SIGNERS OF THE DECLARATION WERE BORN AS BRITISH SUBJECTS

BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP HAS EVOLVED FROM ENGLISH COMMON LAW IDEAS TO A CONSTITUTIONAL GUARANTEE THAT WAS NOT FINALLY SECURE UNTIL 1868

The phrase “everyone born since the United States of America was constituted is a birth-right citizen” oversimplifies a story that spans nearly a century of legal change.

At the moment the Constitution took effect in 1789, the new republic inherited the English common-law principle of jus soli, which generally treated anyone born within the sovereign’s territory as a natural-born subject.

Early federal courts often applied that rule by analogy, yet Congress still assumed it had power to define who counted as a citizen, so the Naturalization Act of 1790 extended full political membership only to “free white persons” born abroad to American parents and left the status of many people born on United States soil uncertain.

In 1857 the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision crystallised that uncertainty by declaring that Black people, even if born free in a free state, could never be citizens of the United States, a ruling that shattered the idea that place of birth alone conferred membership.

Not until the Civil War’s aftermath did Congress and the states reverse that doctrine.

The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, wrote the rule of unconditional jus soli into the Constitution, declaring that all persons born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens; three decades later the Supreme Court confirmed in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the amendment covered virtually everyone born on American soil, regardless of their parents’ status, save only the children of foreign diplomats and enemy occupiers.

From that point forward, birth-right citizenship became effectively universal, but it is accurate only to say that every child born since 1868—not since 1789—has enjoyed that automatic guarantee.

Turning to the signers of the Declaration of Independence, none of them were “born in the United States” because the United States did not yet exist when they were born.

Forty-eight signers first saw daylight in the British colonies that became the new nation, making them British subjects at birth, and eight—Button Gwinnett, Robert Treat Paine, James Wilson, John Witherspoon, George Taylor, Matthew Thornton, James Smith, and Francis Lewis—were born in England, Scotland, Wales, or Ireland before emigrating.

Their political identity transformed on July fourth seventeen seventy-six when they pledged “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” to a cause that would, in effect, retroactively convert many colonial births into births within what became the United States.

Yet strictly speaking, their nativity records list British dominions, not an American polity, and they became citizens by revolution and by subsequent state and federal statutes, not by the modern doctrine of constitutional birthplace citizenship.

In short, universal birth-right citizenship in America is the product of the Fourteenth Amendment and its later judicial interpretation, not an unbroken rule reaching back to the founding, and the men who declared independence were themselves born subjects of the British Crown rather than citizens of a nation that had not yet come into being.

The Day the Frame Cracked

Yesterday’s republic does not exist this morning.

Ever since the Court’s opinion in Trump v. United States declared that any presidential act labeled “official” is beyond prosecution, the Constitution’s guard-rails have carried the weight of a freight train they were never built to stop.

One year on, the rails have buckled.

What we are watching is not a “constitutional crisis.” Crisis implies a moment of peril that can be resolved and left behind.

This is constitutional failure—an open, spreading breach in the vessel that once held our democratic order.

The founders foresaw demagogues; they did not imagine a Supreme Court that would hand such a figure a crown or a Congress that would shrug.

The parchment barriers James Madison trusted now flutter like spent confetti.

Judge J. Michael Luttig, no liberal alarmist, puts it plainly: we lost the republic on Inauguration Day 2025 the moment the new president began wielding immunity as license.

His warning lands with the force of Lincoln’s own “all the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa” passage: the mortal danger is internal.

Luttig’s indictment lists twenty-seven contemporary “self-evident truths,” each mirroring a grievance against George III in the Declaration of Independence.

The parallels are eerie: the king “has obstructed the administration of justice.”

So has a president whose attorney general smears every judge who rules against him, posting their pictures online and summoning mobs to the courthouse steps.

The king “has made judges dependent on his will alone.”

So has a president who dangles promotion or banishment over sitting jurists and nudges Congress toward impeaching those who cross him.

Chief Justice John Roberts knows all of this; he has admitted as much to friends.

Yet the Court keeps accommodating power, nursing the illusion that even-handed tut-tuts about “everyone lowering the temperature” can substitute for a direct defense of judicial independence.

Meanwhile threats against judges multiply, U.S. Marshals strain to keep up, and a federal bench that once stood as the quiet spine of the republic now checks its rearview mirror on the drive home.

Against that backdrop Independence Day loses its childlike sparkle and recovers its original purpose: it is a date for publishing grievances and recommitting to resistance.

Judge Luttig suggests that every household read the Declaration aloud this Fourth of July.

The exercise is not sentimental; it is diagnostic.

Each line is a probe testing the health of today’s body politic.

Too many probes draw blood.

What then?

The answer cannot wait for a savior robed in black or elected in some calmer cycle.

The answer is civic refusal—refusal to normalize the language of kingship, refusal to accept courts packed with pliant clerks, refusal to let intimidation drive good lawyers off the public roster, refusal to shrug when a president calls violence “strong leadership.”

