Welcome to Friday, August 23rd, stripes and polka-dots...

President Trump has announced his administration is looking at ways to end automatic citizenship for U.S.-born children of noncitizens.

“We’re looking at that very seriously, birthright citizenship, where you have a baby on our land, you walk over the border, have a baby - congratulations, the baby is now a U.S. citizen.... It’s frankly ridiculous,” Trump told reporters outside the White House.

The Constitution’s 14th Amendment, however, grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” It was passed after the Civil War to ensure that African Americans had full citizenship rights.

Trump has said he’s been assured by his lawyers that a change to birthright citizenship could be made “just with an executive order.”

But lawmakers and legal scholars have challenged the ability of a president to end the practice. James Ho, a Trump-appointed federal appeals court judge, wrote in 2006 that birthright citizenship “is protected no less for children of undocumented persons than for descendants of Mayflower passengers.”

Do you support ending birthright citizenship?

On the Radar

Senate Needs to be the Senate

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is urging Democrats to stop considering abolishing the filibuster, writing in a New York Times op-ed: "America needs the Senate to be the Senate."

Earlier this month, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said that Democrats should kill the filibuster to take on climate change. Other Democrats have also called for ending the practice in order to move forward on gun control legislation.

"I recognize it may seem odd that a Senate majority leader opposes a proposal to increase his own power," McConnell wrote. "Certainly it is curious that liberals are choosing this moment, when Americans have elected Republican majorities three consecutive times and counting, to attack the minority’s powers."

McConnell added: "If future Democrats shortsightedly decide to reduce the Senate to majority rule, we’ll have lost a key safeguard of American government."

Do you support the filibuster?

Larger Deficits Projected

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has updated its economic outlook for the 2019-2029 period to project an increase in budget deficits of $872 billion.

The CBO now expects the FY2019 budget deficit to be $63 billion more than it had projected in May (up to $960 billion), and that aggregate deficits over the 2020-2029 period will be $809 billion more than projected because of recently enacted bills that increased spending.

The following graph includes some of factors that drove the changes in projected deficits:

PIC-O2

Should Congress work to reduce budget deficits & the national debt?

Under the Radar

Flu Vaccines to Detained Migrant Families

The U.S. government has said it won’t provide flu vaccinations to unauthorized immigrant families in holding centers.

“In general, due to the short-term nature of CBP holding and the complexities of operating vaccination programs, neither CBP nor its medical contractors administer vaccinations to those in our custody,” a Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman said in an emailed statement to CNBC.

At least three children who were held in detention centers after crossing into the U.S. from Mexico have died in recent months, in part from the flu. A group of doctors had sent a letter to Democratic Reps. Rosa DeLauro (CT) and Lucille Roybal-Allard (CA) asking them to investigate the health conditions of CBP camps.

"When I learned that multiple children had died in detention from potentially preventable causes, it truly disturbed me. The country needs urgent answers to that question so that children stop dying in detention," Dr. Jonathan Winickoff, a Harvard pediatrics professor and one of the doctors who sent the letter, told CNBC.

Should CBP deny flu vaccines to border detainees?