• 2-17-25: The Economist, “Birthright Citizenship: Into a Scrap: To deny newborns citizenship, Trump misreads the constitution”; magazine (link). On the questions: Is Donald Trump misreading the Constitution, or is The Economist?; and, What does the Constitution’s so-called “Plain Text” actually say?”

In their January 2025 print edition, London-based magazine The Economist elected to take an official position echoing the American Left’s understanding of Trump’s “End Birthright Citizenship” agenda.

They agree with the Left, and they believe that Trump’s reading of the Fourteenth Amendment—as well as the Constitution’s underlying citizenship doctrine writ large—is simply wrong; and their position is laid out in unequivocal, absolutist, debate-ending certainty. To the heart of their matter, they state, as if written in Constitutional stone, their belief that unqualified jus soli birthright citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants “is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution.” 

Yet, their interpretive reasoning is based on a magical reading of the Fourteenth, while justified only by a strange understanding of the accepted conventions in the interpretation of legal texts; the key flaw in play here being their understanding of what on earth the “plain text” of a legal document is. As such, The Economist writes

• “According to the plain text of the amendment, ‘all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.’ It doesn’t mean what it appears to mean, Mr. Trump claims. … Mr. Trump seems to think the jurisdiction clause allows him to exclude [the children of unauthorized immigrants born on U.S. soil]. To justify this, he draws on fringe thinking… The argument made is that when the framers of the amendment wrote “jurisdiction” what they in fact meant was “allegiance.” This “just looks reverse engineered,” says [one Constitutional Law expert].” 

But, as is easy enough to show, in reality, it is The Economist which is ‘reverse engineering’ the amendment’s plain text, and it is The Economist which “seems to think” that the “plain text” of the Fourteenth Amendment was not referring to the children of Black American slaves, but that the Fourteenth was, at that time, somehow, instead, quietly working to establish for ‘all children of illegal foreigners born on U.S. soil a new right to Birth Tourism citizenship.’  The Left’s unstated implication being that the Fourteenth was therefore referring not to the children of slaves (as we long thought), but actually referring the children of border crashers, illegal immigrants, Haitian gangsters, or any other undocumented ghost living on the take in America. 

But this is barely different than the Left’s blanket revisionist claim that the term “gender,” throughout all of Natural and Constitutional History was always referring to men, women, Drag Queens, and lesbians with phalloplasties. And, who really believes that? 

Thus, if we are supposedly following the rules here, and if “plain text” is The Economist’s stated standard of interpretation, how could any rational adult think it possible to construe the Fourteenth as “Granting Birthrights to the Children of Illegal Foreigners,” when such ordinary words appear neither in the Fourteenth Amendment, nor anywhere else in the Constitution? 

The “plain text” of the Fourteenth says no such thing. And to prove it, the only reference to foreigners in the Fourteenth is under the statutory governance of all American citizenship rights being limited to those who are either naturally “born” or “naturalized.” The “natural born” standard is laid out in Article II Section 1, whereby second-class children of foreigners (naturalized ones) are prohibited from holding the Office of President. This Constitutionally-enshrined law is disputed by no one. When in Rome, do as the first-class Roman citizens do, because you—a second-class foreigner—are not one of them, and are therefore prohibited to become President of Rome. This is pretty basic stuff, and it’s ridiculous that it even needs to be said, just as it is ridiculous that anybody would ever need to say that, no, men cannot have babies.

According to my own textually-accurate and Constitutionally-consistent interpretation of the Fourteenth (which is the one the Trump administration is surely planning to defend in the Supreme Court), the Fourteenth Amendment was drafted to enact a specific view of citizenship which is entirely accordant with U.S. immigration and naturalization policy, just as it was set from the beginning. Meaning, this is what the Fourteenth Amendment actually legislates:

• “In the United States, all persons, whether naturally born or naturalized, and thereby subject to the U.S. jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they legally reside.”

This, clearly, means that there is one uniform rule based on two mutually-exclusive qualifications: All persons are either born to an American parent (and are thus American because of that jus sanguinis birthright), or, to the constitutionally-provided-for alternative, some persons who are born to foreign parents, may then be automatically naturalized only when the parents are officially naturalized by the official “uniform” naturalization process involving, one, application, two, renouncement of old allegiance, and, three, pledge of allegiance to the U.S.

This has always been the Constitutionally-provided for law in this country, given that it has never been officially repealed.  And to prove it, the Constitution’s Article I Section 8 “uniform rule of naturalization” has never been repealed.  

This “either naturally-born or naturalized” citizenship doctrine—literally and explicitly—was the sole, longstanding “Immigration Act” policy of the United States, from 1795 and onward, right up to the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s drafting.  As has long been apparent, there is no “plain text” in the Fourteenth explicitly noting that the previous naturalization policy was repealed by a new one, now granting American rights to the newborns of illegals. The Left never seems to mention the lack of a repeal tacked on to the Fourteenth, because that would deny the magical reading. What this means, when we add it all up, is that the Left is purposely squinting so hard on their magical “jurisdiction” reading so that they can plausibly imagine that the Fourteenth was supposedly engineered so as to repeal the old Naturalization Acts, but without actually saying so. But, no, the Fourteenth includes no such repeal of its “natural born versus naturalized” dichotomy, and its “plain text” fails to use the words “Birth Tourism” because that ridiculous model was never intended to be legislated into law while the Fourteenth’s Framers were working to incorporate American-born slaves into American society. Nothing to do with border crashers.

