Debating Citizenship Laws and Constitutional Clarity (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: So let's bring in Brennan Center's Director of Democracy Initiatives, Thomas Wolff, for more on this. Thomas, thanks for joining us. So this order is blocked for now. The President has been vocal about pushing it forward despite, you know, the potential setbacks. The majority of constitutional scholars saying it doesn't work. My understanding is that the question is, so that first sentence of the amendment, all people born and naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States, and subject, if they're subject to the jurisdiction of, and that's the loophole, I guess. What's wrong with that?

Speaker 2: There's absolutely no loophole. The Constitution means what it says on its face. If you're born here, you're one of us. That language that the Trump administration is throwing around is a narrow carve out that was established a long time ago, basically for diplomats and their children. And the way to think about this question of who's subject to the jurisdiction of the United States government is very simple. Do you have to pay taxes? If you don't pay taxes, can you be imprisoned? If you break the law, can you be put in prison? That is the case for undocumented people. It's the case for people who are here on all different kinds of immigration statuses. So they are certainly under the jurisdiction of the government. And that's been the case for well over 100 years at this point, just on the face of the Constitution.

Speaker 1: Saddled law, as they say, but Donald Trump, as I say, is pushing the Overton window, opening the Overton window. So, you know, take a look at at the courts right now. And so many people are concerned. Immigrants are concerned about this. Obviously, this is really strikes at the heart of of the immigrant experience, right? If you come and so many of our neighbors, they have children here. What about that? How are the courts going to deal with this? Are you confident that that the Supreme Court of the United States, which overturned Roe versus Wade and did some other things, would affirm the understanding you just you just talked about of the 14th Amendment?

Speaker 2: The text of the Constitution is clear. The historical understanding of the Constitution is clear. And the Supreme Court's own understanding of this provision has been clear since the late 1890s. This Supreme Court, if it decided that it wanted to rule in favor of Donald Trump, would at the end of the day be doing something that even the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson court, which was the court that established a rule of separate but equal that ruled in America for several decades, even that court didn't want to go this far. The Supreme Court is going to have an extremely difficult time ruling in favor of Donald Trump, as he's discovered today. He's four days deep in his new administration. He's already taken a major legal loss. That's sending a strong message that the rule of law is still in place in America and there's still opportunities to fight back and win on what it means to be an American and what it means to have a constitution. Not a bedrock principle there, Thomas Wolfe from the Brennan Center, thanks for helping

Speaker 1: us out. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.