies and will express a passport for them so the parents can return with the baby shortly after birth.

That was back in the early 2010s, I don’t think it was prevalent then (I just had too many friends with the money to do that). I don’t think it is common now because Chinese citizens have more confidence about China and so aren’t looking for backup plans anymore.

The question of whether babies born to foreign tourists are automatically citizens is separate from the question of whether this is desirable.

On the desirability side of things, it's been this way for the entire history of this country (the amendment just codified how things were already done) and it seems to have worked OK. But even if we were to decide that this is bad, it would need to be fixed with an amendment.

Solicitor General Sauer brought up the same point during oral arguments in this case, and he didn't seem to know how prevalent it was either. Seems like the kind of thing you should have figured out before making your case to the Supreme Court.

Well, it doesn't matter. If the SCOTUS decides that some people, in certain circumstances, are not in jurisdiction of US law, then they have to apply that notion everywhere.

They can't pick and choose "oh no they are in jurisdiction of law A but not in law B". Jurisdiction is a fundamental concept, there's no middle ground.

As for whether people are really doing birth tourism: sure, there might be some cases, but well, they are using something that the legal system allows. If the country feels like it doesn't want that happening, it needs to amend the Constitution.

(Also, let's not kid ourselves that the birth tourism thing is what conservatives care about... People doing that kind of thing are usually rich. The real target are poor illegal immigrants giving birth in the country.)

Citizen tourism is not a real concern; good grief why do people care about fringe issues that impacts no one instead of concentration of corporate power, consolidation of wealth, and decreasing rights for citizens?

> I used to live in a state where some new friends had told us about places that facilitated pregnant women's trips to the US solely for the purpose of staying and giving birth in the US so the child could become citizens. They then head home. I have no idea how prevalent this is.

As many as 26,000 mothers do it (birth tourism) every year.

CIS analyzed U.S. Census Bureau data to track the number of foreign-born mothers who gave birth in the United States. Researchers cross-referenced those births against federal figures of temporary visitors. They isolated foreign mothers who arrived on short-term visas, gave birth, and did not establish long-term residency in the U.S. CIS concluded that 20,000 to 26,000 births annually are attributable to women arriving on short-term tourist visas specifically to obtain citizenship for their children.

Opinion:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf

News:

https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-birthright-citizens...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/30/us-supreme-c...

https://www.axios.com/2026/06/30/scotus-rejects-trumps-birth...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/supreme-court-rule-...

https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow...

Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42776131 - January 2025 (34 comments)

This "broad conception" is pretty well documented as what Congress wanted at the time of passage of 14th Amendment. It's been considered "settled law" for ages. The only real reason it's come to SCOTUS is that a particular political faction wants it to, and the media gives that particular faction more credence, and more coverage. So there's two things here:

1. An artificially whipped-up "question".

2. Conservative bias in the media.

> Conservative bias in the media.

Depending on how you count, something like 96%, 94%, 65% or 87% of mainstream media employees lean left. Of course this matters less and less as customers tune out and their influence wanes.

https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Do_97_percent_of_journali...

Now do the management/ownership side.

Thank you! Do they make the decisions about what stories to work and to run?

Yes, educated people tend to lean left, since the right is so anti-intellectual. But virtually all media in this country (both social and legacy) belongs to the far right pedophile oligarchs currently running this country to the ground to fatten their pockets.

The media in the US generally leans left (with a few notable exceptions).

This is a cherished American belief, but I don't think it's true after 2016, when NYT gave Trump a significant boost with their coverage of Clinton's emails, and continues to sanewash Trump, after 2024, when billionaires like Soon-Shiong and Bezoa personally directed their paper's editorial stance towards Harris, after Aksel Springer unveils a corporate conservative bias policy.

I think it's blatant now, but evidence suggests that "liberal bias" was never more than a partisan accusation.

Thank God.

If only because this would open up people born here to having their citizenship retroactively revoked.

The constitution is pretty clear. If you don't like it amend it.

If anything we need to expand it to include anyone who gives birth in this country. If you're willing to deal with our horrible maternity care system and help keep up our declining population, you deserve a blue passport.

The U.S. Constitution is very far from being clear. The whole purpose of the Supreme Court is to explain the meaning of what is written in the Constitution; there are 9 justices in the court and they often disagree on that.

Just look at the second amendment:

  A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,
  the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The "well regulated militia" phrase caused at least two very different opinions: United States v. Miller [1] in 1939 and District of Columbia v. Heller [2] in 2008, with very different results.