On a wider, more historical level, the Constitution’s greater plain-text citizenship doctrine has always held that all persons born on American soil are either naturally born to American parents or are born to previously-naturalized parents, and such children are thus only American because their parents were properly naturalized before their birth; and this is the only interpretation which makes any sense.  This is the reading which Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Trump, Justice Alito and I would all roundly agree to. There is simply no other way to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment in a way which is consistent with both the rest of the Constitution, as well as the Constitution-mandated “uniform rule of naturalization” as required in Article I Section 8. 

No, the “plain text” says what it means: that “In the United States, all persons, whether naturally born or naturalized, and thereby subject to the U.S. jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they legally reside.” 

To be unequivocal and clear, what this law is saying is that children will always be the same nationality of their fathers. This is straight out of Vattel’s The Law of Nations; the book which many of the Constitution’s Framers were reading in the run-up to the Constitution’s drafting.

Up until 1898 (when the deformed Wong Kim Ark ruling was issued), all American citizenship doctrine was unequivocally based on the concept of jus sanguinis, i.e., Vattel’s theory under which all children follow the citizenship standing of their parents; LeBron James’s babies will always be American, even when haphazardly born on Chinese soil. Clearly, The Economist has not bothered to think this thing through before decreeing their illogical reading.

The still-standing Civil Rights Act of 1866 affirmed citizenship for those “not subject to any foreign power”; an absolute and clear law which outrightly refused citizenship to border crashers, all of whom, in case this is not clear, are directly “subject to foreign power,” to be understood only in the prohibitive sense.  We again note that the Fourteenth Amendment Framers took no explicit pains to repeal that act, because they would have had no intention to. 

And again, if this is not clear enough already, “subject to the [U.S.] jurisdiction thereof” and “not subject to any foreign power” essentially mean the same thing. Meanwhile, The Economist is reverse-engineering the reading of the Fourteenth so as to render these identical phrases as meaning the opposite.  Being Brits, we can excuse the poor knowledge base. But we cannot excuse the sheer force of such disinformation. The Economist, after all, is sold on the checkout line magazine racks at your local Whole Foods.

But let’s now nail down America’s longstanding, Framer-era Naturalization Act policy. And here, we simply go back to the original post-Constitution U.S. immigration policy which officially defined foreigners as second-class citizens from the start. 

This Constitution-backed policy legislates the understanding that all babies of foreigners born (since lacking legal capacity of their own, and therefore being subject to both the citizenship and guardianship jurisdictions of their birth parents) cannot become American citizens until their parents first become naturalized citizens. Here is the Naturalization Act of 1795, drafted during President Washington’s second term:

• “Sec[tion] 3. And be it further enacted, That the children of [formerly foreign] persons duly naturalized, dwelling within the United States, and being under the age of twenty-one years, at the time of such naturalization… shall [finally] be considered as citizens of the United States: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons [i.e., all babies born to] fathers [who] have never been resident in the United States.” (U.S. Congress, Naturalization Act of 1795)

So, all persons who were babies born to foreigners on U.S. soil may become citizens only after such time that their parents first officially pledge allegiance to the United States under official Naturalization Act policy.

Secondly, in refuting The Economist’s uninformed argument that “jurisdiction” has nothing to do with “allegiance,” the Naturalization Act of 1802 confirmed America’s jus sanguinis doctrine in rather plain language: 

• “any alien who was residing within the limits, and under the jurisdiction of the United States... [though not a citizen] may be admitted to become a citizen, on due proof... that he has resided two years, at least, within and under the jurisdiction of the United States… and that he doth... entirely renounce... all allegiance... to any foreign... sovereignty whatever.” (Naturalization Act of 1802, §1)

This language clearly illustrates that “jurisdiction” indicates two levels of law: that a foreigner can directly be ‘under U.S. jurisdiction,’ while still being “subject to the jurisdiction” of “foreign” power. 

Clearly, it is the Left playing valence-reversing word games with the terms “subject to” and “jurisdiction.” Under the circumstances of the Constitution, these terms do not mean what the Left says they mean. Meanwhile, Trump’s reading of these terms perfectly accords with the Framers’ original “uniform rule of naturalization,” which legislates the fact of “all persons” being either natural born or naturalized, and with no third option granting unqualified territorial birthright citizenship.

Re-read the Fourteenth: its “plain text” says not a word about unqualified territorial birthright citizenship.  

