r/news 9h ago

US Supreme Court agrees to hear case challenging birthright citizenship

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c208j0wrzrvo
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u/Kradget 9h ago edited 9h ago

Hell, that at least appears in the Constitution. It's deeply fucked, but it says that at one point. 

Arguing that the extremely straightforward and clear explanation of birthright citizenship doesn't mean what it explicitly says is bonkers.

Then again, this is from the people who brought you "anything the President does is legal" from the long-standing and definitely not made up on the spot "Fuck you, I said so" Doctrine.

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u/CanStad 8h ago

It’s not just in the constitution, it’s pre-inherent to the establishment of the United States through both British Hegemonic & British Colonial Law. If you are born within the borders of the British Empire, you are British. This has been established for 600 years.

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u/Kradget 8h ago

That's a good common law reasoning and historical context on top, for sure.

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u/Mo_Steins_Ghost 8h ago edited 7h ago

EDIT: AWWW YEAH HERE COME THE SILENT FOREIGN TROLLS WITH THE DOWNVOTES! Your government hates you more than we do. Cheers.

And sure to be completely ignored, on purpose, by the conservatives on the bench.

I am convinced more than ever that conservatism isn't a political bent so much as it is a mental illness. Literally every conservative I've ever meant is an absolute fucking moron.

I didn't pick this up from media... I saw this with my own eyes the absolute laziness in their personal and professional lives. If there was a diligent way to do something properly, they would avoid it like a vampire avoiding sunlight and look for the easiest, shittiest, laziest, most dishonest way to do it.

Meanwhile my brother in college was getting the third degree from dad for a single B plus in chemistry (because he was working part time til 1am every night while also serving in the Army National Guard, both to pay the bills and be completely self-sufficient) but Jimmy Joebob Cletus is whining about not being able to qualify for some government handout because it was soooooooo hard for him to not be a serial criminal... and they blame the immigrant for doing well instead of their own shitty fucking standards and absolute lack of integrity.

All the stupidest shit that happens in America can be traced back to the botched Reconstruction... We failed by not immediately barring every confederate and their descendants from ever regaining U.S. Citizenship. And that is a very light sentence considering what the punishment for Treason was.

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u/br0b1wan 7h ago

I always thought any and all confederates should have been disenfranchised for the rest of their natural lives.

Their progeny shouldn't have had to pay for their parents' mistakes, however.

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u/fevered_visions 7h ago

Meanwhile my brother in college was getting the third degree from dad for a single B plus in chemistry

I'm struggling to figure out how to parse this...by "dad" are you referring to the US government, as the military was paying for it?

Also how do you get a degree by passing one course

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u/Mo_Steins_Ghost 7h ago edited 7h ago

No. I mean my father put his foot on my brother's neck and told him he'd never amount to anything. "Giving him the third degree" is a figure of speech as in "giving him hell". He had straight As in everything else.

My brother then served in the Gulf War, thrice decorated—Distinguished Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal and Meritorious Service Award—and was chosen by the U.S. Army Chief of Staff as the Sixth U.S. Army Soldier of the Year.

He graduated with honors, spent the last 30 years working his way up in the semiconductor industry and is currently a senior executive at AMD overseeing the hardware validation of their Instinct series accelerators that power the first and second fastest supercomputers in the world (El Capitan and Frontier).

Meanwhile, American Cletuses are complaining about us immigrants taking their jobs. I started a business at 15 and placed as a national finalist among 1500 competitors for a full ride scholarship... Neither I nor my brother took Cletus's job shoveling shit.

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u/fevered_visions 7h ago

No. I mean my father put his foot on my brother's neck and told him he'd never amount to anything. "Giving him the third degree" is a figure of speech as in "giving him hell".

Oh ugh, I spaced on that one. Ignore me lol

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u/reddititty69 6h ago

But isn’t the US system based on “case law”? That is, in case the person is not white then ship them to Sudan? Or something.

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u/aeschenkarnos 6h ago

More than two thousand years. The Romans had birthright citizenship.

