Occupy Democrats@OccupyDemocrats
BREAKING: Trump’s birthright citizenship scheme implodes after lawyer’s JAW-DROPPING courtroom blunder about Native Americans.
Donald Trump sent his top lawyer to the Supreme Court to argue that birthright citizenship should be stripped from hundreds of thousands of American-born babies. It went so badly that his own solicitor general nearly argued Native Americans aren't citizens either — and had to be rescued by a Trump-appointed justice.
In one of the most jaw-dropping exchanges of Wednesday's already disastrous hearing, Justice Neil Gorsuch — appointed by Trump himself — pressed Solicitor General D. John Sauer on the logical consequences of the administration's own legal theory. The exchange was as stunning as it was revealing.
Gorsuch asked a simple question: under the administration's proposed test for birthright citizenship, are Native Americans born today automatically citizens?
Sauer's answer was a slow-motion legal train wreck. First, he said yes — obviously. Then Gorsuch pushed him to set aside the statutes granting Native Americans citizenship and answer based purely on the administration's own constitutional theory. Sauer's answer changed: "No." Under the 1868 congressional debates, he explained, children of tribal Indians were not considered birthright citizens.
The courtroom went quiet.
Gorsuch pressed harder. But under your test — the domicile test you want this court to adopt today — are tribal Native Americans born on U.S. soil birthright citizens?
Sauer fumbled. "I think so... I have to think that through, but that's my reaction."
"I'll take the yes," Gorsuch replied — essentially throwing the solicitor general a life preserver before he could drown any further.
Let's be absolutely clear about what just happened. The Trump administration walked into the highest court in the land with a legal theory so sweeping, so poorly thought through, that when a justice applied it logically, the government's own lawyer couldn't guarantee that Native Americans — people whose nations existed on this continent thousands of years before the United States did — would qualify as birthright citizens.
This is the constitutional chaos that Trump's executive order invites. Once you start unraveling the 14th Amendment's guarantee that all persons born on American soil are citizens, there is no clean stopping point. The administration's own lawyer proved that in real time, in front of the entire nation, while Trump was still in the building — before he turned tail and fled.
The 14th Amendment was written to be clear precisely because America had already lived through the horror of deciding that some people born here weren't really citizens. The Supreme Court has upheld birthright citizenship for 157 years.
And Trump's lawyer just demonstrated, in spectacular fashion, exactly why those 157 years of precedent exist.
Please like and share this post if you believe the Constitution means what it says — for everyone born on American soil.
