The Supreme Court just broke citizenship. Here’s how Congress can fix it.



The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Barbara struck down President Trump’s executive order denying automatic citizenship to children born to parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States.

Chief Justice John Roberts and the majority found a constitutional violation where none exists.

The court has ruled. Now Congress must answer.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s separate opinion points to the path forward. He agreed that the executive order conflicts with the law’s current language, but he rejected the majority’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

“Congress could — consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment — amend §1401(a) or otherwise enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country,” Kavanaugh wrote.

Congress now has both the authority and the responsibility to act.

Justice Clarence Thomas’ exhaustive dissent recovered the original public meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” That phrase required more than physical presence. It contemplated complete political allegiance and permanent domicile.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the debates surrounding the 14th Amendment distinguished permanent members of the American political community from temporary visitors and people who remained subject to foreign powers.

Justice Samuel Alito also warned of the consequences of the majority’s interpretation. Automatic citizenship for the children of illegal entrants and birth tourists creates opportunities for foreign exploitation and weakens the nation’s control over membership in its political community.

This was not a close call.

The majority conflated temporary subjection to American law with the solemn allegiance, duties, and privileges of citizenship in a constitutional republic.

The American Revolution rejected the relationship between monarch and subject. The United States instead recognizes sovereign citizens with God-given rights who consent to government through a shared political compact.

By erasing the distinction between a person temporarily subject to American law and a citizen belonging permanently to the American political community, the court cheapened citizenship and created a serious vulnerability.

The judiciary has failed. Congress must now correct that failure.

Unfortunately, the current Republican Congress has squandered much of the mandate voters delivered. Election-integrity legislation remains unfinished, while promised efforts to restrain activist courts and restore constitutional government have stalled.

Voters have noticed.

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The legislative solution follows directly from Kavanaugh’s opinion and the historical record presented by the dissenters.

Congress should pass a Birthright Citizenship Reform Act amending 8 U.S.C. § 1401(a). Citizenship at birth should attach only when at least one parent is a United States citizen or a lawful permanent resident domiciled here.

Congress should also define “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to exclude the children of foreign nationals present unlawfully or admitted only temporarily.

The legislation should apply prospectively and include narrow transition provisions. These changes would respect the original limits of the 14th Amendment, close national security gaps, and restore the integrity of American citizenship.

I am running for Congress in Florida’s 19th District because Washington needs representatives willing to turn constitutional principles into legislation.

I qualified for the ballot through citizen participation rather than by writing a check. As a former January 6 defendant who refused a false plea agreement and endured solitary confinement, I understand the cost of standing on principle.

In Congress, I will introduce the Birthright Citizenship Reform Act and fight for its passage. I will also demand action on election integrity and work to restore American sovereignty.

Justice Alito identified the danger. Justice Thomas supplied the historical case. Justice Kavanaugh identified the legislative remedy. All that remains is for Congress to find the courage to enact it.

The court has ruled. Congress must answer.

This is our republic. We have a duty to keep it.

How Trump can still beat the birthright citizenship racket



The Supreme Court delivered a monumentally bad decision last week in Trump v. Barbara, holding that, with limited exceptions, children born on U.S. soil become citizens at birth.

Much of the majority’s reasoning rested on mythology rather than a faithful reading of the law.

The court has closed one path. It has not closed them all.

No one can say with certainty when the United States began treating the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens as citizens. Google and Wikipedia claim the practice dates to the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868. Both also assert that the Supreme Court affirmed birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens in United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

Both claims are wrong.

After the Civil War, the citizenship provisions of the 14th Amendment and its precursor, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, were understood primarily as securing citizenship for former slaves and their children.

It took seven years after ratification for anyone even to ask whether the Citizenship Clause applied to children born here to foreign nationals. When the question finally arose, Attorney General George Williams concluded that such children were not citizens because they retained allegiance to their parents’ countries and therefore were not subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States.

Wong Kim Ark addressed a different question: whether a child born in the United States to lawfully present foreign nationals became a citizen at birth.

Nowhere in the court’s 59-page opinion did it decide whether the Citizenship Clause applies to the children of illegal aliens.

Americans are therefore justified in reacting angrily to Trump v. Barbara.

But border hawks and rule-of-law conservatives should stop acting as though the decision ends the fight.

This is not the first dreadful Supreme Court opinion on immigration law. Anyone remember Plyler v. Doe? It will not be the last.

The court could have resolved the problem through a reasonable interpretation of the 14th Amendment. Instead, the majority chose political mythology over persuasive legal argument.

But birthright citizenship never had to be addressed only through the courts.

