by Sharon Rondeau
(Apr. 7, 2026) — In a tweet on April 4, the Maricopa County Republican Committee (MCRC) posted a link to an article by legal scholar Joseph DeMaio summarizing oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court three days earlier on the issue of “birthright citizenship” in Trump, et al v. Barbara, et al.
The tweet was directed to the X accounts of President Donald Trump, the U.S. Supreme Court, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, the Arizona legislature, The Post & Email, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and others.
On January 20, 2025, the newly-sworn-in president signed Executive Order 14160 titled, ” Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” declaring, part:
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.
Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.
The order was immediately challenged and wended its way to the Supreme Court, which as a prelude in the matter last June, declared “nationwide injunctions,” such as those halting the implementation of EO 14160, an overreach and limited federal judges’ rulings to solely the parties involved in the case.
MCRC’s April 4 tweet featured a comment to DeMaio’s article by “Phantom_II_Phixer” on Friday, April 3, in which he/she responded to a comment by user “A1Patriot” submitted earlier that day.
At 3:58 p.m. Friday, A1Patriot wrote:
In what may be a fatal flaw in the federal government’s case, SCOTUS’ ruling may expose what may and can happen when one (in this case, the federal government) erroneously promotes the offensive & insulting premise that—in the context of birthright citizenship—permanent legal residents are to be classified as essentially the same as U.S. citizens.
As good as the federal government’s lawyer presenting the case, is, he, John Sauer, like far too many others, essentially—& erroneously—sees non-citizens “domiciled” in & making the U.S. their “permanent home,” who are “a part of our political community,” as somehow being “aegis or akin to U.S. citizens.”
If it’s obvious the SCOTUS Dred Scott ruling (1857) was wrong—later resolved by the 13th, 14th, & 15th Amendments (1865-70)—why presume the SCOTUS Wong Kim Ark ruling (1898) was right? It was wrong. Alse See Roe v Wade—before (1973) & after (2022). SCOTUS overturned SCOTUS rulings 200+ times.
PS: As bad as the mistake it is for the plaintiff to represent that permanent legal U.S. residents are essentially the same as U.S. citizens, it is good to see the references to Emer de Vattel’s Law of Nations, even though his name is misspelled as “Emerich” in the official plaintiff case docs filed with SCOTUS.
At one point in the hearing, Justice Amy Coney Barrett actually cites Emer de Vattel, although the official SCOTUS transcript spells it “Vitel.”
As longtime P&E readers are aware, “Emer de Vattel,” referenced by DeMaio in his article and scores of others over the years, is the author of the 1758 dissertation, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law acknowledged by the Court as an invaluable source of guidance to the Framers as they built a new nation following American independence.
Indeed, in late February, Yahoo!’s artificial intelligence (AI) tool, “Scout,” described The Law of Nations as “a primary legal authority” and “an actual treatise on international and natural law that the Framers consulted and applied—not merely a modern scholar’s opinion about what the Framers intended.”
In § 212, Vattel wrote as to “Citizens and natives”:
The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its advantages. The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens. As the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights. The society is supposed to desire this, in consequence of what it owes to its own preservation; and it is presumed, as matter of course, that each citizen, on entering into society, reserves to his children the right of becoming members of it. The country of the fathers is therefore that of the children; and these become true citizens merely by their tacit consent. We shall soon see whether, on their coming to the years of discretion, they may renounce their right, and what they owe to the society in which they were born. I say, that, in order to be of the country, it is necessary that a person be born of a father who is a citizen; for, if he is born there of a foreigner, it will be only the place of his birth, and not his country.
A number of constitutional scholars note that Founding Father John Jay, who became the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote his famous July 25, 1787 letter to Constitutional Convention President George Washington urging that convention delegates require the President and Commander-in-Chief be a “natural born Citizen” as opposed to simply a “Citizen” as initially proposed.
Following what appears to be only minimal discussion, the Committee on Postponed Matters agreed on the presidential-eligibility wording now present in Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution:
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
Responses to DeMaio’s April 3 article delved into numerous elements of the “birthright citizenship” question, including the concepts of:
- “natural law”;
- the meaning of “permanently domiciled,” a frequent reference during the April 1 oral argument at the Court;
- recent on-air commentary on the subject by Fox News’s Mark Levin;
- the infusion of “politics” into the Court’s opinion in Wong Kim Ark,” also a key component of the April 1 hearing;
- the issues of “birthright tourism” and children born to illegal aliens on U.S. soil;
- the suggestion that the Court should overturn its decision in Ark;
- and commenters’ view that Solicitor General D. John Sauer, arguing for the Trump administration in favor of abolishing “birthright citizenship” in certain circumstances, emphasized “domicile” erroneously, thereby suggesting that legally-admitted but non-U.S.-naturalized foreigners’ status is the same as that of U.S. citizens when it comes to their children born in the United States.
Phantom_II_Phixer’s reply to A1Patriot reads:
To avoid misunderstanding from me, your second paragraph words are exactly what I have been crowing about for many months now on this website.
Rephrased: Every alien, legal or illegal, standing on the soil of the 50 states or Washington DC are 100% under the full jurisdiction of their foreign country that they vacated until such time that they return to their foreign country or are naturalized as a US citizen through positive immigration law(s).
You are absolutely right by implying that this concept is sorely overlooked by both President Trump and missing from the mouth of Solicitor General D. John Sauer during his oral arguments on April 1, 2026 at the US Supreme Court.
Below Phantom’s comment on X, MCRC posted a tweet to Article III Project founder Mike Davis, who remarked following the April 1 oral argument:
It appears as though the Supreme Court is going to constitutionalize birthright citizenship for Chinese birth tourists.
This means Chinese nationals have their babies in America, return to China with these new American citizens, vote in our elections, and receive our benefits.
And the response reads:
In what may be a fatal flaw in the federal government’s case, that’s what one may get when one erroneously promotes the offensive & insulting premise that—in the context of birthright citizenship—permanent legal residents are to be classified essentially the same as U.S. citizens