The Constitution’s actually-enshrined “allegiance” and “jus sanguinis/blood”-based citizenship language directly contradicts The Economist’s reading of the Jurisdiction Clause. To continue our attempt to definitively clarify this critical “jurisdiction” distinction, what the Naturalization Act makes plain is that one can be under the technical, locational “jurisdiction” of the U.S. (under which, say, Brits, whether aliens or tourists, are now required to drive on the right side of the road, or face legal consequences, because now “subject to the jurisdiction of” U.S. traffic law), versus Citizenship-defining “jurisdiction,” where the wanna-be American foreigner must, “entirely renounce... all allegiance... to any foreign... sovereignty whatever.” This is what citizenship is. It’s about blood birthright and allegiance. It’s not a game in which pregnant foreigners dip their toe onto American soil, so as to magically transform their baby’s foreign blood into American blood. The Left’s (and The Economist’s) magical reading of the Fourteenth Amendment only reveals a fundamental ignorance of what the status of citizen and the powers of governance even mean.

The Left, as we can now recognize, have never bothered to explain just why the Framers wrote “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” when they really meant “all persons born, even when born to illegal immigrant parents, are U.S. citizens despite such a grant being prohibited by the Constitution’s uniform rule of naturalization.”

Nor has the Left explained why the Framers supposedly wanted to create a radically awkward situation in which a foreigner’s baby is magically deemed of American bloodline, while they, the parents, retain their original foreign citizenship, instantly creating a situation in which the government has a right to separate “American” baby from foreign parent, the baby remaining here, while the illegal parent is returned to their home country. The Left wants to shame the U.S. government for cruelly separating children, when, in fact, it is their own ignorance-fueled “reverse engineered” reading of the Constitution which creates that “conflicting citizenship” status between illegal parent and U.S.-born baby. How on earth can the Left claim that the Framers wanted that, and packed it all into the cryptic words “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”? The Left’s reading simply makes no sense.

And we are left only to marvel at how the immigration Do-Gooders of the Left ever contrived to read the Fourteenth such that it grants American citizenship to all border crashers, while also silently repealing the seventy years of jus sanguinis naturalization policy that preceded the 1868 legislation.  But given the Left’s doctrinaire belief that “men can have babies,” it is no surprise that they also propound the equally magical belief that children of foreigners have American blood in them. But it just isn’t true; that is, under the actual circumstances of the Constitution and the jus sanguinis naturalization policy underlying the entirety of its text. And the Left wonders why five million Democrats just jumped ship and voted for Trump.

So, then, wrapping it up, here we now find a major international publication, The Economist, simply getting it wrong, based on their belief that the magical reading of the Fourteenth should somehow be comprehended as representing the “plain text,” when the plain text in plain obvious fact says absolutely zero about bypassing the Constitution’s “uniform” naturalization process so that the babies of border crashers can be automatically deemed every bit as American as Tom Brady’s babies. True, natural-born American children don’t speak Tamil as their first language, as Vivek Ramaswamy—whose father is still Indian—does.

In the end, President Trump is merely moving to correct the egregiously incorrect reading of the Left, and he has every right to do so. And just as there are only two classes of gender (male and female), there are only two classes of American citizenship (natural born and naturalized). If we want to include bizarre third classes (trans rights, soil-based birthrights), then, all we, as Americans, need to do is to “pass an amendment” saying so. But until we do, no such trans rights or birth tourism rights will exist under the Constitution, as written.

And The Economist’s magical reading of the Fourteenth is about to be trampled by the Alito-led Supreme Court, who will heartily agree that the Fourteenth Amendment, when read under the lens of citizenship, birthright, subjectivity, and jurisdiction, was only ever intended to be understood as saying precisely this, and nothing else:

• “In the United States, all persons, whether naturally born or naturalized, and thereby subject to the U.S. jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they legally reside. Any person who is neither naturally born American nor naturalized American is, plainly, not American, because in violation of that uniform, binary rule.”

To The Economist: please, take note, take a moment to regroup on matters of Constitutional citizenship doctrine, and please, issue a retraction, if only on the basis of the mere possibility that you might have missed something in your blind rush to poison Trump’s well. Admitting that a foe is correct will only boost your credibility. Take the opportunity, if only to disarm the backlash after Justice Alito issues the ruling which tells the world the very thing I just told you.  

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• 12-28-24: Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke; book (link). On the question: Do the private behavioral preferences of gay and trans individuals empirically disprove their own publicly-asserted gender beliefs?

Rising intellectual star Musa al-Gharbi has just written one of the most fascinating academic passages I have ever read; that is, among those falling within the domain of Gender Ideology. 

To set up the context of our reading, al-Gharbi is laying out the concept of “preference falsification” (p. 35), which explains the human tendency to self-censor and/or outright lie about one’s preferences within certain politically-delicate-or-doctrinaire contexts. Thus, per this phenomenon, observers might see wide gaps between a person’s rhetoric and their corresponding behaviors. Al-Gharbi gives the example of people who will publicly put up a woke front and openly agree with (or avoid disagreeing with) the claim that “Trans women are women,” while, in private, believing no such thing. He then applies the idea, writing that 

• “[T]he behaviors of people who profess that “trans women are women” suggest strongly that most do not literally believe that trans women are the same as cisgender women. Proponents who are romantically interested in women typically do not treat these two populations equally as women with respect to their own dating and marriage decisions—not even remotely.” (35)

In the real world, once away from the cultural stage and the performative need of attaining “symbolic capital” (that concept, his main thesis), a straight man who wokely states in public that “trans women are women,” when himself out on the prowl for “women,” will only be seeking actual women, and never female impersonators, who—to the point—are not actually women. This disparity exemplifies “preference falsification.” 