Just as the second amendment has this "militia" phrase that provokes arguments, the fourteenth amendment starts with

  All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the
  jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State
  wherein they reside.

and the phrase "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is vague enough to trigger discussions about whether it applies to illegal immigrants or not.

Natural language is just bad in expressing rules.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Miller#Decisi...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller...

The jurisdiction clause is there because of diplomats. It's a common thing in other Jus Solis countries, for good reason.

The debate is whether the USA is a Jus Soli (no s) country.

Roberts claims Jus Soli applies to the USA by looking at historical concept of the words in the constitution and the king's obligations to those on his soil. He cites historical statements by founders.

Thomas and Gorsuch rejects Jus Soli applies since it is a concept from feudal lords and serfdom which the USA did not inherit. The cite historical statements by founders.

Kavanaugh thinks congress gets to decide the meaning (within reason), so he rejects Jus Soli as well.

Jackson worries about backsliding and using this to oppress people, unsure about her legal reasoning, but seems to guess at how authors of the amendment understood the words. I would still classify her as saying USA did not inherit Jus Soli, but later codified it via amendment.

And so we have the whole bench of 9 people guessing and discussing the intention of the lawmakers. Did they indeed mean diplomats when they wrote "subject of the jurisdiction thereof"? If a Martian lands on the US soil and gives birth, will the offspring immediately be "subject of the jurisdiction thereof"? What was the common meaning of the word "jurisdiction" in 1868? This kind of stuff.

No it really isn’t. Immigrants are clearly subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. As Wong Kim stated the only way not to be is if the government has given you permission to be here without being under jurisdiction like a diplomat or if you’re part of an invading force. Every other person in the us is expected to follow us laws. Just because they don’t doesn’t mean the us doesn’t have jurisdiction.

This is why American Samoans aren't citizens. They aren't subject to the full jurisdiction of the USA even though they are born in the United States.

Yet you rarely find anyone giving a shit about the American Samoans, you never hear about it.

----- re: below due to throttling---------

>American Samoans aren't citizens because American Samoa is a territory, not a state. Puerto Rico has a special status that was extended to it to grant its residents citizenship – this isn't a status that's automatically granted to all territories, it requires Federal approval which AS has never formally pushed for.

Unless you falsely believe PR or AS are not part of the United States, you are just agreeing with me with extra words regarding the jurisdictional differences. The only option for denying birthright citizenship would be not born in United States, or not subject to jurisdiction thereof.

See this excellent prior comment[] on why the difference between PR and AS is jurisdiction and not whether it is part of the US.

>This seems entirely subjective.

I'm not going to do a formal academic study with you, it's plainly obvious as of late you see far more headlines on hackernews (a search shows a single HN topic on AS citizenship in the history of HN, but full page+ of search results on the birthright citizenship issue at hand) and elsewhere regarding the birthright citizenship issue at hand and far more rarely the fact American Samoans don't get it.

[] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16700413

There was no such thing as an illegal immigrant in the US when the 14th Amendment was ratified.

I can believe that there is a lot of variance in maternal care and obstetrics in the US, but my wife and I had a pretty good experience. Documented here in what detail I could muster in those days: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Pregnancy

Congrats!

But statistically America lags behind most other nations of similar development levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_maternal_...

Not to mention the lack of maternity leave or real worker protections. A family member was fired for taking off time during a pregnancy. Everyone's fine now, but she definitely had a rough patch.

A big part of this comes down to the lack of any real safety net here.

Wow, looking at the data on that page, it seems that people should go to Belarus if they want to have a baby.

> our declining population

Our what?

The US's population is not declining. However, without immigration, our population growth would be very close to zero, and a yet lower rate of natural increase is locked in over the next couple of decades (more old people who will die than children).

And, I mean, it's obviously hard to predict beyond that, but it doesn't seem like anyone has any real clear answer to the trend of steadily decreasing TFR right now.

I suspect OP mean declining fertility rate. USA population is still increasing, but is slowing down, and will sharply drop if the fertility rate remains below replacement of ~2 children per woman.

I believe OP is referring to how immigration is the only known working solution to a decreasing population.

The US fertility rate is already 1.6 births per woman[0], and the population is only not decreasing because it still receives far more immigration than, say, Japan or South Korea.

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr038.pdf

The US Is Flirting With Its First-Ever Population Decline - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960624 - February 2026 (1008 comments)

The nuance is ~71% of the world’s population now lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level needed to maintain population size. US working age population cohort has likely peaked. The future of the developed world is fighting over global skilled workers and young potential immigrants who would settle and start families in your jurisdiction.

