President-elect Donald Trump's signature promise for his first day in office is not just unconstitutional, it's a betrayal of one of America's greatest accomplishments to better itself as a nation, wrote The Washington Post editorial board in a scathing criticism Tuesday.
Specifically, Trump wants to abolish birthright citizenship, the guarantee that anyone born in the United States is a citizen regardless of parentage, a right adopted as part of English common law and affirmed by the 14th Amendment after the Civil War and the fall of slavery. He has also toyed with the idea of denying passports to children of undocumented parents.
"The late Post columnist Michael Gerson said it best when he wrote in 2018: 'Any political movement that regards the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment as an obstacle to its political intentions has earned a great deal of suspicion,'" wrote the board. "Ratified in 1868 to solidify the political transformations for which hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers had given their lives, the amendment refuted the belief that a person’s race or ethnicity should determine citizenship. Its authors intended to undo the Supreme Court’s shameful Dred Scott decision, which held that no person of African ancestry could ever claim U.S. citizenship. It offers a clear, simple standard for determining who is an American, by which the color of one’s skin and their ancestry are irrelevant."
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Trump and his fellows have tried to twist the plain meaning of the amendment by arguing that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” can be reinterpreted to exclude children of undocumented parents — but this is wrong, wrote the board.
"All people living in the United States — even those here illegally — are 'subject to' U.S. law. Moreover, historians widely agree that the phrase was intended to exempt two groups of people from birthright citizenship: children of foreign diplomats and members of Native American tribes that maintained sovereign status under treaties with the U.S. government," the board noted.
Additionally, the debates in the Senate at the time made it clear that everyone involved understood the amendment would apply to the children of immigrants, of all races — something that rankled white supremacists of the day, the article added.
"A triumph over racism and xenophobia, the 14th Amendment also marked the beginning of a global movement to embrace birthright citizenship, rather than determining citizenship by ethnicity or national origin," wrote the board — and, contrary to Trump's claims we are the "only" country that has such a system, almost every nation in the entire Western Hemisphere does the same.
"By harping on the idea ... Mr. Trump might please his base and scare some first-generation Americans, but he also reveals a misunderstanding of the nation’s history — and what makes it great," the board concluded.