Meaning, for most, the statement “trans women are women” is knowingly false.

Now, here is where it gets truly interesting. Al-Gharbi footnotes the above passage with the findings of a Blair & Hoskin study from 2019. As Al-Gharbi tells it, 

• “The study found that even among the small minority of people who expressed openness to dating a trans person, respondents frequently gravitated toward partners incongruent with their own sexual identity. For instance, gay men preferred trans women over trans men, and lesbians tended to prefer trans men over trans women.  That is, despite professing to recognize trans men as men, women whose sexual identity is oriented around exclusive attraction to other women were nonetheless open to dating trans men, and were relatively less interested in trans women (despite ostensibly recognizing trans women as women, and defining themselves in terms of attraction to other women). And similar realities hold for gay men: despite defining themselves in terms of their attraction to other men, and explicitly recognizing trans men as men, and trans women as women, gay men tend to nonetheless prefer trans women over trans men. In both cases, people seem to be prioritizing the physical [sex at birth] anatomy of prospective partners over their expressed gender identity—insofar as they are open to dating trans partners at all. In short, the tension between what people [publicly] profess and how they [actually] behave with respect to claims that “trans women are women” (or “trans men are men”) is not just common among cisgender heterosexuals. It manifests regularly among lesbian and gay Americans as well.” (Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, p. 321; citing Karen Blair & Rhea Hoskin (2019), “Transgender Exclusion from the World of Dating: Patterns of Acceptance and Rejection of Hypothetical Trans Dating Partners as a Function of Sexual and Gender Identity”)

What this means is that both gay men and lesbians are tacitly recognizing the binary, biological truth of the matter: that “trans women are not women, but only homosexual males,” and that “trans men are not men, but only lesbians.” 

The bottom line here is that when the socially-constructed falsifications and performative alliances are felicitously factored out, “trans women” are organically unmasked as the real-world gay men they actually are, while “trans men” are organically unmasked as the real-world lesbian women they actually are. There is simply no other way to state this essential truth.  

Human culture may often enough indulge performative socio-politico-sexual constructs of the Judith Butler and Drag Queen Story Hour kind; but the chromosomal gut of the human animal knows perfectly well what it’s looking at. And the essential truth here is that gays and lesbians know the same underlying truth which Justice Alito, Donald Trump, MaryCate Delvey, and I, as well as a whole lot of “preference falsifying” woke folx already know: that trans women are gender-dysphoric gay men, and that trans men are gender-dysphoric lesbians. Again, there is no other way to say it, that is, if truth is the goal.

And the study presented by al-Gharbi demonstrates that “expressed”—or purported—gender identity is nothing but a fallacious, carefully-constructed, and politically-enforced myth. The study stands as a kind of gender-ideological “money talks, bullshit walks”-grade acid test. Do good-intentioned trans allies really believe that “trans women are women”? No, “not even remotely,” says al-Gharbi. 

Applying the idea more broadly, it’s no leap to see that preference falsification doesn’t end with dating and virtue signaling. From corporate offices to classrooms to DEI departments enforcing gender quotas, performative beliefs dominate, with people outwardly parroting ideological dogmas while privately reverting to natural-born truths. The courts, too, must grapple with this tension, as we heard at U.S. v. Skrmetti Oral Argument. The Framers grounded the Constitution in self-evident truths—not Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. To enshrine such falsified preferences as enforceable legal standards is to betray this foundation entirely. To my mind, a Constitution-faithful judiciary is oath-obligated to reject performative gender myths, and to judicially interpret and enforce only the Constitution’s originally-comprehended allegiance to biology, chromosomes, natural law, and common sense. “Sex at birth” is what “sex” is. “Gender at birth” is what “gender” is.

As the remedial cultural—and, well, judicial—convention, the rule would seem to be: gender preferences which are selectively falsified are gender preferences which can be selectively ignored. Or, more combatively: if you don’t mean it, don’t say it. File it all under “preference falsification,” and thank Musa al-Gharbi for his excellent new book, a work that challenges conventional thinking at every turn. Good thing, and good timing.

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• 12-17-24: “Judge Broke Rules by Criticizing Justice Alito During Flag Flap”; Wall Street Journal (link). On the question: Did Democrats unfairly dogpile Justice Alito when his wife flew MAGA-supporting flags in the yard? 

Many on the Left questioned the ethics of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samual Alito when his wife flew both an inverted American flag and a so-called “Pine Tree Flag” in the front yard of the family’s residence. Such an act can be and was widely interpreted as generally supportive of the MAGA events of January 6. As the WSJ points out, at the time of the incident, Justice Alito defended himself by pointing out that it was his wife, Martha-Ann, who flew various flags at their homes, a practice he, himself, disfavored and had no part in. He didn’t do it; she did.

