Immigration > Birthright Citizenship

Sauer Saved US Citizenship. Was SCOTUS Listening?

The solicitor general’s arguments in the birthright citizenship case now before the Supreme Court should remind us all why and how we’re Americans.

Marly Hornik | April 15, 2026

If the U.S. Supreme Court makes the right move ending automatic birthright citizenship, we may have one man to thank. 

On April 1, 2026, SCOTUS heard oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, the case set to determine immigration status for babies born on U.S. soil to temporary sojourners and parents who entered the country illegally.  Many Americans fear that a decision automatically granting US citizenship in such cases will result in mounting abuses of voting rights, apportionment, and social services.  The end result could be malign foreign influence within our government alongside unmanageable taxpayer burdens.  An outcome favoring birthright citizenship certainly has the potential to drive more worms out of the can that’s already been open for decades.

Much of the argument in the chamber focused on the specific meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s language, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” and whether its Framers had incorporated a British common law definition of citizenship into the phrase. 

In arguing that they had not done so, U.S. solicitor general John Sauer cited a century’s worth of controlling authorities, but it was his brief rebuttal that offered the clearest language for ordinary citizens to ruminate on.

When Sauer stated, “Congress has clearly departed from the common law, the British conception of allegiance, that monarchial conception of allegiance. They have adopted the Republican conception of allegiance,” he gave us an opportunity to reflect on the radical nature of the American founding and its cherished assertion: natural rights.  The meaning of citizenship was permanently altered by claiming life, liberty, and property as the divine right of individuals.

Under a monarchical system (as well as a theocracy like Iran, or a totalitarian regime like China), the king has all the power.  Citizens and their productive output are functionally the property of the king, who determines the conditions of wealth distribution.  Justice is arbitrary and final, even including atrocities like the public hangings perpetrated recently in Tehran by fragments of the IRGC.  Poverty is inescapable except by random chance.

In England, so-called civil rights conferred by the Magna Carta were merely limited carve-outs from the whole power of the king, notably extracted at the point of a sword.  Enforcement was not guaranteed.  Thus, citizenship was a subservient relationship that increased the wealth of the king by its expansion.

The birth of America inverted this relationship, deliberately, as the primary goal of revolution.  The sovereign was now the citizens, who hold all power, exercising self-governance through direct representation by officials operating within narrow carve-outs of authority from the whole.  Protecting the right of American citizens to pursue their own plans, subject only to agreeable and justly enforced laws, was and remains the purpose of this newly conceived form of government.  Thus, citizenship became a responsibility as well as an opportunity to midwife the highest potential of what Nature’s God intended in making us.

Sauer’s well taken point, if the justices heard it, was that assuming a British common law definition of citizenship for America would be like deciding that Washington lost the Revolutionary War.  The two versions of citizenship couldn’t be less interchangeable.  Once that point is acknowledged, the defense’s argument falls apart.

Were Thomas Paine present in the Supreme Court’s chambers on April 1, he would have likely dismissed many of the intellectual arguments explored therein as missing the point, in trying to assess American citizenship against a standard that had not yet dreamed up ordered liberty.  The discussion raised by J. Barrett about jus soli, or citizenship determined by the soil, versus jus sanguine, citizenship by blood, produced no clarity because neither standard encompasses intent.  J. Jackson’s puerile example of having her wallet stolen in Japan, and Japanese police helping her recover it, may be technically jurisdictional, but irrelevant to the question of allegiance.  Even J. Alito’s musings on children who owe military service to another nation fell shy of what Paine would surely have asked: “Do they accept our law as king?”

Our republican form of government is based on individuals agreeing to uphold the social contract.  Entry-level jurisdiction is consent to self-governance!  This is a unique form of citizenship, although in the intervening 250 years, many nations have democratized to varying degrees as a result of our success.  And yet many more still turn on a culture of bribery, organized crime, deceit, opacity, and abuses.

Americans rightly fear that people who illegally cross our border have not agreed to follow our laws, as lawlessness is implicit in their entry.  Many recent sojourners were enticed by the promise of wealth provided by our own government, which betrayed our social contract in abandoning border enforcement and lavishing tax dollars on drifters not allegiant to the rule of law.

Let us hope that SCOTUS heard the profound truth underlying Sauer’s plain statements.  Citizenship in America is not determined by British law, dirt, blood, or getting arrested.  To again quote Sauer, “it's a reciprocal relationship between the citizen” and the unique privileges, responsibility, and opportunity of being a political member of the American republic.

Marly Hornik is a national election validity advocate and educator.  Ms. Hornik is a regular commentator on Newsmax, News Nation, and Fox 5 DC.  Her articles have been published in American Greatness, The Blaze, Townhall, The Daily Caller, American Thinker, The Gateway Pundit, and more.  She is the founder and CEO of RealAmerica.Vote, and founder and executive director of NY Citizens Audit.

Image: Pashi via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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