Is the U.S. Labor Force Nearing Its Peak? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48726615 - June 2026

The Fertility Rate of Every Country in the World - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/fertility-rate-of-world-pop... - May 17th, 2026

U.S. Total Fertility Rate by State 2007 vs 2025 - https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1qt22ka/oc... - February 2026

The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)

Our World In Data: Population tool: How will populations across the world change in the 21st century? - https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool

("demography is destiny")

Additional citation:

The Demographic Dead End: 2026 State of Fertility Report - https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/the-demographic-dead-end-... - July 2026

Report: https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/ifs-stateo... [pdf]

The birth rate correlates inversely with female earnings growth and correspondingly with male earnings growth; or, more to the point, declining birth rates correlates with the advancement of feminism (including birth rates approaching and then reaching zero.)

This is an observation and not a judgement. Take what you will with this information.

Yes, because of the outdated assumption that women take virtually all responsibility for childcare, which is damaging not just to women, but to men and children too, combined with the it becoming more difficult for families to manage on a single income.

It is not just an American problem. It is slowly changing, at least here in the UK: I see a lot more dads taking kids around these days. I have still found people were surprised that my daughter lived with me rather than her mother after divorce though.

It makes sense to me. When women have more choices, they tend to put off having kids or they raise their standards - for their economic situation before kids, for partners, etc.

I think this is good; insofar as women have children, it should be because they want to, not because they're pushed into it.

I'll say - it also wouldn't kill us to have slightly fewer people on the planet. We're already taxing much of our systems/ecosystems past their breaking points. Smarter people than me, entire groups of scientists, are saying that what we're doing now is badly unsustainable and we're heading for trouble.

Slightly fewer is good. A rate of around 1.8 kids per woman seems slow but it's an exponential so it's still quite significant.

Parts of the world have reached 1.0 kids per woman, which is a halving of the population per generation, which will put a massive strain on our resources

> I'll say - it also wouldn't kill us to have slightly fewer people on the planet. We're already taxing much of our systems/ecosystems past their breaking points. Smarter people than me, entire groups of scientists, are saying that what we're doing now is badly unsustainable and we're heading for trouble.

If you believed this, would you be against sterilizing third world populations to limit the overall population growth ( given those are the populations which continue to grow in this environment ) ? If not sterilizing - what about propagandizing their younger population to not reproduce? Would that be a net-good?

If not, why not?

This is true, although I think it correlates more strongly with female participation in the workforce than earnings directly. And it's not a criticism of feminism, just a consequence that we should be aware of.

A material component of reduction in the US fertility rate has been avoided teen (15-19 cohort) pregnancies. ~40% of pregnancies both in the US and internationally, annually, are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively).

Teen birth rates hit another historical low in 2025, CDC says - https://www.npr.org/2026/04/09/nx-s1-5777587/teen-birth-rate... - April 9th, 2026

Additional citation:

There's No Mystery To America's Fertility Decline - https://ifstudies.org/blog/theres-no-mystery-to-americas-fer... - June 30th, 2026 (“The U.S. fertility decline is shaped by many forces, but the data point to one primary driver: the collapse of childbearing among women in their 20s.”)

> This is an observation and not a judgement. Take what you will with this information.

Why bring it up at all if you're not trying to say anything?

Birth rate correlates with home ownership rate for people aged 25-34. Wonder why that's been going down despite household earnings growth.

It also correlates with the economy being more and more hostile towards single income households, but let's just blame women knowing their own worth.

> If only because this would open up people born here to having their citizenship retroactively revoked.

No, that's not how laws work

Applying laws retroactively is much less common than a "simple" rule change

This wouldn't really be applying laws retroactively, but deciding what the law has always meant. If the decided meaning is that children of illegal immigrants are not automatically citizens, that means they weren't automatically citizens beforehand. Thus there wouldn't really be anything to revoke, they just never were citizens in the first place.

The executive order that prompted this was only aimed at babies born after it went into effect, but I see no reason it would have to be that way.

Either laws work the way they're written and 4 members of the court disagree or they work the way the Supreme Court says they work and a worse ruling could threaten those citizens.

That was very much on the table, though not locked in.

That's not how we have traditionally thought citizenship works, but that is exactly what the Trump administration would've gone for next if the supreme court had ruled in their favor in this instance, thereby setting up the _next_ supreme court case.

> If anything we need to expand it to include anyone who gives birth in this country.

???

That's exactly what this ruling affirms; no expansion necessary: it already included "anyone who gives birth in this country".