Nevertheless, the news of Mrs. Alito’s act made national headlines, and by the time the press had settled into its final, polarized narrative, Justice Alito himself was publicly found guilty of his wife’s act, as a kind of unjudicial partisanship worthy of recusal, despite the plain fact that Mrs. Alito is not a judge, and also, is not Samuel. 

So then, why talk about this now? Because one particular element of the fallout lives on: a U.S. District judge has just been found guilty of “misconduct,” for having criticized Justice Alito. As the Wall Street Journal explains,

• “The offense? Questioning the ethics of a Supreme Court justice. U.S. District Judge Michael Ponsor published an essay in the New York Times arguing that the display of flags associated with President-elect Donald Trump’s MAGA movement at Justice Samuel Alito’s Virginia and New Jersey homes was a breach of public trust. The piece was unusual because judges don’t typically offer personal criticisms of a colleague in public. … [T]he jurist assigned to review the matter... found that by commenting on controversial issues and criticizing Alito, Ponsor violated the code of conduct that applies to all federal judges other than Supreme Court justices… [as well as] found to violate rules against actions that “detract from the dignity” of a judge’s office and harm “public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.””

Given the prevailing contentiousness of the post-Trump political divide, most would reflexively assume that any such protesting party (such as Judge Ponsor) would hold their ground. But in actuality, Judge Ponsor has come forth to acknowledge that his article, the title of which asked “How Could Alito Have Been So Foolish” might—itself—have been foolish, confessing that 

• “With the benefit of an objective perspective, I realize now that my criticism of the ethical judgment of a Supreme Court Justice might have had the effect of undermining the public’s confidence in the integrity of the judicial system.” (Ponsor, per WSJ)

So, then, the matter comes to an end.  But to my mind, this story is still not over. Because the real issue behind the Alito flag incident has still never been covered by the mainstream press, nor has the true contradiction of the matter been honestly laid out.  And in political reality, the obvious, underlying issue here is the duplicity of the mainstream press. Because, if they were interested in reporting objectively, they would have proactively noted that, had Mrs. Alito—instead of flying a “MAGA” flag in her yard—chosen to fly a Trans Rights flag, she would have been hailed a hero, and not a single resulting demand for Justice Alito to “recuse himself” would ever have issued forth from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, The Nation, and the rest. 

A Trans flag would have been fine, while the MAGA flags, in contrast, not. But, both are merely the political interests of the radical extremes of both Left and Right. 

And the question remains: why would it be tolerable to fly the Leftist flag, but not the Rightist one? 

As I have stated in previous writings, I suspect that the call-out and discussion of such Leftist hypocrisy was the very purpose behind Mrs. Alito’s daring and ‘questionable’ move to fly MAGA flags in her yard. 

Let me explain. Had she, herself, come forth and directly responded, “But none of you would have raised a peep if I had flown a Trans flag, would you?,” such directness may have intensified SCOTUS scrutiny and placed undue pressure on the already-embattled Chief Justice.  Hence, her silence and her nuance; instead, permitting the mystery of her act to compel inquiry, discourse, and resolution, of its own accord.  And the unstated element of Mrs. Alito’s clever and correct premise is this: if Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson were to wear LGBTQ+ rainbow pins on their robes while adjudicating on the High Court, nobody on the Left would have raised a peep about “partisanship” or “recusal.”  

What seems evident to me is that Mrs. Alito, trusting in Americans’ general will to expose a rat, felt strongly enough that enough objective journalists would come forth with this very delineation of her motive. And yet, shockingly, thus far, it appears to me that I am the only American writer/blogger to have brought up the issue, to have explicated Mrs. Alito, to have reconciled the duplicity, and to have suggested that she has indeed raised a compelling, highly relevant point.

As it actually played out, when I directly brought this issue of Leftist duplicity to national legal pundits Elie Mystal and Mark Joseph Stern (The Nation, Slate, respectively) on Twitter, each of them, rather than answering, only moved to block me, and to silence the inquiry. Sad, to say the least. The underlying irony here is that I asked these journalists for fairness and accountability back when I was still a pro-Biden Democrat. And their action thus stood as the first shot fired in my subsequent turning toward Trump—and Alito—and thereafter thinking to myself that just maybeTrump and Alito aren’t so bad after all; and maybe the mainstream press, in the hubris of their collective echo chamber, are simply getting this wrong, and straying too far from objective journalistic fact. 

Post-election, it appears that five million swing voters agreed with me on this; on the need to better listen to the other side. Such individuals among us may have been successfully blocked and banished on social media, but our actual votes were not so easily silenced.

Weaving the narrative back to the admonished judge, the greater lesson that ought to have emerged from the performative political kerfuffle is this: Judge Ponsor, rather than titling his article “A Federal Judge Wonders: How Could Alito Have Been So Foolish?” might have instead titled it: “A Federal Judge Wonders: What If This Had Been a Rainbow Flag?” 

