“Birthright Citizenship is not about rich people from China, and the rest of the World, who want their children, and hundreds of thousands more, FOR PAY, to ridiculously become citizens of the United States of America. It is about the BABIES OF SLAVES! We are the only Country in the World that dignifies this subject with even discussion. Look at the dates of this long ago legislation – THE EXACT END OF THE CIVIL WAR! The World is getting rich selling citizenships to our Country, while at the same time laughing at how STUPID our US Court System has become (TARIFFS!). ‘Dumb Judges and Justices will not a great Country make!'” posted the President of the United States on Monday morning, two days before his Solicitor General D John Sauer leans on an 1884 Supreme Court ruling against a native american in his quest to uphold Trump’s ability to outlaw birthright citizenship – but only for the children of non-citizens born domestically after February 2025 – via executive fiat.
You never know, calling the United States Supreme Court stupid could help Sauer, who’s already got his work cut out for him, to say the least. “We believe the reliance on Elk to deny birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants is misplaced. It’s a misreading and a misunderstanding,” Leonard Fineday, general counsel of the National Congress of American Indians, told NBC as though Sauer doesn’t already fucking know it and that the 1884 Elk v Wilkins decision is simply the best he’s got as he tries to work backwards from the outcome Trump wants.
It’d be a waste of space to even summarize Elk v Wilkins here. All you really need to know is that majority opinion author Justice Horace Gray in 1898 also penned the Wong Kim Ark decision Trump is trying to overturn, with Gray writing in Ark specifically that his earlier decision concerned “only members of Indian tribes within the United States and had no tendency to deny citizenship to children born in the United States” who were not Native American as he and majority affirmed that any other person born within US borders – excepting those of two foreign diplomats – was automatically a US citizen. Then toss in that in 1924 the Elk v Wilkins decision was superseded when President Calvin Cooldige signed the Indian Citizenship Act. Maybe Sauer wants that nixed too.
Again, to partially self-plagiarize from an article last month about this case is something that’s still vexing about the thinking here: If that specific provision of the 14th Amendment was “about the BABIES OF SLAVES!” (also the fucking idiot is wrong on birthright citizenship being only an American principle – it’s far from it) then why the order was written expressly to only apply to children born to non-citizens after February 19, 2025. It’s kind of a binary proposition. Nikki Haley is not the daughter of two emancipated slaves and by that logic she’s either a naturally-born US citizen or she isn’t.
Even dumber about this is that on the very small chance that it isn’t a dead end and that citizenship for a certain class of individuals solely by their date of birth and parentage can indeed be stripped away by fiat then the upshot is, at the very least, that it can be just as easily restored by the next administration by a superseding executive order. And that superseding could be taken further.
In related-ish news, the fat bastard also resumed threatening to destroy Iran’s electrical infrastructure, posting “The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran. Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’ This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year ‘Reign of Terror,'” almost certain to be met with mockery from the Iranians.