My Little Pony and Birthright Citizenship
I was sitting on the porch watching the last light go orange through the pines, listening to the woods settle into their evening conversation, the cicadas first, then the tree frogs answering them back the way they always do, call and response, ancient and unhurried, unbothered by a single thing happening in Washington D.C. Somewhere out back a rooster crowed at the fading sun. People don’t always know that about roosters, they don’t just crow at dawn. They crow at sunset too, as if they’re arguing with the dark, insisting the day isn’t finished yet.
I had been reading about birthright citizenship all day.
I do not recommend mixing Supreme Court opinions with a Southern evening. One of them is going to win, and it is not going to be the Supreme Court.
But here is the thing about growing up where I grew up, in a family where the television news ran like background music to whatever else was happening, you absorbed things before you had the vocabulary for them. You heard words like citizenship and jurisdiction and amendment coming out of the TV and your child brain did what child brains do. It translated them into something it could actually understand.
I think I was four years old. Somewhere in the1980s. My Little Ponies were holding court under the coffee table, which was their castle, as was right and proper. The news was on. My parents were talking in the kitchen about the headlines of the time. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was a huge news story and birthright citizenship was part of the surrounding conversation.
I thought about this very seriously for a little girl holding court under the coffee table.
And then I asked:
So if I was born in Japan, I would be Japanese?
My parents paused.
And have pretty eyes just like… this?
You can imagine the rest.
The thing is, I still believe the logic of that question. A baby born on Japanese soil to American parents isn’t Japanese. She is American, carried there, born there by geography and timing, belonging by blood and allegiance to something that has nothing to do with which hospital she arrived in.
I believe the same thing works in reverse. A baby born on American soil to parents who are citizens of another country, who owe their allegiance elsewhere, who are here temporarily or illegally or passing through — that baby is not American by virtue of the address on the birth certificate any more than I would be Japanese for having been born in Tokyo.
That’s not really a radical position. That is, as it happens, what the people who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment said they meant.
The amendment was ratified in 1868. Its purpose was specific and documented and ought to be honored on its own terms: to guarantee citizenship to the formerly enslaved people of this country — men, women, and children who had been born on American soil, raised on American soil, who had built this country with their hands and their blood, and who had been told by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that they were not and could never be citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment said: they are. They always were.
That is a beautiful and necessary thing. It deserved to be written into the Constitution. It deserved to be enforced with the full weight of federal authority. It still does.
What it was not, what its own authors said it was not, was a blanket guarantee of citizenship to every person physically present on American soil at the moment of birth, regardless of allegiance, regardless of status, regardless of why they were here or for how long. The 1866 Civil Rights Act, which preceded the amendment and informed its language, stated plainly that citizenship applied to persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power. Not subject to any foreign power. A child born to parents who are citizens of another country, who travel here for the express purpose of giving birth, is subject to a foreign power. Her parents are. And the amendment’s own authors said that mattered.
Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, the principal author of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause, said so on the Senate floor during debate in 1866. His words are in the Congressional record:
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.
The man who wrote the clause said foreigners and aliens were not included. That’s not interpretation. That is the author’s own stated intent, preserved in the primary record.
If you need further proof that the original interpretation was narrower than what courts have since applied, consider this: American Indians were not granted citizenship by the Fourteenth Amendment. They were born on this soil. Their families had been here longer than anyone. And Congress had to pass a separate act — the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 — to make them citizens. If the Fourteenth Amendment meant everyone born here regardless of parentage or allegiance, that act would have been redundant. It was not redundant. It was necessary.
June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to uphold birthright citizenship as currently interpreted, striking down President Trump’s executive order. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority that citizenship is the right to have rights. Three justices — Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch — dissented.
Justice Thomas (whom I consider quite a National Treasure) wrote in dissent that the Court had added to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed slaves but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.
Justice Alito put the question plainly: suppose a person’s only connection to this country is that he was born here to a mother who was present just long enough to give birth and then quickly returned to her native country. Suppose that country is a strategic adversary or enemy of the United States. According to this court, that person is a citizen of the United States.
I’m not here to tell you the Supreme Court was wrong in its application of existing precedent. Precedent is what it is. Wong Kim Ark v. United States in 1898 set the interpretation that has governed birthright citizenship ever since, and courts are bound by it.
What I am here to say is: precedent and original intent are not always the same thing. And that a four year old lying under a coffee table with her ponies in the 1980s understood something the legal system has been arguing about ever since. They should probably stop acting like toddlers having a tantrum every three minutes and serve the citizens of this nation.
There is, however, a door left open in the wreckage of yesterday’s ruling, and it was left there deliberately.
Justice Kavanaugh joined the majority but wrote separately to say something the other five did not. He agreed that Trump’s executive order could not stand, but not because the Constitution forbids what Trump was trying to do. It cannot stand, Kavanaugh said, because it conflicts with a federal statute: 8 U.S.C. § 1401, passed by Congress in 1952, which codifies broad birthright citizenship into law. The Constitution itself, in Kavanaugh’s reading, does not lock this policy permanently in place.
A constitutional provision requires a constitutional amendment to change — a process so difficult it has succeeded only twenty-seven times in more than two hundred years. A federal statute requires a simple majority in the House, a simple majority in the Senate, and a president’s signature. Congress could, if it chose, amend the statute. Kavanaugh said so explicitly. His own words:
The Constitution’s Citizenship Clause may well be ambiguous on this precise question. But Congress resolved that ambiguity by codifying birthright citizenship broadly in 8 U.S.C. §1401(a). The executive order doesn’t violate the Constitution — it violates Congress’s statute. And Congress can change that statute.
President Trump heard him. Within hours of the ruling, Republican senators were already announcing plans to reintroduce legislation, including the exact language of a bill written not by Republicans but by then-Senator Harry Reid in 1993, which defined children born to non-citizen mothers as subject to their mother’s foreign jurisdiction, not America’s. Reid’s bill never failed. It simply expired in committee. It can be reintroduced.
The fight isn’t over. It has simply moved from the executive to the legislative branch, which is, constitutionally speaking, exactly where this argument belongs.
You are not what the ground beneath your feet says you are.
You are who your people are. Where your allegiance lives. What you would defend and what you would grieve.
The tree frogs don’t know any of that. They just sing when the light goes.
And the rooster out back keeps arguing with the dark, insisting the day isn’t finished yet.
Maybe he’s right.