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It can also be confronted through diligent enforcement of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Now the Trump administration must do exactly that.

Illegal immigration is not merely a border problem. Once illegal aliens reach the interior, they settle in American communities and form families. Under Barbara, their U.S.-born children become citizens.

But illegal aliens who never enter the country cannot give birth here.

The damage from the court’s decision can therefore be reduced through secure borders and rapid removal of illegal entrants before they establish themselves and have children in the United States.

Birth tourism can also be curtailed through enforcement.

State Department consular officers already presume that pregnant women applying for B-2 visitor visas may be seeking entry for the primary purpose of giving birth to a U.S. citizen child.

After Barbara, the administration should scrutinize such applications more aggressively. Applicants suspected of birth tourism should bear the burden of demonstrating a legitimate temporary purpose for travel.

The problem becomes more complicated with foreign nationals admitted temporarily for work.

H-1B workers, L visa intracompany transferees, and other employment-based nonimmigrants may travel with their families and reside here for extended periods. Preventing every birth to those visa holders would be neither practical nor lawful.

But consular officers already have authority to refuse visas when they believe an applicant is misrepresenting the purpose of entry.

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If officials have credible reason to believe that the primary purpose of an application for H-1B, H-4, or another temporary visa is to secure U.S. citizenship for a child, they should deny it.

The Supreme Court’s absurdly broad interpretation of birthright citizenship proves the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Automatically granting citizenship to every child born on American soil to foreign nationals is terrible policy.

The best way to limit its consequences is to prevent the circumstances that trigger it. That means effective border security, rapid removal, rigorous interior enforcement, and close scrutiny of birth tourism and visa fraud.

The court has closed one path. It has not closed them all.

The Trump administration should now use every lawful enforcement tool available to prevent Trump v. Barbara from taking root and expanding the very incentive that produced the case.

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The administrative state just took a major hit



The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter is a major victory for constitutional government.

By restoring the president’s authority over the executive branch and overruling what remained of the mistaken Humphrey’s Executor precedent, the justices took an important step toward democratic accountability. The decision also opens a path for President Trump and future administrations to rein in the administrative state.

Americans should celebrate this ruling as a victory for self-government.

At the heart of the ruling is a simple constitutional principle: The president, as the elected head of the executive branch, must have authority to direct executive policy and hold executive officers accountable.

That authority is not merely an administrative convenience. It is the mechanism through which the American people exercise control over executive government.

Article II vests “the executive Power” in a single president and charges him with ensuring that “the Laws be faithfully executed.” Officers exercising executive power derive that authority from the president and must remain accountable to him.

Without meaningful removal authority, the presidency risks becoming little more than a figurehead while unelected officials pursue agendas beyond democratic control.

For decades, Congress has increasingly insulated parts of the federal bureaucracy from presidential supervision. The founders envisioned no such arrangement.

The expansive appeals processes and employment protections shielding many federal employees are well known. Less appreciated is how much of the current system emerged during the 1960s and expanded over the following decades, producing a bureaucracy increasingly insulated from elected leadership.

Whatever the intentions behind those reforms, the result has been to weaken the president’s authority to manage the executive branch and the people’s ability to govern themselves through elections.

The consequences have become increasingly visible.

A Merit Systems Protection Board survey found that only about two in five federal supervisors believed they could successfully remove an employee for serious misconduct. That finding shows how procedural barriers have eroded managerial accountability.

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The same culture was evident during President Trump’s first term, when career officials embedded policies contrary to administration priorities in guidance documents, subregulatory materials, and even formal regulations.

When executive officials deliberately frustrate lawful presidential policy, the president must possess adequate authority to remove them.

Predictably, critics warn that Slaughter will politicize the civil service and revive the spoils system. Those concerns miss the point.

President Trump has repeatedly said federal hiring should be based on merit, qualifications, and competence. His administration’s executive orders, rules, and regulations reject political loyalty tests in career hiring.

Merit-based hiring and presidential accountability are not competing principles. They are complementary.

A professional civil service should be selected because its members are qualified to perform their duties. But once entrusted with executive authority, those officials must faithfully execute the lawful policies of the elected president.

That’s far from “patronage.” It’s how representative government should function.

The administration’s Schedule Policy/Career executive order reflects that distinction. It applies to career employees in confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions. Those employees remain merit-based career officials, not political appointees.

But senior career officials exercising substantial policy influence should not be able to use endless procedural protections to delay, frustrate, or undermine an elected administration’s agenda.

The Civil Service Reform Act was never intended to create permanent insulation for officials exercising broad executive discretion.

