Donald Trump promises to sign an Executive Order on day one of his new term abolishing Birthright Citizenship. This will trigger litigation thar promises to land in Trump's Supreme Court for final adjudication, Assuming Trump prevails there, the GOP already introduced a Bill to abolish Birthright Citizenship legislatively. JD Vance co-sponsored that Bill. This amounts to an historically unprecedented assault on virtually every American's Citizenship.
Under Birthright Citizenship proof of birth in the US, via a birth certificate for example, suffices to prove citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment secures this clear and easy path to Citizenship for all Americans born here, and so operated over the last 156 years.
With the abolition of Birthright Citizenship no American will qualify for Birthright citizenship without additional proof of parental citizenship. You read that correctly, nearly every voter will face new evidentiary burdens to prove citizenship. Under the GOP approach we will all need to prove the legitimacy of our parents' citizenship.
The Vance sponsored Constitutional Citizenship Clarification Act, introduced on June 5, 2024, purports on its face to totally and instantly abolish Birthright Citizenship. According to one co-sponsor's website the Act will:
Notably, the Act proposed by Vance includes no limitation on this "clarification" of who enjoys citizenship and who does not. The Act includes no limitation on retroactive effect and lacks any express limitation providing for prospective impact only. The Constitution only proscribes retroactive criminal sanctions The intent of the Act is to correct errors in prior interpretations of the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment.
More broadly, the GOP assault on virtually everyone's citizenship seeks to maximize the power of the next Trump Administration to round-up citizens, as discussed in my prior blog post. As such, this amounts to the greatest power-grab of rights over American citizens in history.