The Constitution is not self-executing; it never was. Its survival depends on citizens who read it, understand its limits, and enforce its spirit in the arena of everyday politics.

We have crossed the line where complacency masquerades as prudence. The frame around the golden apple is cracked.

Whether it shatters or is mended will be decided not by the authors of immunity doctrines or the pundits who polish them, but by the millions of ordinary Americans who must now decide if they will stand up for a republic already lost once in living memory.

The Fourth of July is the right day to start.

Birth-Right Citizenship in Plain English

In the United States, anyone born on U.S. soil—no matter who their parents are—automatically becomes a U.S. citizen at the moment of birth, unless the parents are foreign diplomats who enjoy full immunity.

The rule comes from the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified in 1868):

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States … .”

In 1898 the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark nailed the principle down: the child of Chinese parents, legally barred from naturalization themselves, was nonetheless an American because he had been born in San Francisco.

This “jus soli” (right of the soil) contrasts with “jus sanguinis” (right of blood), the approach many countries take in which parentage, not birthplace, controls.

Canada, Mexico, Brazil and most of the Western Hemisphere follow a U.S.-style jus soli system; much of Europe and Asia do not.

The American version is unusually sweeping because it is embedded in the Constitution, meaning it cannot be trimmed by ordinary legislation.

Congress can refine who counts as “subject to the jurisdiction”—for example, the children of occupying armies are excluded—but it cannot revoke birth-place citizenship outright without a constitutional amendment.

Politically, birth-right citizenship comes up whenever immigration is hot: some lawmakers propose denying automatic citizenship to children of undocumented parents, arguing it would deter “anchor babies.”

Most legal scholars, across the spectrum, reply that the Fourteenth Amendment’s text, the post-Civil-War history that produced it, and a century of precedent leave Congress no room to do that unilaterally.

Any real change would require two-thirds of both Houses, three-quarters of the states, and likely a revisiting of Wong Kim Ark—a mountain, not a molehill.

For the average person the rule means simple paperwork: a birth certificate issued anywhere in the fifty states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands or Northern Mariana Islands is proof of citizenship.

It also shapes the demographic and cultural fabric of the country, ensuring each generation can claim a stake in the nation without regard to ancestry—one reason the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment adopted it in the first place, to bury the Dred Scott notion that some people could be born here yet never belong.

DONALD TRUMP’S FAMILY DEMONSTRATES A MIX OF NATIVE-BORN AMERICANS AND IMMIGRANT ANCESTORS WHOSE ORIGINS SPAN GERMANY, SCOTLAND, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, AND SLOVENIA.

Donald Trump’s paternal line is split: his grandfather Friedrich (later Frederick) Trump and grandmother Elizabeth Christ Trump were both born in Kallstadt, Germany, immigrated to the United States in the 1880s, and never relinquished their foreign birth, whereas their son Fred Trump—the former president’s father—was born in New York City in 1905 and is therefore U.S.-born.

On the maternal side Donald Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, arrived from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland in 1930 and remained a foreign-born American citizen by naturalization, while her husband, Fred, and all five of their children—Maryanne, Fred Jr., Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert—were delivered in New York City hospitals and are native-born citizens.

Turning to marriages and descendants, Trump’s first wife, Ivana Zelníčková, entered the United States from what was then Czechoslovakia and is foreign-born; his second wife, Marla Maples, was born in the state of Georgia and is U.S.-born; and his current wife, Melania Knauss, grew up in Slovenia and is foreign-born, later naturalized.

All five of Donald Trump’s children—Donald Jr., Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany, and Barron—were born on American soil, as were his known grandchildren, making the younger generations citizens by birth under the Fourteenth Amendment.

In short, Donald Trump’s immediate circle of relatives who were born in the United States includes his father Fred, his four siblings, one former spouse Marla Maples, all of his children, and all grandchildren, while foreign-born members encompass his mother Mary Anne, his paternal grandparents Frederick and Elizabeth, his first wife Ivana, and his current wife Melania, illustrating how immigration and native birth intertwine across the Trump family tree.

Killing Birth-Right Citizenship Would Also Deny Donald Trump’s Own Grandchildren Their American Status

Ending the Fourteenth Amendment’s birth-right rule isn’t a quick statutory tweak; it would require a nearly impossible constitutional amendment.

Many GOP voices forget that the clause protects every baby born on U.S. soil, no matter a parent’s papers—exactly how Donald Jr., Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany, Barron, and all of Trump’s grandchildren became citizens despite their Scottish and German forebears.

Repeal would force hospitals to police ancestry, creating two classes of newborns with identical family trees but different legal standing.

Courts have rejected that logic since Wong Kim Ark (1898), and the administrative chaos would choke passports, Social Security and the military with proof-of-pedigree demands.

Politically, the proposal punishes only future infants while leaving today’s native-born—including every senator’s and representative’s children—untouched, making it a symbolic gesture that rewrites 150 years of settled law for no practical gain.

In short, critics of birth-right citizenship are swinging an axe at the very pillar that secures their own families’ American identity.