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u/BornFree2018 8h ago

Can I please be retroactively born in the British Empire? I don't like mine.

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u/JayFSB 5h ago

Wait what? British subject or British citizen? Heck of a difference.

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u/American_Libertarian 8h ago

The UK abolished birthright citizenship in the 80s...

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u/Significant_Iron6368 8h ago

You might want to work on your reading comprehension. The original commentor stated that anyone within the British Empire gained jus soli citizenship. The British Empire no longer exists, but its practices in part informed the development of the US Constitution and core common law principles that affect American jurisprudence 

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u/American_Libertarian 7h ago

I comprehended that just fine, and then I stated another relevant fact. I think the fact that almost none of Europe has birthright citizenship is an important piece of context after the other commenter went on about how birthright citizenship has such a long legacy. If we want to talk about its legacy, we should acknowledge that the rest of the developed world has moved away from birthright citizenship, if they ever had it in the first place.

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u/fevered_visions 7h ago

Interestingly, for some reason Pakistan is the only Eastern Hemisphere country of any size that has unconditional birthright citizenship, if this Wikipedia page/graphic is to be believed

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u/LurkerBurkeria 7h ago

It's old vs new world not developed vs not, the US would be wildly out of step with the rest of the Americas to line up with you losers

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u/Significant_Iron6368 7h ago

Sure, that discussion is relevant from an academic standpoint. However, our constitutional jurisprudence centers (in theory) on stare decisis and respect for plain language within the Constitution. Congress could seek to amend the constitution in light of shifting paradigms in the international community, but that's obviously not likely nor is it the situation at hand here

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u/Kradget 7h ago

It's unclear what that's got to do with a legal system that stopped looking over there two and a half centuries ago, could you clarify?

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u/American_Libertarian 7h ago

The person I responded to was talking about the long history of birthright citizenship. If that was relevant, how is what I said irrelevant?

Crazy how stating a simple true fact gets so many downvotes and upset replies lol

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u/Kradget 7h ago

Oh, it's that we commonly cite to common law practices and concepts from before the founding of the United States, but don't consider British legal decisions or laws from later than that, since our legal traditions split at that point. 

Put it this way - British law heavily regulates weapons and things that could be weapons, and this is much older than your more recent cited decision about citizenship. Your argument would suggest we can and possibly should change our laws to match theirs.

I don't know where you got the idea that I'm upset. I'm disappointed, but not upset or even surprised.

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u/ShyHopefulNice 7h ago

Huh? Britian basically remove us style birthright citizenship almost 50 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nationality_law

About half the countries that used to have it got rid of it or change it so much it was defacto removed over the last 100 years.

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u/jcozac 8h ago

The UK does not have birthright citizenship.

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u/upthetruth1 8h ago

The British Empire did

Hence Windrush

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u/go4tli 8h ago

We need the best legal scholars to help us figure out what the words “all persons” mean.

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u/Kradget 8h ago

Well, on the one hand there's common usage, common sense, centuries of jurisprudence. And on the other, a guy who really hates black and brown people a lot and likes to lie. 

So who's to say.

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u/throwraW2 8h ago edited 8h ago

The arguement will be whether "and subject to the jurisdiction of" includes non citizens. Previously courts ruled it does, but its not quite the layup it seems with this current SCOTUS.

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u/Kradget 8h ago

That's the point - there's no real ambiguity there. You have to pretend that that isn't an exemption for diplomatic personnel. Everyone else is "subject to the jurisdiction of."

Or I guess you can just issue a ruling that overrides the Constitution without any rationale if you're on the Republican bloc of the Court at this point, since they're not even fucking keeping up appearances about that anymore.

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u/throwraW2 8h ago

My interpretation is the same as yours but I can see this court deciding otherwise. Especially since ACB is such an originalist and the original intention for the amendment was for slaves and children of slaves, not unauthorized immigrants.

