Jamel Bouie

The case itself stems back to the president's day one executive order attempting to redefine democracy.

The Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, which this is like a rough paraphrase, holds that all persons born and naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction therein are citizens of the United States and of the states as well.

I try to redefine this to mean that undocumented immigrants and like some visa holders were excluded from birthright citizenship.

And the reason this was a big deal is because there is the collected weight of almost like 160 years of history and jurisprudence and historical scholarship that says that the citizenship clause is bad.

Basically, as broad as it sounds, that unless you belong to a very narrow set of long-recognized exceptions, which is that you are the child of diplomats, you were born on territory controlled by a foreign enemy, or that until the 1920s, you belong to certain native tribes, which had a different relationship to the U.S., and that they were on territory not controlled by the U.S.

Unless you are in those categories,

then you are a citizen by birth in the United States.

That's what people thought they were doing when they wrote the thing.

That's what the Supreme Court in 1898 decided when it held in favor of Wong Kim Ark, a Chinese-American born in the United States.

And that's basically been...

What it is.

And so part of what I think for many legal scholars, what's so nerve-wracking about this case and crazy-making about this case is that there's not really – there's not a real dispute about what the citizenship clause means.

You can certainly do a thing where you engage in what I would describe as a language game where you say, well, if I move the words around like this and if I find obscure sources here, I can –

construct perhaps a logically coherent alternative meaning but like if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bicycle right like okay you can do that but what we know it means is this

No, I mean, I think you're right to say that the conservative members are not going to change their tune because Trump is there.

That would just validate one of the criticisms of the conservative majority on the court.

I think it's better to look at just Trump's psychology.

Trump doesn't actually...

know how to negotiate he doesn't know how to bargain all he knows to do is intimidate and threaten and and maybe cajole on occasion and so i think he's just thinking if i go there and look you know stone face this will intimidate them into um into agreeing with me maybe it's targeted at sour you know maybe this will make sour you know think twice about messing up which you know too late

But that's where I think Trump was.