✏️ Legal Pad
Born Here, American Here
The Supreme Court this week rejected an executive order that sought to narrow birthright citizenship for children born in the United States whose parents were either living here illegally or present on temporary visas.
The decision was 6-3 and written by Chief Justice John Roberts. The Court concluded that the longstanding guarantee of citizenship is deeply rooted in our history and cannot be rewritten by executive order.
There are legitimate arguments to be had about immigration.
A nation has the right, and the obligation, to control its borders, enforce its laws, and decide who may enter and remain here. Concerns about illegal immigration, temporary visas, and so-called “birth tourism” are real issues and do not disappear simply because the constitutional question has been answered.
But immigration enforcement and citizenship are not quite the same thing.
The legal status of a parent does not necessarily dictate the citizenship of a child born here. The Fourteenth Amendment established a rule designed to be durable, predictable, and largely immune from the political winds of any particular administration.
That permanence matters.
Citizenship should not depend on which party controls the White House, which policy is popular that year, or what paperwork a newborn child’s parents possessed at the moment of birth. Constitutional rights are valuable precisely because they are harder to change than ordinary policy.
There is something affirming in that.
In a country where so much can feel conditional, the basic promise remains remarkably simple: a child born here is one of us.
Whatever your politics, that should still mean something.
💡 Sidebar
This Should Be Normal
The United States Men’s National Team is into the Round of 16 after defeating Bosnia and Herzegovina 2-0 while playing much of the second half with ten men. For the uninitiated who didn’t have a prolific soccer career that extended through…high school…ten men is one man short.
American striker Folarin Balogun, who scored a goal earlier in the game (yes, Marchini, I know it’s a “match”) received an EXTREMELY questionable red card later in the game and was ejected. That meant the US had to play about a half hour of the game a man down.
But, instead of wilting on the world stage, the boys stepped up, knocked in another goal, played shut down defense and punched their (our) dance card to the next round. It was the team’s first World Cup knockout victory in twenty-four years.
That is exciting.
It is also unacceptable that it took twenty-four years.
The American soccer team is usually discussed in the language of underdogs, Cinderella runs, moral victories, and respectable losses. We celebrate simply being competitive with countries whose total populations would barely fill some of our states. Enough of that.
American excellence has no business skipping soccer.
Yes, soccer. Not football. We already have football, and ours requires helmets, shoulder pads, and approximately four hours to play sixty minutes.
This country has an absurd population of world-class athletes, unrivaled sports infrastructure, elite coaching, advanced training facilities, enormous financial resources, and a youth sports system capable of turning a six-year-old’s Saturday morning game into a nationally sanctioned military operation.
There is no reason the United States should approach the World Cup merely hoping not to embarrass itself.
The improbable run should become the expected one.
That does not mean winning every tournament. Nobody does. It means reaching the knockout rounds should be the floor, not the miracle. It means opposing teams should see the United States on the bracket and understand they are in for ninety minutes of speed, conditioning, physicality, and relentless pressure.
At some point, American soccer has to stop asking whether it belongs at the table and start acting like it owns the restaurant.
⚖️ Closing Arguments
Two hundred and fifty years ago tomorrow, a collection of farmers, merchants, lawyers, planters, and professional misfits approved the most consequential breakup letter ever written.
The message to the most powerful empire on earth was fairly direct:
This relationship is no longer working.
Of course, the Declaration of Independence was more eloquent than that. But beneath the prose was an act of almost incomprehensible nerve.
The men who signed it did not know they would win.
They did not know whether the country they imagined would survive its first war, much less its first 250 years. They placed their names on a document announcing treason against a global superpower and then pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the result.
That is courage in its purest form- not confidence that everything will work out, but a willingness to act when it very well may not.
The country they founded was imperfect. It was an idea. But it was an idea that no one in human history had every tried: The Founders did not build a government around the assumption that good people would always make good decisions. They assumed the opposite. They understood that human beings are ambitious, emotional, self-interested, and remarkably talented at confusing their own desires with the public good.
Madison put it plainly: if men were angels, no government would be necessary.
America was not founded on naïveté about human nature. It was founded on a clear-eyed understanding of it- and the belief that liberty could survive only if power was forced to answer to other power.
Equality. Liberty. Self-government. The right of ordinary people to challenge concentrated power.
Those ideas became tools that later generations could use to demand that the country live up to its own words.
That struggle continues today, loudly and often unpleasantly. We disagree about nearly everything. We treat political opponents like enemy combatants. We sometimes seem more interested in winning arguments than preserving the country in which we are fortunate enough to have them.
But the arguing is part of the inheritance.
America was born from disagreement. From people refusing to accept that power was entitled to remain unchallenged simply because it had always been there.
As a lawyer, I benefit from that inheritance every day. The ability to walk into a public courtroom, stand before ordinary citizens, and demand that a government, corporation, or powerful institution answer for what it has done is an extraordinary thing.
It exists because 250 years ago, a few people decided that authority should answer to the governed, not the other way around.
America is not a finished product. It never has been. It was never supposed to be. It is an ongoing experiment built on the fairly radical proposition that free people can govern themselves, correct their mistakes, and leave the country better than they found it.
Two hundred and fifty years later, the work is not finished.
Tomorrow is one of my favorite days of the year. It’s a day where, above all, I think about how lucky I am. Not because America has always lived up to its ideals, but because a group of people once had the courage to write them down and begin the attempt, and I won the lottery by being born an American.
Court is in recess, God Bless America- see you next Friday.
