14th Amendment twist: NBC ignored six key words in its ‘gotcha’ interview with Trump

President Trump appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday for a wide-ranging interview. Once again, he addressed the contentious subject of birthright citizenship, a doctrine that asserts that anyone born on U.S. soil, even to noncitizen parents or persons in the country illegally, should be considered an American citizen no matter what.

President Trump wants to get rid of unrestricted birthright citizenship, a practice that not even the most left-wing European governments engage in. When reciting the text of the 14th Amendment as a “gotcha” to his plan, “Meet the Press” omitted six crucial words: “All persons born … in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, shall be citizens of the United States.”

Nothing in the 14th Amendment stops Congress from enacting legislation that limits birthright citizenship along the lines of what Harry Reid proposed in 1993.

Those words matter.

Congress has the power to define what it means to be born in the United States “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Current law contains no such restriction, but Congress can make one, excluding prospectively from birthright citizenship individuals born in the U.S. to illegal aliens.

This is an idea that has attracted lawmakers of both political parties.

In fact, one of the first bills (at least in recent memory) that attempted to impose statutory limits on automatic birthright citizenship was introduced in 1993 by Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who later became the Democrats’ leader in the Senate.

Senator Reid’s bill was called the Immigration Stabilization Act of 1993. Title X of that bill would have limited automatic birthright citizenship to children born in the United States to mothers who were either U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents at the time. The fact that federal law doesn’t currently impose such a restriction doesn’t mean that it couldn’t, and that’s why Reid proposed that change.

Nothing in the 14th Amendment stops Congress from enacting legislation that limits birthright citizenship along the lines of what Reid proposed in 1993.

Those who suggest that Congress is somehow powerless to limit birthright citizenship ignore important constitutional text giving Congress power to define who among those “born in the United States” is born “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

Moreover, the very lawmakers who drafted the 14th Amendment did not consider it to confer automatic citizenship upon anyone born within its geographic borders — such a suggestion was considered absurd at the time.

Senator Jacob Howard, who served on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that drafted the 14th Amendment, said of the citizenship clause:

This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.

Senator Lyman Trumbull, a staunch abolitionist who drafted the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which presaged the 14th Amendment, also understood “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to mean “not owing allegiance to anybody else and being subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States.”

These policies were explicitly crafted to normalize the citizenship of newly freed slaves following the Civil War, and everyone at the time knew it. One can only imagine how these statesmen would react if they could see their crowning constitutional achievement perverted to justify anyone in the world illegally entering our country, having a child, and automatically conferring American citizenship upon their new family member.

It bothers me that “Meet the Press,” long revered as America’s leading Sunday political news program, has become so one-sided. In this instance, the program seems to try to render a debatable matter beyond debate by selectively omitting key words from the Constitution, making it appear incorrectly that the 14th Amendment proscribes any and all restrictions on birthright citizenship.

We should revisit the question of birthright citizenship, along with many other corruptions of our national security and sovereignty, if we are to preserve America for those who are already citizens.

Editor’s note: This article has been adapted from a thread on X (formerly Twitter).