On April 1, the Supreme Court heard arguments from Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who claimed that children, born of undocumented immigrants or temporary residents, physically in the United States at the time of birth, are not entitled to American citizenship. American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Cecilia Wang, on behalf of those rebuking President Trump’s efforts to overturn the Constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, advanced that the narrowed definition of “domiciled” offered by the solicitor general on behalf of President Trump was an aside in the preceding cases which guide the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause. The proceedings occurred after President Trump signed Executive Order 14160, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” The order seeks to exclude only unauthorized immigrants and those with temporary legal status from being eligible for birthright citizenship. However, Executive Orders do not have the authority to amend the Constitution; only Congress has the power to propose Amendments. This makes the interpretative claim raised, a matter for The Supreme Court, which would need to narrow the definition of “domiciled,” silently overturning decades of precedent. 

All this is very wordy. Let’s take a machete to this case and break it down chronologically. 

Before the Declaration of Independence in 1776, English common law was imposed on all British colonies, including the ones that would become the United States. Thereby, the standards of birthright citizenship were that any person born in the British dominions were automatically subjects of the Crown and therefore citizens. Only two exceptions were distinguished: 1) any person born to an "alien" (foreigner) father, enemy to the Crowd at the time of birth, is an "alien" and 2) any person born to an........

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