“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 Then toss in that in 1924 the Elk v Wilkins decision was superseded when President Calvin Cooldige signed the Indian Citizenship Act.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.