I’ve spent a career drafting language that has to mean exactly one thing under stress: contracts, offering memoranda, expert reports, the kind of documents where a loose word costs a client real money. That discipline explains what’s happening in the fight over birthright citizenship. When a court reads your position narrowly, you don’t quit; you find the part it didn’t reject. President Donald Trump signed two new executive orders last week on birthright citizenship, five weeks after the Supreme Court struck down his last one. The new orders are narrower. Narrower isn’t the same as weaker.

Start with the sentence everyone is arguing about. Ratified in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Twenty-six words, and the fight has always lived inside six of them: subject to the jurisdiction thereof. The only recognized exception since the founding era covers foreign diplomats, people who answer to a foreign sovereign, not to American law. Everything the administration is doing now is an argument about where that line sits, not an attempt to erase it.

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