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TRUMP’S VILE BIRTHRIGHT STANCE IS AN ELECTION ISSUE  
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Greg Sargent
July 10, 2026
The New Republic

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_ Mike Johnson is now floating a “legislative fix” to birthright
citizenship. That’s an assault on the Constitution—and a vote that
vulnerable Republicans will hate, if recent polling from Fox News is
any indication. _

"Donald Trump - Caricature (Painting)", by DonkeyHotey (CC BY-SA 2.0)


 

After the Supreme Court handed Donald Trump a major defeat by
upholding birthright citizenship last month, an angry Trump took to
Truth Social to urge Republican lawmakers to overturn it with
legislation. “Congress should start TODAY,” Trump demanded
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adding: “No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is
necessary!”

That’s nonsense—five justices affirmed
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just about all children born on U.S. soil, including those with
undocumented parents, are citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. But
House Speaker Mike Johnson knows he must appear prepared to obey
Trump’s command, so on Fox News Sunday, he declared
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House Republicans are examining ways to undo what the Constitution
says.
“If there’s some legislative fix, we’ll advance that
immediately,” Johnson insisted. Note the word “immediately,”
which seems to mean “between now and Election Day.” Is this
something vulnerable House Republicans will really want to vote on?

Doubtful. Indeed, look carefully and you’ll see the beginnings of a
pattern: Republicans like Johnson—who know this would be extremely
unpopular—are conjuring up a new tone and new language designed to
recast it as a modest step, and not as the radical upheaval it would
truly represent. Just watch Johnson’s full quote
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Birthright citizenship might require a mere “legislative fix,”
Johnson says, because under it, citizenship has been “devalued” by
“birth tourism.” That last phrase has long been a noxious rallying
cry on the anti-immigrant right. But in Johnson’s hands, it’s
meant to portray the birthright citizenship “problem” as no
biggie, as a trivial matter that just needs a little patching up. And
note the oh-so-casual tone he strikes throughout, as if he’s
discussing an adjustment to marginal tax rates.

Or take Vice President JD Vance, who recently described
[[link removed]] ending birthright
citizenship in similarly bland terms. “It’s fundamentally a
loophole that exists in our immigration system that rewards illegal
aliens,” Vance said on Fox News Sunday. “There are a number of
things that we’re already looking at to close that loophole.”

Note Vance’s repetition of the word “loophole,” which seems
suspiciously deliberate. Why, this would be a mere tweak—akin to a
new coat of paint on the garage door or oiling a squeaky hinge, you
see.

Theoretically, Johnson and Republicans _could_ write legislation that,
say, prohibits the grant of citizenship to any babies born to one or
two parents who entered illegally and/or were undocumented at the time
of the birth. Right now, such a bill would presumably be upheld as
constitutional by “only” four Supreme Court justices: Samuel
Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch voted to overturn birthright
citizenship on constitutional grounds, and Brett Kavanaugh sided with
the majority but only on a statutory basis, not a constitutional one.

That’s alarming. It means only five justices now believe birthright
citizenship is a “foundational guarantee,” explains Slate’s Mark
Joseph Stern
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so opponents need only to “nab one more vote” on the court to
create a majority to uphold a congressional statute ending it. So
Republicans might try to pass something that might be invalidated now
but could test the court again—and lay the groundwork for more
efforts later, similar to how _Roe v. Wade_ foes chipped away at it
for years before succeeding.

The irony to Johnson’s effort to make all this sound trivial is that
the problem he identifies—people coming into our country solely to
have a baby and scam the system into letting them stay—actually _is_
very insignificant. A brief in the case by over 100 specialists
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in social science, demography, and other fields notes that the
government’s own numbers put such births at far less than 1 percent
of overall U.S. births. And even that low figure is almost certainly
wrong: The real total, they detail, is far more “infinitesimal.”

But the change that Republicans are contemplating would be a moral,
substantive, humanitarian, and constitutional earthquake. As Amanda
Frost explains
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ending birthright citizenship could lead to hundreds of thousands of
newborn babies per year going forward remaining undocumented. That
would mean they have less earning power as adults, harming the
economy. Alternatively, if they are removed (or not born here at all),
that means a future of national demographic decline.