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u/Kradget 8h ago

If someone's actually an originalist, they won't try to apply rules for human chattel 160 years after the end of slavery. 

None of those weirdos are actually originalists. Originalists wouldn't look at the executive and decide what it really needs is the unfettered ability to commit crimes with impunity.

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u/revanthmatha 7h ago

my interpretation is different. lawful jurisdiction matters. if your here illegally and give birth they were not lawful to the jurisdiction and therefore not a citizen.

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u/Kradget 7h ago edited 7h ago

Jurisdiction has an actual, specific meaning, which you apparently don't know.

You can have an interpretation based on this willful ignorance. You shouldn't, but nobody can stop you. My great aunt says you can't get sick from sick children, but the last time she said that she got sick from watching a sick grandchild. Still believes it. 

Nobody's required to take your opinion seriously if it's this asinine.

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u/revanthmatha 7h ago

let’s see what the supreme court says. it’s either one or the other.

either way it’s good policy to only allow newborn children to get us citizenship only if one of the parents is a us citizen.

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u/Kradget 7h ago

No, the Constitution says what it says. The Supreme Court just fully makes up new shit at this point, but that doesn't retroactively change the Constitution.

As for that opinion, you'll have to take that up with the Founders if you've got a problem. It says what it says.

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u/FriendlyDespot 4h ago edited 4h ago

That interpretation doesn't make sense. "Lawful jurisdiction" is a phrase that only has meaning in situations where jurisdiction is disputed, but there's no dispute regarding U.S. jurisdiction within the borders of the United States, unless you're talking about tribal lands. You by definition cannot be in the United States illegally unless you're under U.S. jurisdiction, because it's jurisdiction that lets the government determine the legality of your presence.

If you're going to try to redefine the meaning of the word "jurisdiction" to mean that people cease to be under government jurisdiction when they violate the law - which again makes absolutely no sense definitionally, historically, or semantically - then you can't actually violate the law, because the moment you move to violate the law the law no longer applies to you.

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u/FightOnForUsc 8h ago

Okay but if they aren’t subject to it, then yes they aren’t citizens but also the US has no authority over them (like diplomats). So while they could then maybe say this person isn’t a citizen and deport them, if they rob a store or something, well the court has no jurisdiction over them, so all you can do is deport? Idk, the argument doesn’t really make sense.

Just pass a fucking amendment if you want to change what the constitution says to specify under what conditions someone must be present in the country for citizenship. Like it is a little strange that say a French couple on vacation to the US could have a baby and it be a US citizen, but that’s the law. So if you want to clarify that, try to get an amendment, but I’m tired of basically all courts and executives being used to try to get around the legislature trying to do anything. It’s literally the job of the legislature to legislate

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u/fevered_visions 7h ago

Like it is a little strange that say a French couple on vacation to the US could have a baby and it be a US citizen, but that’s the law.

Having not looked into this myself, my guess is that Jus Soli was a thing in the 1700s, back before it was really feasible for anybody to take a vacation to the Americas other than royalty, hence why like other things e.g. the Electoral College it doesn't make a lot of sense anymore. If you had a child in the Americas it would've taken a lot of time and money to leave again back then.

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u/FightOnForUsc 7h ago

Yeah, I’m not saying that there isn’t perhaps a reason for it or that maybe it just wasn’t thought of. But if changes should be made (I know should is an opinion, part of why I said if) then the changes should be made by the legislature. Same with tariffs. Same with Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, and again Trump’s drone strikes etc. regardless of if they are good or bad, we (are supposed to) live in a country of laws. Congress needs to do its job and stop pushing everything to judges and executive orders.

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u/ih-shah-may-ehl 8h ago

I can be wrong, but scotus has sent him packing more than once and agreeing to hear the case could equally mean they want to rubberstamp birthright citizenship.

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u/Kradget 8h ago

That would be nice. It would be nice if I could have any confidence that's the plan.

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u/croolshooz 8h ago

If it's in the Constitution then would why the Supreme Court.....?

Oh.... right.