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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, my name is Sandra E. Garcia, and I'm a reporter at The New York Times. I write for The Styles Desk, where we try to understand our complicated world by keeping up with culture. We want to take you to the forefront of cultural shifts and let you know why things are trending.
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Can I ask you a couple questions? Did you sleep here last night? Yes, we did.
We did. We got here at about 11.30 p.m. and got some sleep until maybe 6 a.m. Yeah.
How early did you get here?
6.30. I got here a little bit after 4. So we are waiting in the line from last Sunday.
Sorry, you've been waiting in line since last Sunday? Yeah. Yeah, last Sunday.
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. On Wednesday morning in Washington, the scene outside of the Supreme Court captured the enormous stakes of the case that was about to be argued before its nine justices.
This is pivotal. This will define the immigration experience for decades.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of birthright citizenship in America?
Right. Basically saying the 14th Amendment guarantees that anyone born, with very few exceptions, on American soil is an American citizen.
Yes. And not just in the 14th Amendment, but in subsequent court rulings, in actions by past presidents, this has been the common, subtle law understanding.
Right. And so we always understood that the administration's legal arguments in defense of this executive order were going to be potentially tough sledding. before the entire judiciary. So take us into these oral arguments and how they unfold. And let's start with the administration's lawyer. We will hear argument this morning in case 25365, Trump versus Barbara. General Sauer.
Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court.
President Trump's Solicitor General, John Sauer, who represents the administration at the Supreme Court, is asking the justices to reinterpret or restore what he says is the original meaning of the 14th Amendment.
The Citizenship Clause was adopted just after the Civil War to grant citizenship to the newly freed slaves and their children.
So a key point to the administration's argument centered on the language of the 14th Amendment and the meaning of a phrase, subject to the jurisdiction of. The language of the 14th Amendment says that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States.
In 1984, this court recognized that subject to the jurisdiction means owing direct and immediate allegiance. The clause thus does not extend citizenship to the children of temporary visa holders or illegal aliens.
John Sauer is trying to get the justices to focus on, again, the meaning of subject to the jurisdiction of. In his view, the babies of illegal immigrants are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and are therefore not citizens.
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Chapter 3: How did President Trump's presence impact the Supreme Court proceedings?
Right. Robert seems to be saying, you want us to get from the concept that invading pillagers of the U.S., their kids should not be American citizens, to suddenly saying that all the children of undocumented immigrants shouldn't be given birthright citizenship. And he just doesn't quite see the line between the two.
Yes, and Sauer's response is to go back to the debates around the drafting of the 14th Amendment and even to a statute that existed before the amendment and to pull out various statements from senators at the time.
And one of the strongest statements of this is Senator Trumbull's statement that I quoted at the beginning where he says, he's asked, what does that mean subject to the jurisdiction thereof? And he says, it means not owing allegiance to anybody else. That is what it means.
and to try to reinforce this idea that in order to be a birthright citizen, your parents had to have complete allegiance to what he called the political jurisdiction of the United States.
And it felt like the Solicitor General knew his audience, that this conservative majority on this court likes originalism, likes to go back to original sources, and that he was appealing to that background.
Sure, that's going to be key to this decision. What was the original meaning? What were the drafters thinking of the time? And there was a lot of discussion about how do you apply that history and the text to this modern day issue of illegal immigration that the drafters were not necessarily thinking about in these terms at that time.
And what we're dealing with here is something that was basically unknown at the time when the 14th Amendment was adopted, which is illegal immigration. So how do we deal with that situation when we have a general rule?
Right, Justice Alito pipes up at this point, and he's curious how the government's argument confronts that.
Right, and he asks about the idea of applying a broad principle to a new problem, and the Solicitor General says, that's right, this broad principle does apply here, and that's what we often do when we're interpreting the Constitution. And he has all of these historical examples that he cites to sort of back up this claim in the way that he thinks the principle has been applied over time.
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