Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case, is currently before the Supreme Court, and there is a vast array of amicus briefs, as well as the briefs of the parties. But one key issue has not gotten the attention it deserves: accepting the government's position would undermine the central purpose of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. For that reason alone, the Trump Administration should lose the case, especially from the standpoint of originalism.
Virtually all informed observers agree that the main purpose of the Citizenship Clause was to grant citizenship to newly freed slaves and their descendants, reversing the holding of the Supreme Court's infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, which ruled that Blacks could never be citizens of the United States. Indeed, the Trump administration's Supreme Court brief in Trump v. Barbara says exactly that: "The Clause was adopted to confer citizenship on the newly freed slaves and their children." But all of the administration's arguments for denying birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants and non-citizens present in the US on temporary visas would, if applied consistently, also have denied citizenship to numerous freed slaves and children thereof.
