Stephen Miller is demanding that the Supreme Court issue a unanimous ruling overturning birthright citizenship. Anything less, he said, would mean a nonfunctioning democracy.
Miller, an architect of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, was characteristically melodramatic Thursday in a Fox News interview celebrating the high court’s immigration-related rulings that morning. But Miller also seemed fixated on the remaining cases being decided, including whether the administration can deny automatic citizenship to immigrants’ children who were born in the U.S., which the 14th Amendment has guaranteed since 1868.
“Anybody who has read even 30 seconds of American history understands that the Reconstruction amendments after the Civil War were to ensure that the children of slaves would be franchised in the United States. The author of the 14th Amendment was clear in saying it did not apply to aliens,” Miller, 40, argued.
The amendment itself doesn’t carve out a provision for children of immigrants. It states in part, “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.”
Still, Miller insisted that the case is an easy one to decide.
“There should be a 9-0 ruling in a functioning democracy,” he said, clapping his hands for emphasis. “The idea that you could have a country where you just set foot on U.S. soil, and any child you have gets to be an American citizen and vote in our elections, collect our welfare, sit on our juries, sit in judgment of our fellow men and women—it’s such an outrage to the idea of having a country, it defies description."
Miller amped up the hyperbole.
“If this country doesn’t—one way or another—end birthright citizenship, this country doesn’t have a future," he insisted. “Citizenship has to be sacred and precious, and as we stand here on the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, the idea that we wouldn’t have in this country respect and sanctity for citizenship, for the voting franchise, is such an insult to generations of Americans who spilled their blood for our freedom on battlefields here and all across the Earth.”
The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in early April, after the executive order the president had signed on his first day back in office was blocked by multiple lower courts. In a first, Trump attended the proceedings, but left after 90 minutes when justices he appointed questioned his administration’s rationale for doing away with nearly 160 years of precedent.
“You say the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to put all newly freed slaves on equal footing and so they would be citizens,” Amy Coney Barrett questioned Solicitor General John Sauer. “But that’s not textual. So how do you get there?”
Trump later fumed on Truth Social about the ordeal.
“We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘birthright’ Citizenship!” he wrote, even though around three dozen countries do so, according to Newsweek.
In addition to birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court still has to rule on cases involving mail-in ballots, campaign finance, transgender athletes, and the firings of regulators and members of the Federal Reserve. The next decision day is Monday, June 29.