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• 12-12-24: “UK bans puberty blockers for under-18s”; Politico.eu (link). On the question: Was Justice Alito correct in arguing the Cass Report’s position that ‘risks outweigh the benefits’? 

In the subheadline to this fresh shot of news heard around the world, we read that “Government-ordered commission flags an “unacceptable safety risk” in continued prescription to children.” 

In this news, one cannot help but flash back to Justice Alito’s recent confrontation with Solicitor General Prelogar over the value of the UK’s Cass Report, from which Alito and his SCOTUS allies in part derived their palpable sense that, regarding all such Trans treatments on minors, “the risks of puberty blockers and gender-affirming treatment are likely to outweigh the expected benefits of these treatments” (Alito, U.S. v. Skrmetti, Oral Argument, 14-15).

Given that it was just a week ago that Alito made the argument, it is no leap of logic to infer that leaders in both the UK and US may be looking to each other’s research and reasoning in putting this Constitutional-and-Human-Rights crisis to an end. In other words, the international consensus seems to be building, and it is not looking good for the Trans sector. In Politico, we read

• “The Department for Health and Social Care has now received advice from the government-ordered Commission on Human Medicines and on Wednesday backed its recommendation to restrict their use and supply indefinitely while further work is done to ensure young people's safety. … An earlier U.K. review into gender identity services found that studies [supporting] treatment for gender dysphoria were unreliable and there was a lack of attention paid to patients seeking to halt or reverse the gender transition process. ... Announcing the move, Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said: “We need to act with caution and care when it comes to this vulnerable group of young people, and follow the expert advice.”” (Politico.eu, 12-12-24)

Such an affirmation of caution is now—finally—finding its way into the mainstream. Legal theorists are finally grasping the underlying legal-and-medical concepts squarely, both normalizing and disseminating the linguistic distinctions underlying the previously-too-abstract ‘non-binary gender’ claims (see Jonathan Turley, “Sotomayor’s Headache: The United Kingdom Upholds Ban on Puberty-Blocking Drugs for Minors”).  

In the U.K.’s express need to act with caution, we hear an echo of Justice Kavanaugh at Skrmetti Oral Argument, who telegraphed his own “red light” thesis: 

• “If... England's pulling back and Sweden's pulling back, it strikes me as, you know, a pretty heavy yellow light, if not red light, for this Court to come in, the nine of us, and to constitutionalize the whole [Trans Rights] area when the rest of the world or at least the people who—the countries that have been at the forefront of this—are, you know, pumping the brakes on this kind of treatment because of concerns about the risks.” (Kavanaugh, U.S. v. Skrmetti, Oral Argument, 50). 

We see where this is going. The closer we honestly look into Trans youth medical practice, the more horrific it gets. Governmental oversight, whether at the state or federal level, has a natural, compelling interest to protect children not only from unscrupulous medical practices, not only from unscrupulous sexual dogmas making their way into elementary school classrooms, but also a compelling interest in protecting children from parents who have somehow received and accepted the idea that it is ok—and even preferred—to consent to the idea of castrating and sterilizing their own children.

Good sense, on an international level, is finally bringing this human rights catastrophe to its inevitable end.   

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• 12-11-24: “Experts pour cold water on Trump's plan to end birthright citizenship — but issue a stark warning”; Salon.com (link), and “Trump’s Misguided Attack on Birthright Citizenship”; Wall Street Journal (link). On the question: Do the “experts” even understand what they are saying about Trump’s “End Birthright Citizenship” plan? 

In his Wall Street Journal article, Jason L. Riley, pretending knowledge, directly states that 

• “Birthright citizenship is a principle enshrined in the 14th Amendment that grants American citizenship to almost anyone born on U.S. soil.” (Riley, WSJ, 12-11-24)

But this is nowhere near the truth. Nowhere in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment do we read the words “soil,” “jus soli,” or “the children of non-citizens shall be equal to the children of citizens.” Riley’s poor reading is based in the belief that the phrase “born… and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” refers to children leaving the womb on the king’s soil and, therefore, instantly being the property of the king. But in the U.S., that makes no sense, since all persons born are “subject to” the authority of their parents, who are subject to the authority of their own identity documents. 

As I have written elsewhere, “The gestation is subject to the jurisdiction of the womb; the womb is subject to the jurisdiction of the woman. The child is subject to the jurisdiction of the parent; the parent is subject to the jurisdiction of the country.” This is the Law of Nations; this is the U.S. Constitution. It cannot work otherwise; that’s when human rights violations start happening. When the liberal U.S. government deigns to claim that a Mexican couple’s baby is a U.S. citizen—and not a Mexican one—that’s the human rights violation. Because, suppose that the Mexican parents want to take their baby back to Mexico, and the U.S. says “no”? That, again, is a human rights violation. The liberals who promote “territorial birthright” (as in the two articles named above) only demonstrate that they have never quite thought it out this far.

