by Sharon Rondeau

(Feb. 25, 2025) — 2:04 p.m. EST – At any moment, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government will convene a hearing titled, “‘Subject to the Jurisdiction Thereof’: Birthright Citizenship and the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The hearing follows President Donald Trump’s executive order, signed his first day in office, halting the practice of awarding U.S. citizenship to any child born within the borders of the United States regardless of parental citizenship or legal status.
The order begins:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1. Purpose. The privilege of United States citizenship is a priceless and profound gift. The Fourteenth Amendment states: “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.” That provision rightly repudiated the Supreme Court of the United States’s shameful decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), which misinterpreted the Constitution as permanently excluding people of African descent from eligibility for United States citizenship solely based on their race.
But the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Consistent with this understanding, the Congress has further specified through legislation that “a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a national and citizen of the United States at birth, 8 U.S.C. 1401, generally mirroring the Fourteenth Amendment’s text.
The committee “will examine the meaning of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and President Trump’s recent Executive Order on birthright citizenship,” the announcement states.
The order drew a firestorm among 18 Democrat-led states, whose attorneys general challenged it in four federal jurisdictions resulting in four injunctions.
The Trump administration is appealing.
The public may watch the proceedings here.

After watching this 2 hour C-Span hearing https://judiciary.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/subject-jurisdiction-thereof-birthright-citizenship-and-fourteenth-0 I can now see similarities between our U.S. Government’s faithfully neglected “natural born Citizen” and today’s “birthwrong-citizenship” (my words):
U.S. allegiance parents versus foreign-allegiance parents inside the USA
U.S. domiciled parents versus non-domiciled parents inside the USA
U.S. assimilated parents versus non-assimilated parents inside the USA
What to do to correct the neglect?
Trump’s EO was meant to eventually go to the courts, that phrase has been badly misinterpreted by so many people. Here’s the key, the State Department explicitly states that those with foreign citizenship are required to obey the laws of all countries to which one holds citizenship, and those countries also have the right to enforce their laws upon those who have their nations citizenship, meaning those with foreign citizenship are subject to that nation’s jurisdiction. This is why if Kamala Harris was automatically conferred the citizenship of her parents at birth, she shouldn’t have been conferred US citizenship and wouldn’t be a US citizen let alone a Natural Born Citizen.
The “constitutional law” experts have tried to spin that the phrase only applied to diplomats which is thoroughly incorrect for when the 14th Amendment was written Indians were excluded because Congress deemed that they were subject to tribal jurisdiction and 99.9% of Indians aren’t diplomats, tribal elders could be deemed to fit that category, but the vast majority don’t. Congress clearly didn’t mean that phrase only applied to diplomats.
Trump’s EO will go to the Supreme Court, and they should vote to uphold it, but they won’t, and one only needs to look at DACA to see why. SCOTUS really doesn’t like taking things away things that the govt gives to people even if it’s illegal and unconstitutional. SCOTUS won’t revoke US Citizenship from millions who have received it even though based on the plain text of both The Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment they shouldn’t have been bestowed it.