Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court was championed by conservatives who wanted to end the injustice of Roe v. Wade. It’s a sad irony that she’s now joined a decision that will have similarly far-reaching ill-effects on American politics and jurisprudence alike. Trump v. Barbara, the “birthright citizenship” case decided this week, is a travesty of Roe’s magnitude.
The decision’s defenders point to its long pedigree, with precedents dating back more than a century. But Roe had its precedents, too, and the justices who invented a national right to abortion were not shy about claiming there were centuries’ worth of grounds for their desired policy, too. Birthright citizenship, as liberals like the six-justice majority in this case interpret it, allows for absurdities no one had imagined at the time of the 14th Amendment’s drafting and ratification. That enemy combatants in the Middle East could be entitled to the full rights of American citizens if their mothers happened to give birth in the United States; that foreign espionage agencies could create cadres of dual citizens by booking flights to our territory for “birth tourism”; that illegal immigrants in the process of breaking our laws could be rewarded for doing so by being allowed to confer the priceless gift of American citizenship on their offspring—none of this was intended by the authors or ratifiers of the 14th Amendment, which was intended quite simply to ensure that after the Civil War black Americans could not be denied the only citizenship they could possibly have. The children of enemy combatants, foreign spies and terrorists, and illegal immigrants are all born with allegiances inherited from their parents, just as natural-born American citizens inherit the allegiance and citizenship of their parents.
If the American people think that the progeny of illegal immigrants or even hostile aliens who happen to give birth here do deserve automatic American citizenship, then the proper mechanism for expressing that intention within the framework of constitutional self-government would be legislation or an executive order. The American people routinely elect representatives, senators, and presidents to make and unmake laws and policies according to need. Nothing is more fundamental to democracy or republicanism than citizenship itself, which is quite simply the “self” of “self-government.”