They are arguing that the mothers should also get citizenship, in addition to the babies. That's definitely not what was affirmed.

35 countries in the world, most in the Americas, confer unconditional birthright citizenship (jus soli), regardless of their parents' nationality or immigration status.

Sorry but I wanted to see a 9-0... There are 3, 4, that are just ignoring the constitution from what I read/saw. It is only a matter of time. A win for now but that is for now.

What is “a matter of time” exactly? I doubt the court wants to revisit this again any time soon. And two of the dissenters are probably the likeliest justices to be replaced next.

Trump and his cronies were never going to win that battle. Like many things he does, it serves as a dog whistle to nationalists and allows him to paint anyone who opposes him as somehow un-American and an enemy of the ‘people’.

> Trump and his cronies were never going to win that battle.

He got dang close. He's only one justice replacement away from making it doable.

Gods, we are not as far from ripping up the Constitution as we'd like to think.

White nationalists, specifically, yeah. Colloquially known as Nazi wannabes.

it's on the tin of the 14th amendment

deal with it

Another bad decision that won't stand the test of time. The decision says more about the justices themselves than it does the decision. Voting the "right way" gets positive press attention, invites to the DC social circle, etc. Kavanaugh and Barrett are both attention seeking, weak willed individuals that Roberts plays like puppets. Personally, Trump should not have nominated either of them. And W's nomination and selection of Roberts over Scalia was appalling. Neither a textualist or an originalist could have ruled that way. And using the 14th Amendment as justification is historically disingenuous, as Clarence Thomas pointed out. Birth tourism will thrive.

I'm sorry, you are saying that using the highest law of the land to settle a legal question it directly addresses is historically disingenuous?

No, I'm saying the use of the 14th amendment to justify the majority opinion is disingenuous, as Thomas points out.

This particular Supreme Court is out of control. The Roberts court will (IMHO) go down in history in the same cateogry as the Taney court that gave us such decisions as Dred Scott. Supreme Court justices have always been political actors, not some high-minded academics that come down from their ivory tower to hand down missives every now and again (as some imagine). But this is a step beyond anything we've seen in a long time. Here are some highlights:

- 4 justices in this decision rejected the plain text reading of the Citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, which would've overturned over a century of precedent;

- They invented the "Major Questions Doctrine" that basically allows the Supreme Court to overrule the will of the executive and legislative branches if they deem the decision sufficiently weighty. It was invented and used to block significant legislation under the Biden administration;

- They invented the History and Traditions Test under the Biden administration to overturn Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs decision. This was in spite of abortion being not only legal but essentially unregulated at the founding. Famously, Ben Franklin published an at-home recipe for abortion [1];

- They have lied about the facts of cases to push a particular decision. One of the more notable cases was Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that allowed school prayer. The lie? That the coach was "quietly" praying. This was not true and was documented, including photos to the contrary;

- There are now essentially zero limits on campaign spending by anyone after today's decisions on PAC and campaign coordination and of course Citizens United;

- They decided that independent agencies set up by Congress are unconstitutional despite almost a century of precedent because of the separation of powers but this doesn't apply to the Federal Reserve for some reason;

- They overturneed 40 years of precedent of Chevron deference, a case that Gorsuch should've recused himself from since he was essentially avenging his mother's sacking as EPA administrator under Reagan in a case that became Chevron. 40 years of Congress and 7 presidents of both parties have written and signed laws with Chevron deference in mind;

- They invented presidential immunity out of whole cloth in a country that was founded rejecting monarchs who were above the law. All the insider trading and pardon selling of the current administration is a direct and foreseeable result of that decision;

- They decided that Federal regulations could essentially be challenged at any time instead of the previous six-year rule (ie Corner Post). This essentially allows you to challenge a 100 year old rule by setting up a situation where you're "harmed";

- Roberts has almost singlehandedly gutted the Voting Rights Act over several decisions. Previously he got rid of federal preclearance because of a history states had with discrimination and voter suppression. They immediately went back to discrimination and voter suppression. And then this year the court basically allowed racially-discriminated redistricting under the guise that it was "partisan" not "racist" unless you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's racist;

The inability of this court to see obvious racism harkens back to a famous decision called Cruikshank that decided private individuals couldn't be punished for civil rights violations (notably, hate crimes) in a response to the Colfax massacre. Additionally, Cruikshank stated that the Bill of Rights didn't apply to state governments. This was slowly dismantled by various opinions over the next century.

There were other cases of the Redeemer era (notably Plessy v. Ferguson that legalized segregation) where the court was completely unable to see racism and went out of its way to limit any effort to combat it. We're in one of those eras now (IMHO).

