The Trump administration’s efforts to narrow the scope of the 14th Amendment are based on revisionist history.
When I was a child, I took some pleasure in pointing out that my father was a natural-born Californian. His parents were temporary visitors or, in the language of the 19th century, “sojourners” in the Golden State at the time of his birth. Despite his son and his father and his many fathers’ fathers before him all being native-born Texans, and despite his parents’ rapid return to Texas, he was forever an alien-born to the Lone Star State.
Keith E. Whittington is a contributing writer at The Dispatch and the David Boies Professor of Law and Director of the Center for the Study of Free Speech and Academic Freedom at Yale Law School. He is the author of The Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy, and he was a member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.
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