As I write this, the Supreme Court is hearing a case challenging the tradition that nearly all children born in the United States, whoever their parents may be and how they came to be here, are automatically citizens.
On the first day of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order stating that babies born on U.S. soil to illegal immigrants and temporary foreign visitors were ineligible for birthright citizenship. That was an obvious shot across the bow of the U.S. Supreme Court as it challenged an interpretation of the 14th Amendment that has stood for over a century. The President knew his EO would be also challenged, and would eventually end up on the Supreme Court docket.
Because this is an important question that would, if SCOTUS agreed with the President’s interpretation of the Constitutional intent (there were no such things as “illegal immigrants” when the Constitution was written) have massive consequences in many areas, the oral argument is attracting blow-by-blow analysis. That is not my purpose here.
The issue for Ethics Alarms is President Trump’s decision to attend the oral argument. No previous President has done this, although nothing prevents the President from attending. Trump’s predecessors all avoided the option, though there have been many, many cases over the years that the President knew would have a major effect on his policies as well and the matters he had to deal with. President Pierce did not attend the Dred Scott oral arguments. To be fair, he was barely engaged at any time in his miserable four years in the White House. But FDR didn’t sit in while the Court was determining the fates of his many New Deal programs. Nixon didn’t listen to the Pentagon Papers arguments.
Ethics Alarms 
+10,000 MPH!
jvb
+15,000 MPH
jvb
Core stage separated.
jvb
Fantastic! I was at work and didn’t get to watch the launch, but finally, finally, finally we are headed back to the Moon!
In my darkest nightmares in the 70s, I would never have thought it would take more than 50 years to do so.
Godspeed Artemis indeed.
I know diplomats have immunity from prosecution but our government can and have expelled those with diplomatic immunity in the past as such even they are subject to the “jurisdiction thereof”.
Jackson’s line of questioning surrounding the ability to prosecute does not make someone subject to the jurisdiction. The corollary is the Israel has compulsory military service but that does not mean visitors must register for service. Visitors to the US must follow our laws but that does not make them citizens. Where voting is mandatory, citizens from those countries must go to their embassy to vote or face sanctions.
If the developers of the 14th amendment wanted to mean anyone born on our soil to be citizens they would have included Indians rather than having to give them citizenship by legislation in the twentieth century.
The argument that Indians were part of a sovereign nation inside the boundaries of the US fails to consider the counter to that is that the boundaries to the reservation were established by the US government and the US government funds much of their infrastructure and thus are at the discretion of Congress.
I was really sorry to hear that Trump attended theses arguments and wish he hadn’t done it.
How is this really that different from Shumer standing on the steps of the Supreme Court before the Dobbs decision and threatening the justices? He shouldn’t have done that either. No, Trump didn’t issue any verbal threats (thank goodness), but he doesn’t have to. His mere presence is enough.
The good news? I don’t think the justices he wants to intimidate are intimidatable. He might actually cause a justice or two to vote against him.
Watching the news today I heard a comment that in a recent year, 10% of babies born in the USA were to non-citizens. Furthermore, China has such an active birth tourism industry that there are over a million US ‘citizens’ growing up in China, who could one day come here to work, run for office, infiltrate, vote …
If we are to preserve our sovereignty we need to end birthright citizenship, continue to control the border, and deport as many illegal immigrants as possible, no matter how long they’ve been here.
The Justices have at least as much power as the President. If they can’t handle his presence as a spectator … do I say ‘grow a pair’ too often?
And if you’d like another tangent, I was having trouble with WP the other day and couldn’t respond to the ethics discussion, so …
Sydney Sweeney
I’d switch.