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Last week, President Donald Trump continued his defiant stance against the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision from earlier this summer, firing off two new executive orders about which people born in the U.S. should be declared citizens. Despite losing at the Supreme Court on the legal issue in late June, the Trump administration remains committed to twisting a long-settled constitutional question into a tool to keep Black and brown people out of American life. The conservative legal movement, at first skeptical of Trump’s original executive order attacking birthright citizenship, has now fully embraced the cause. And the cause’s survival can all be traced back to our Supreme Court’s unwillingness to give the Trump administration the overwhelming legal defeats it deserves.

In Trump v. Barbara, the court struck down Trump’s first executive order on birthright citizenship. Signed on his first day in office, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” purported to strip the right to be a U.S. citizen from children born to parents who are in the country unlawfully, as well as parents lawfully but only temporarily in the country. This was in spite of the fact that the 14th Amendment grants birthright citizenship to “all persons” who are born in the United States and subject to its laws. All persons. The only exceptions to this rule that have ever been consistently recognized are for people technically born within the country’s borders but under the legal authority of a separate sovereign, such as children of foreign diplomats.

It’s this exception that Trump’s first executive order tries to capitalize on. Trump barely took the effort to even change the name of the order the court had struck down, calling the new one “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” This new order seeks to expand the number of people who fall under the foreign diplomat exception. People who would no longer get citizenship would include children whose parents have been named as part of a designated terrorist organization, are foreign government officials, work for foreign-based nonprofits, or are involved with certain international business transactions. The order stretches the birthright citizenship exception as it’s been traditionally recognized beyond recognition. As the American Civil Liberties Union explained in its aftermath last week, “Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Constitution. No additional executive order can change the meaning of the Constitution.”

Trump’s second executive order focuses on a related citizenship issue:........

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