The Situation Room - July 1st

Good morning everyone,

I’m Atlas, and welcome to The Situation Room! We cover the most high impact geopolitical developments every Wednesday!

Today’s topics:

• SCOTUS Affirms Birthright Citizenship in 5-4 Decision

• U.K. Tacks On Additional $20 Billion Dollars For Defense Spending

• U.S. Envoys For Iran Peace Deal Arrive In Qatar

SCOTUS Affirms Birthright Citizenship in 5-4 Decision

_{By: Atlas}

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected President Trump's attempt to end birthright citizenship, upholding the long-settled reading of the 14th Amendment that makes a citizen of nearly everyone born on American soil. The 6-3 decision, the final ruling of the term, was the most consequential of Trump's immigration defeats at the high court and closed the door on an executive order he signed his first day back in office.

The case, Trump v. Barbara, turned on a single clause written into the Constitution after the Civil War. The court held that children born in the United States to parents here illegally or on temporary visas are citizens the moment they are born. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined in full by Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the three liberal justices, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh supplying a sixth vote on separate grounds.

What the Court Decided

Roberts anchored the ruling in text, history, and a case the court decided more than a century ago. The Citizenship Clause, he wrote, grants citizenship to anyone born in the country and subject to its laws, with narrow exceptions long recognized for the children of foreign diplomats and members of an invading army. Children of parents unlawfully or temporarily in the country, he concluded, satisfy both elements of the clause and are citizens at birth.

The chief justice traced the principle back to English common law, which held that those born on British soil became subjects, a rule he said crossed the Atlantic with the colonists and survived the Revolution. The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868 to repudiate the Dred Scott decision, was meant to enshrine that understanding permanently. The court reaffirmed it in 1898 in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, ruling that a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents was a citizen despite his parents' status.

Roberts rejected the administration's central argument, that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" requires a permanent allegiance the children of noncitizens cannot show. There was scant evidence, he wrote, for what he called a dramatically revisionist reading, and nothing in the clause's language limited citizenship to the children of those with a permanent home in the country. "Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights," he wrote, adding that the amendment's framers extended that promise to every free-born person in the land and that the court was keeping it.

A Splintered Majority

Though six justices agreed the order could not stand, they did not all agree on why, leaving the constitutional holding resting on a bare majority of five.

Kavanaugh broke from the others on the reasoning. He would not have found the order unconstitutional, concluding instead that it violated a federal statute Congress wrote in 1952 conferring citizenship on those born in the country and subject to its jurisdiction. A president, he wrote, cannot override that law by executive order, though he suggested Congress could amend it to carve out exceptions. That distinction matters. Because the majority grounded its decision in the Constitution, undoing it would require a constitutional amendment rather than an act of Congress, a far steeper path.

The split drew a pointed rejoinder from within the court. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of two Black justices, criticized the dissent's reading as narrow, writing that the Reconstruction amendments were an anticaste reset for the nation, not a limited fix for slavery, and faulting the effort to set Black Americans against immigrants.

The Dissents

Justice Clarence Thomas led the opposition with a 91-page dissent, more than three times the length of the majority opinion, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch. He accused the majority of relying on an alternative history of the amendment and argued that its authors, including the architect of the provision, Representative John Bingham, understood it to exclude the children of temporary visitors. Citizenship, Thomas wrote, was meant for permanent members of the body politic, those domiciled in the country and rooted in it. He warned that the ruling devalued citizenship and predicted it might not stand the test of time.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote separately, calling the decision one of the most important in the court's history and, in his judgment, a serious mistake that would affect the country's future. He raised a national security concern, describing a hypothetical child who grows up abroad, never sets foot in the country, and is taught to hate it, yet holds a citizenship that cannot be revoked. Gorsuch added a brief dissent of his own questioning where the parents of children born here could be considered domiciled if not in the United States.

Reaction and What Comes Next

Trump denounced the outcome on Truth Social, calling it too bad for the country and, in a separate post, a win for China, a reference to his administration's repeated targeting of birth tourism. He urged Congress to act immediately, insisting no constitutional amendment was necessary, a claim most legal scholars dispute given that the ruling rests on the Constitution itself.

Republican lawmakers signaled they would press on through other channels. Senator Rand Paul revived a constitutional amendment he had introduced in April, urging voters to call their senators, and Senator Mike Lee said the long fight for an amendment was beginning. Representative Chip Roy floated legislation to withhold federal funding from agencies or states that take an expansive view of the right. Governor Ron DeSantis, a former attorney, called the decision a substantive defeat that would require an amendment or a future court to overturn.

Civil liberties groups welcomed the ruling. Cecillia Wang, the American Civil Liberties Union's national legal director who argued the case, said the decision reaffirmed a fundamental promise that those born in the country are citizens, and that no president can change the Constitution by fiat. Norman Wong, the great-grandson of Wong Kim Ark, said the ruling showed his ancestor's victory remained as important now as in 1898.

The order Trump signed would have affected a substantial number of families. Estimates placed the number of children born each year who could have been denied citizenship at roughly 250,000 to 260,000, a figure that includes both children of illegal immigrants and, in smaller numbers, those born to parents on temporary legal status. The order was blocked in the lower courts and never took effect anywhere in the country. With the decision, the justices closed out their term and left the 150-year-old understanding of American citizenship intact.

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