The administration has also appropriately tested constitutional errors by removing officials whose statutory protections conflict with Article II. Those cases have allowed courts to reconsider precedents that steadily weakened presidential control over the executive branch.

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In its 2026 Jackler and Jaroch decision, the Merit Systems Protection Board recognized that statutory employment protections cannot override Article II when applied to inferior officers exercising significant executive authority.

The Supreme Court’s Slaughter decision builds on that reasoning and on other precedent. It rejects the fiction that agencies exercising executive power can remain meaningfully “independent” of the executive.

Those who execute federal law must ultimately answer to the president.

Opponents will characterize the decision as a dangerous expansion of presidential power. In reality, it restores the constitutional structure the founders designed.

Americans elect a president to implement policies on immigration, the economy, national security, and countless other questions. If unelected officials can frustrate those policies through institutional resistance or procedural barriers, elections become less meaningful.

Accountability disappears because voters cannot determine who is responsible for the success or failure of executive policy.

The Slaughter decision restores that chain of accountability. It strengthens the president’s ability to direct officers exercising executive power while preserving a federal workforce hired on merit and expected to execute the law faithfully. That is neither radical nor unprecedented. It is the constitution's design.

The federal government exists to serve the American people, not to function as an independent center of political power.

By reaffirming presidential authority under Article II, the Supreme Court strengthened democratic accountability and helped ensure that executive power remains where the Constitution places it: with the president elected by the American people.

Americans should celebrate this ruling as a victory for self-government.

Elections cannot provide meaningful accountability when officials exercising executive power are insulated from the president voters chose.

Slaughter helps restore that constitutional chain: Executive officers answer to the president, and the president answers to the people.

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The Second Amendment stops at too many tollbooths



On June 23, standing before a crowd in Pennsylvania, President Trump was asked where he stood on a national right to carry.

His answer was four words: “Yeah, we’re working on it.”

The crowd roared.

For millions of law-abiding gun owners, those words pointed toward something they have awaited for decades: an end to a system that treats a constitutional right like a privilege that must be renewed at every state line.

Let’s be honest about where things stand.

The president has not signed anything, and no national reciprocity law exists today. The Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act cleared a House committee last fall but has stalled in the Senate.

Our rights are only as strong as our willingness to defend them.

This is the starting line, not the finish line. But it is the right race to run, because the issue reaches far beyond the convenience of carrying a firearm across state borders.

I think about that every time I drive from my home in upstate New York to North Carolina to visit my son, daughter-in-law, and grandson.

I travel through New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. Four states. Four sets of gun laws. Four different answers to the same question: What rights does a free citizen carry when he crosses an invisible line on a map?

We accept this with almost no other right.

My driver’s license is honored in all 50 states. My freedom to speak, worship, and remain secure in my home does not evaporate at a tollbooth.

President Trump has made the same point since 2015, comparing a carry permit to a driver’s license: If one works in every state, so should the other.

The argument is common sense. The principle beneath it runs deeper.

The Second Amendment does not create the right to self-defense. It recognizes a natural right the founders understood to be endowed by God.

The right to keep and bear arms is not a permission slip issued by the government. It is the people’s right of self-preservation.

The founders knew what they were guarding against because they had lived under it.

Strip people of the means to defend themselves, and every other freedom becomes a favor granted by those in power. Free speech becomes a suggestion. Religious liberty becomes a privilege.

History is brutally consistent on this point: Disarmament often comes before oppression, not after it.

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Yet over the past century, America has moved from treating the right to bear arms as a birthright of citizenship to treating it, in too many places, as a government-granted privilege hedged in by fees, waiting periods, and paperwork.

The result is a maze of state and local laws so inconsistent that the same citizen, with the same clean record and character, can be legal in one state and a criminal the moment he crosses into another.

That is not the rule of law. That is a trap for honest people.

National reciprocity would cut through that maze. It would recognize a simple principle: Your right to carry should travel with you.

Twenty-nine states already recognize that citizens should not need government permission to carry. The Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision also affirmed that the Constitution protects the right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense rather than leaving it to the discretion of local officials.

Reciprocity would extend that logic across state lines.

So yes, the president’s words in Pennsylvania were encouraging. But encouragement is not law, and the bill remains stalled in the Senate. It will stay there unless the people who care about this issue make themselves heard.

I have often said that elections are only victories in individual battles. The fight for freedom continues long after the votes are counted.

This is one of those fights.

If you believe your God-given rights should not change the moment you cross a state line, say so. Call your senators. Talk to your neighbors. Make the national right to carry a question every candidate must answer.

Our rights are only as strong as our willingness to defend them.

The founders did their part. The question is whether we will do ours.

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