All of this is incremental too. So today two cases were decided that essentially allowed states to ban trans athletes. The next step here is that trans athlets must be banned. Those cases are already percolating through lower courts and we'll see them in the next term most likely.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-frank...

> All of this is incremental too. So today two cases were decided that essentially allowed states to ban trans athletes. The next step here is that trans athlets must be banned. Those cases are already percolating through lower courts and we'll see them in the next term most likely.

Actually what today's decision does is uphold Title IX rights for women and girls. Have you considered how this decision benefits female athletes?

Hard to address everything wrong you wrote, but in particular major questions doctrine protects us from presidential overreach. It has been key in stopping some of Trump’s foolish policies like tariffs. So that is hardly something we should be criticizing. Biden’s student loan forgiveness was similarly illegal executive overreach. These sorts of major things should be passed by congress.

Yes and no. The tariffs decision was fractured. There were really two prats. The first was that a statutory interpretation of IEEPA didn't give the President the power to tax. That authority lies with Congress. The MQD, to me at least, felt shoe-horned in tehre, kind of to justify its existence. But a statutory interpretation was sufficient to rebuke the President's authority so why the rest? It feels like the court is saying "see? we use this on Trump too. We're not biased".

5-4 though, yikes! This shouldn't have even been close. With an impassioned 91 page dissent by Thomas. What a chode.

6-3 with Thomas, Alito & Gorsuch dissenting

This is kind of crazy. The text of the amendment is as literal as it gets. If this had failed it would have basically meant emptying Congress of all of its powers, because now the executive can just pick whatever interpretation they deem fit to their goals and run with it.

The rule of courts of law is to interpret the law, not to pick new creative meanings out of them. That's the role of the legislative power - otherwise what's stopping a court to reinterpret the meaning of any word in any legal text and allow the executive to rule by decree

"subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is not a clear statement.

5-4 on the Constitution. Kavanaugh's concurrence is that birthright citizenship is controlled by a law that Congress could change.

Kavanaugh ruled that Trump's EO wasn't unconstitutional, just contrary to federal law, and Congress could change the law there if they wanted. So, this makes it only 5-4 upholding the 14th amendment.

Which is gods-damned crazy. We are that close to overturning major civil rights.

This would also overturn our ability to arrest or deport non-citizen, no? If the argument is that they are not under the jurisdiction of the US government, we cannot legally arrest or prosecute them?

This would create chaos. Not to mention the tens of millions of citizens retroactively turned into stateless people!

Kavanaugh agrees with their reading of the 14th Amendment, though.

I should be unanimous, it's what the constitution says. If you don't like it you need to go through the amendment process.

>I should be unanimous, it's what the constitution says

Thats a tautology. “What the constitution says” is the thing in question.

Sure, but it leads to allowing for the possibility of interpreting "..the right to bear arms.." as "you are allowed to own the limbs of an Ursus arctos".

There's plenty in the US constitution which is vaguely worded, but you have to twist its words an awful lot to deny birthright citizenship.

The language couldn't be any clearer. The fact that it was questioned by people with a stated motive doesn't prove otherwise.

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

> All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof ...

It's the second part that is in dispute and is not clear from the constitution's text what exactly it means and who it excludes. And yes, it has always excluded some people born within the borders, it is not a meaningless statement.

Well, no, but almost everyone inside US borders is subject to US laws. The exceptions are rare: people in foreign embassies (which is "foreign soil"), invading armies, and indigenous tribes on tribal land.

> subject to the jurisdiction thereof

> A well regulated Militia

POV: you're about to hear the dumbest takes on the internet.

Seriously though, were the founding fathers just master ragebaiters or what? More ink has been spilled over these two lines than any other in modern history.

In the past decade, the Constitution hasn’t slowed down the courts from creatively interpreting its various clauses. Their decisions have effectively amended many of those fundamental (and arguably inalienable) rights. Repeatedly.

This trivial reading of the constitution doesn't align with the reality. Two simple exceptions and a third not so simple are children of diplomats, children of invading armies, and native americans, who required an act of congress to give citizenship at birth.

The supreme Court ruled that South Carolina could not secede from the Union because the Constitution was merely a continuation of the agreements under the articles of confederation even though all states had to withdraw from the confederation to get into the union.

After that bit of logic, nothing the supreme Court decides would surprise me

This is neither science/tech nor VC related, why are we becoming the dumping ground for political news?

Half the people in Silicon Valley are immigrants - or more. Likely very relevant.

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