For Americans, to better understand this effect of governance, here is the definitive scenario: As an American, if you and your pregnant wife travel to Mexico, and your wife delivers your son on Mexican soil, ask yourself: which government is your child “subject to”? Mexico? Or the United States? If you think your child is subject to Mexican jurisdiction, then, ask, what stops Mexico from prohibiting your child to go back to the U.S. with you? Such a claim on Mexico’s part would be a violation of the proverbial “Law of Nations,” as well as a deprivation of basic human rights. Your baby is yours, not the state’s, not the country’s, not the king’s. Everybody knows this intuitively; and yet, something keeps Americans from applying this to the Citizenship Clause.

To be clear, under the basic (and mistaken) “Birthright Citizenship” assumption, your own American child is suddenly a Mexican national. How does that make sense? It doesn’t. The baby of a Mexican is Mexican, just as the Mexican-territory-born baby of Americans is 100% American: because the parents are the ones with the right to say so; not some foreign government. 

And all of this represents the underlying constitutional citizenship fact which Trump, John C. Eastman, I, and many legal scholars want to point out to you: under American law, and under the Law of Nations, your child will always be the nationality listed on your own passport, in your case, American. This is how it works. And, to reiterate the point, it also works in reverse: the children of Russians, Mexicans, and Germans, when born on American soil, are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” meaning, “subject to” the nationality of their parents. Legal scholars are well familiar with the phrasing of that provision, as it was directly derived from the Civil Rights act of 1866. As Justice Fuller himself explained in his 1898 Wong Kim Ark dissent, 

• “The Civil Rights Act became a law April 9, 1866 (14: Stat. 27, c. 31), and provided : “That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.”... The words “not subject to any foreign power” do not in themselves refer to mere territorial jurisdiction, for the persons referred to are persons born in the United States. All such persons are undoubtedly subject to the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, and yet the act concedes that nevertheless they may [still] be subject to the political jurisdiction of a foreign government.” (Fuller, Wong Kim Ark, dissent, 1868)

That, effectively, is the correct reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, in the dissent which should have been the majority. The phrase “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” refers to the “born” person’s American parents (who are, therefore and implicitly, not subject to any foreign country). Trump and I both feel that the Alito Court will quickly and correctly put stare decisis aside, and overruling the 1898 majority misreading, should the matter be brought to the Court. Trump is doing this on “day one”; he has no hesitation as to the outcome.

After Trump issues his Executive Order, he will surely be brought into the Supreme Court in short time, testing the legal question of “Whether the ‘and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ provision directly refers to soil or parentage.” I have already demonstrated beyond all doubt that a Citizenship Clause reading made under the circumstances of Justice Scalia’s ‘Canons of Construction’ can only result in a reading in support of “jus sanguinis,” or parental birthright. (See section III. Scalia’s Canons of Interpretation, in this paper)

In her Salon.com article, Tatyana Tandanpolie exposes her basic non-understanding of the Constitution and its Citizenship doctrine, with this popular misreading:

• “In a “Meet the Press” interview that aired Sunday, Trump reiterated his long-term aim of ending birthright citizenship, a constitutional guarantee that any person born on U.S. soil has citizenship status. He told moderator Kristen Welker he intends to repeal the protection on day one of his presidency through executive action, stripping rights from Americans born to two undocumented parents.” (Tandanpolie, Salon.com, 12-11-24; underline emphasis added)

But, how, she fails to explain, does the Constitution make “Americans” out of children “born to two undocumented parents”? How do they first derive those “rights” before they are “stripped”?  Where does the Constitution say that “All children of foreigners born on American soil are automatically made American”? Answer: it doesn’t. In fact, the Constitution’s Article II Section 1 backs up Trump on this, given that only a “natural born citizen” can be President. In this model, the operative binary is “natural born” and “natural-ized.” These are mutually exclusive: a born child is one because they are not the other. One has American parents, and the other doesn’t. Just as is reflected in the “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”: those subject to American parents are “natural born,” and those subject to foreign parents can be “naturalized.” If the Framers had explicitly intended children “born to two undocumented parents” to automatically become citizens, they wouldn’t have written the “or naturalized” part of the provision.

And, let me put this to the reading public: with whom do you think the Alito-Kavanaugh axis will be inclined to agree: Trump and Justice Fuller (arguing jus sanguinis, or citizenship by natural born bloodline)? Or will they agree with the liberal press, who never quite explain what “and subject to” is supposed to mean, while believing firmly in the legality of “Birth Tourism”? 

Salon writes that 

• “Trump has signaled an interest in repealing birthright citizenship since his first run for president. … But Trump has no viable legal pathway to repealing birthright citizenship.” 

But this only represents a further gross misunderstanding of the Constitution. There was never a “Birthright Citizenship Act” to begin with, and therefore, no Act to “repeal”; the legal construct of “[jus soli] birthright citizenship” only exists implicitly, and is merely the consequence of a misreading of the Citizenship Clause, which happened in 1898, and was never corrected; that is, until, possibly, now. In the above language, we see that the sense of a preexisting “birthright citizenship” act is so palpable as to be morally presupposed, as if it is enshrined in the Constitution’s substantive text (when, clearly, it isn’t); much as the Transgender sector appears to believe that there exists a Trans Rights Amendment (when, clearly, there isn’t one).

