The President’s Birthright Citizenship Order is Not Just Unconstitutional. It’s Crazy

Key Points:

• The president’s executive order challenging birthright citizenship claims to apply only prospectively but would, if upheld, threaten the citizenship status of all native-born Americans, past and present.
• The U.S. Constitution, specifically the Fourteenth Amendment, defines citizenship retrospectively, meaning any change would affect everyone born in the country, not just future births.
• If birth certificates no longer prove citizenship, Americans would need to trace their parents’ citizenship status, potentially complicating voting eligibility and other legal processes that rely on proof of citizenship.
• The proposed changes could undermine the reliability of birth certificates and disrupt systems like the SAVE Act, which depend on them for verifying citizenship and eligibility.
• Although the Supreme Court has sometimes applied rulings prospectively, the Constitution cannot selectively apply to different generations, making the potential consequences of upholding the executive order far-reaching and potentially chaotic.