Here it’s critical to stress that the overwhelming majority of those
people _would not_ be the children of “birth tourists.” They
wouldn’t be the children of people who came here solely to have
babies and are getting “rewarded” for this, as it doesn’t earn
the parents legal status in any case. Instead, the parents constitute
families already in the process of immigrating here for the same
reasons immigrants long have done—to participate productively in our
economy and communities and, ultimately, in our democracy.

So while Johnson and Vance are aiming their rhetoric at “birth
tourists”—an easy-to-demonize group—their actual concern is with
the much larger class of people who want to settle here for reasons
that are recognizably American. _That’s_ who they want to keep out.

Further underscoring the point, don’t overlook Johnson’s assertion
that our citizenship is being “devalued” by birthright
citizenship. Two of the justices—Thomas and Alito—used similar
terms, insisting the children of undocumented immigrants “devalue”
and “degrade” American citizenship more broadly. That’s
extremely loaded language: As Adam Serwer notes
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it echoes Civil War–era language
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about freedom for enslaved people “degrading” the white race, thus
casting all those undocumented children as fundamentally
“inferior” to other American-born children.

Which is ultimately why all this strikes so hard at our constitutional
order. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s concurrence forcefully points out
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birthright citizenship enshrines the promise of equality in part
precisely by overturning “bloodline” as the “marker” of
belonging. The key is that the child’s status should not be
hereditary. Vance and Johnson want to undo _that,_ reversing what
Jackson calls the Fourteenth Amendment’s destruction of “racial
caste.”

So let’s step back and really appreciate Johnson’s vile two-step.
He claims in passing that birthright citizenship “devalues”
American citizenship, casually endorsing a disgusting attack on the
hallowed principle that a child’s status should depend on
birthplace, not heritage or inheritance. Undoing this would be
seismic, yet he frames it as a mere “fix” to “birth tourism,”
making it sound benign to those who might not immediately appreciate
the grand principles at stake here.

“The new quote-unquote ‘fixes’ try to shift the public’s focus
to the legal status of the parents, away from the geographical
birthplace of the child,” Anna O. Law, a historian of immigration
law
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tells me. “For people who don’t know the history of the Fourteenth
Amendment, it might sound plausible. But it would blow a huge hole in
the U.S. Constitution. It’s deeply cynical.”

It would also be deeply, deeply unpopular. A recent Fox News poll
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found that 69 percent of Americans think a kid born to an “illegal
immigrant” (Fox’s language) should “automatically become a U.S.
citizen.” That includes 65 percent of noncollege white voters, 61
percent of rural whites, and even 57 percent of white evangelicals. As
Fox quietly reported
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in March (how often do you hear this finding on the network?),
relative to previous years, support for it is up.

To be sure, now that Trump and MAGA have taken up this cause, it might
shift some Republican voters their way. Focus-grouping by The
xxxxxx’s Sarah Longwell
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shows some Trump voters are now echoing his own language about it.

But still: It’s very, very doubtful that Johnson really wants
vulnerable House Republicans to vote on such legislation before the
midterms. Yet he’s now been pushed into the position of keeping
expectations for a legislative “fix” alive with MAGA—all because
he’s required to pretend Trump’s command for legislation is rooted
in something real. And Vance will have to champion this when his
presidential run starts next year, no matter how unpopular it remains.
When he does, he’ll use euphemisms like “loophole” to mask how
wildly radical and destructive it is. And it’ll be squarely on us to
prevent him, at all costs, from getting away with it.

_GREG SARGENT_ [[link removed]]_ is a
staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the podcast __The
Daily Blast_
[[link removed]]_. A
seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he
was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from 2010
to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New York magazine, and
the New York Observer. Greg is also the __author of the critically
acclaimed book_
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An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation
and Thunderdome Politics.  _
_The New Republic_ [[link removed]]_ was founded in 1914 to
bring liberalism into the modern era. The founders understood that the
challenges facing a nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution
and mass immigration required bold new thinking._

_Today’s New Republic is wrestling with the same fundamental
questions: how to build a more inclusive and democratic civil society,
and how to fight for a fairer political economy in an age of rampaging
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from the climate crisis to Republicans hell-bent on subverting
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_We’re determined to continue building on our founding mission._

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