Despite what many in the press now believe, “Birth Tourism” is neither a human right nor a constitutional one. The press needs to get this right. Soon, as it is rapidly appearing, the Supreme Court will be helping them with some clarifying strictures.

For the press (whether Slate, The Nation, NYT, WaPo, or National Review), all you need to do is download the Supreme Court’s Wong Kim Ark ruling of 1898, and carefully read Justice Fuller’s dissent. This is the reading which the current Court will be using to overturn the longstanding understanding of “Birthright Citizenship,” just as Trump is seeking to do on day one. Someone will fight Trump’s Executive Order, and in the aftermath, SCOTUS will rule in Trump’s favor, based on an affirmation of Fuller’s dissent. For those in the press who want further clarity, you can interview John C. Eastman, Vivek Ramaswamy, or this Eastman, F Effington. We’ll all tell you the same thing: read Fuller.                           

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• 12-8-24: “Trump Says He Will End Birthright Citizenship”; Politico.com (link). On the question: Can Trump really end birthright citizenship with an Executive Order? 

A year and a half ago, I conducted an in-depth inquiry as to whether Trump really had the legal-constitutional grounds to “end birthright citizenship” as claimed.  (See “On Birthrights: Is Trump's “End Birthright Citizenship” Valid?” at Eastman/Blog). My research indicated that, yes, per the same argument made by Trump attorney John C. Eastman, it was indeed possible to end birthright citizenship, by way of a corrected reading of the Fourteenth Amendment’s “Citizenship Clause.” As attorney Eastman has argued, the majority opinion in the 1898 Supreme Court case U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark was a demonstrably incorrect reading of the clause; a ruling which should have been overturned long ago.

Today, in reaction to Trump’s fresh rebooting of his plan, Politico.com presents Trump’s coy strategy of not saying too much, so as to cast the widest net of confusion. Let me help make this understandable. The opening part of the article pretty much says it all:

• “President-elect Donald Trump said he still plans to end birthright citizenship in the United States on day one—but was unable to provide insight into how he would go around the 14th Amendment. “We’re going to have to get it changed. We’ll maybe have to go back to the people,” Trump said in an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker on that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “But we have to end it.””

The article states that he plans to do this “through executive action,” or a Day One Executive Order. 

And here is the part which Politico and Welker are incapable of grasping or explaining: the underlying brilliance of Trump’s present strategy is that by issuing an Executive Order—rather than working to establish a legal case to overturn U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark—Trump shifts the legal onus of testing that 1898 Wong Kim Ark “jus soli” ruling to a third party, with the onus now on them to prove to the Court that Justice Gray’s “jus soli” (citizenship by territorial jurisdiction) ruling of 1898 is correct; and, conversely, that Justice Fuller’s “jus sanguinis” (citizenship by parental blood/parental jurisdiction) is wrong. When, as John C. Eastman, Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump, Justice Fuller, and I all agree, it can easily be argued to SCOTUS that the proper reading of the Citizenship Clause holds that 

• “All persons [both because, (1)] born [via traditional childbirth] … AND [because, (2)] subject to the [American parental] jurisdiction thereof, are [thereby duly qualified as] Citizens of [both] the United States AND of the State wherein they [legally] reside.” (the Effington Eastman reading, in accordance with Scalia’s Canons of Construction)

Clearly, this will be one of the most fascinating SCOTUS hearings of the Trump 47 era. I believe that Trump, John C. Eastman, and Vivek Ramaswamy have read and agree with my argument, and I believe Trump is boldly making this a Day One move because he roundly agrees with my reasoning, and because he perfectly understands that the Alito-Kavanaugh axis of the Supreme Court will love this reading as much as we do. 

Trump says that “we’re going to have to get it [the Citizenship Clause] changed.” But what he really means is that the Supreme Court needs to “change” and memorialize the correct reading of it.

Those who want a deeper understanding of the issue will also enjoy reading my three Ramaswamy blogs, since each of these deals with the same corrective reading of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. The quickest read of those Ramaswamy blogs is here.

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• 11-23-24: “Supreme Court Speaking Habits: 2024 Term Analysis”; Twitter News and Cremieux (link). On the question: What is Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson thinking?  

A fascinating analysis of Supreme Court speaking habits surfaced on Twitter, sparking debate about verbosity, judicial strategy, and what it reveals about the Court’s newest member, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Under the X headline printed above, we read the standard AI-written summary of the news thread:

• “An analysis of the speaking habits of Supreme Court Justices during oral arguments reveals significant differences in verbosity among the justices. Justice Clarence Thomas notably speaks less than his peers, sparking discussions about his judicial strategy or engagement level. Data from the 2024 term up to November 15 shows a contrast in speaking times, with liberal justices collectively speaking more than their conservative counterparts.”

The lead tweet in this thread looked like this: