Regime Revives White Supremacist Argument to Erase Birthright Citizenship – The Tuesday AM Quickie (3/31/26)
Just saw the film Palestine ‘36, about the Arab Revolt and Palestinian workers’ six-month general strike, the longest general strike in modern history. Recommend. - Whitney
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3/31: Sam and Emma are in the studio today for a classic News Day Tuesday.
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Today you’ll read about Trump’s ongoing effort to relitigate Reconstruction, Israel’s new death penalty law only for Palestinians, and just how much data centers raise the temperature of surrounding areas. It’s a lot.
THE BIG NEWS
Regime Revives White Supremacist Argument to Erase Birthright Citizenship
A case heading to Trump’s conservative Supreme Court tomorrow could redefine who qualifies as an American. The regime is arguing that the 14th Amendment “does not apply to people in the country illegally or on temporary visas,” the Washington Post reported. “If the high court agrees, and reverses the long-held interpretation, it could render hundreds of thousands of children born to immigrant parents stateless.”
The case focuses on the amendment’s Citizenship Clause, which grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Trump and his fellow white supremacists want it gone. To support their argument, they’ve turned to the racist “logic” of Confederate officer and lawyer Alexander Porter Morse, who argued in 1896 that segregation should be legal and who tried, with two other anti-Black, anti-Chinese bigots, to end birthright citizenship. The regime cites Morse in its Supreme Court brief “to argue the disputed idea that commentators in the 19th century widely agreed that the Constitution ‘exclude[s] the children of foreigners transiently within the United States’ from qualifying for citizenship.”
In other words, Trump wants a Civil War do-over and return the United States to its blood-soaked, genocidal slaver genesis. As Lucy Salyer, a University of New Hampshire history professor who has written about Morse, put it: “If you know the history and the broader context of what they were trying to achieve, it does ring alarm bells.”