The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Subject to the Jurisdiction Thereof’

Posted on | April 1, 2026 | No Comments

When did states begin issuing birth certificates? And why are these documents now required in various legal contexts? I was born in Atlanta, Georgia — the exact hour and minute were recorded, along with my birth weight — but my grandparents had no such documentation when they were born in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Part of the answer:

The United States began collecting birth data at the national level in 1902, via the U.S. Census. . . . The federal government first developed a standard birth certificate application form in 1907, five years after the Census Bureau began collecting data. The current system of the states collecting data and reporting it to the federal government developed between 1915, when the federal government mandated that states collect and report the data, and 1933, by which time all of the states were participating.

This still doesn’t explain why the government hadn’t thought to do this previously, or what prompted the change. Probably most Americans have never given any thought to questions like this, and likewise this:

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

Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Trump v. CASA Inc., involving the president’s executive order challenging the prevailing interpretation of the so-called “birthright citizenship” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In particular, it is that five-word phrase, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which is the bone of contention: Does this include the children of illegal aliens? Does it include the babies born to foreigners who are here as tourists or on student visas?

Sunday evening I got a phone call from my youngest son, who is now a first-year law student, and we discussed the case. My son believes, and I am inclined to agree, that the Trump administration faces an uphill battle to persuade the justices to accept its claim that the president has the authority to change the interpretation of the Citizenship Clause by executive order. Even if you agree with Trump — i.e., that this clause has been misinterpreted to grant birthright citizenship in cases never contemplated by those who wrote and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment — isn’t it properly the job of Congress to clarify this through relevant legislation? But as I told my son, we got here because Congress has neglected its duty for decades, which is a long story going back to the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which was passed during the “Great Society” apogee of 20th-century liberalism after Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide reelection, when a Democrat-dominated Congress was eagerly enacting all kinds of nonsense as a legislative memorial to JFK. This history also includes the Simpson–Mazzoli Act of 1986, which Ronald Reagan (then struggling with the Iran-Contra scandal) was persuaded to sign, despite conservatives urging him to veto the bill. Simpson-Mazzoli “provided illegal migrants with amnesty and a path to legal citizenship and enabled sanctions on employers who hired illegal migrants”:

Three million migrants, mostly Hispanic, got to stay; the employers were never hit with meaningful sanctions, even as the floodgates opened. A 2016 Yale study concluded that the real illegal immigration population number is 16 to 30 million, versus the 11 million number generally cited.
The electoral impact of this change was felt almost immediately. California had been a Republican mainstay in elections, but in 1988 George H. W. Bush narrowly carried the state. Since 1988, no Republican presidential candidate has carried California.

Because of the bipartisan nature of the lobbying pressures involved — especially those Republicans controlled by the business lobby’s desire for cheap labor — the American people never got a chance to have an up-or-down vote on any of this, until Trump came along. There was never a time between 1965 and 2016 where people going to the polls had a clear choice on this issue. It is important to note that, in 2009-2010, when Obama was president and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, they did not pass any kind of “comprehensive immigration reform,” which they had been arguing loudly for just a few years earlier when Bush and Republicans were in charge. The same pattern was repeated in 2021-2022, with Biden in the White House and Democrats controlling Congress again, and yet still no “reform.” What this tells you is that Democrats know damned well that a majority of Americans oppose the open-borders agenda, and Democrats would destroy their chances for reelection if they tried to ram another amnesty down our throats.

The history of congressional neglect — not to mention congressional dishonesty and cowardice — has gotten us to where we are, and Trump has forced this issue into the forefront of our national conversation because Republicans in Congress either were afraid to touch it, or were sympathetic to the open-borders agenda. Just as an aside to all this, the organization whose name appears in this case as the lead opponent to Trump has an interesting history:

CASA was originally known as the “Central American Solidarity Association of Maryland”. The organization’s name was officially changed to CASA of Maryland, Inc., on July 28, 1995. The organization’s name was officially changed to CASA de Maryland, Inc., on September 4, 2008. Now, the organization is named CASA.
CASA was founded in 1985 in the basement of the Takoma Park Presbyterian Church by US citizens and Central American immigrants. It has since expanded its scope. It is affiliate organization of the National Council of La Raza. They are a member of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. CASA is also a founding member of the National Capital Immigration Coalition, which promotes “comprehensive immigration reform”.

Perhaps you don’t understand the significance of the group being founded in 1985 in Takoma Park. A Soviet-backed “insurgency” provoked a civil war in El Salvador, with the Communist FMLN waging guerrilla warfare against a military junta and its “death squads,” and, along with similar events in Guatemala and Nicaragua, this had brought an inundation of Central American refugees into the U.S., many of whom settled in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. Takoma Park was (and is) a bastion of liberalism, like Berkeley is to California, and the “Central American Solidarity Association” was just another pro-Communist front group formed by opponents of the Reagan administration.

In other words, more than 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we’re still fighting the godless Commies. Just another reason to thank God for Trump, who will attend today’s oral arguments in person.



 

Category: Constitution, History, Immigration, Supreme Court

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