Eric Foner is the leading historian of the post-Civil War era known as Reconstruction. In those years the Union government and the Republican party sought to implement the emancipation of the slaves and create a new order consistent with the Declaration of Independence. The principal means of this the 13th (emancipation), 14th (equal protection and national citizenship) and 15th (voting rights) Amendments were betrayed by the Supreme Court and the Democrat "redeemer" state governments which stripped African Americans of voting rights, and implemented the system of legal discrimination known as Jim Crow. - gwc
Opinion | Donald Trump’s Unconstitutional Dreams - The New York Times
by Eric Foner
In an interview with the news program “Axios on HBO,” President Trump announced that he plans to issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship, the principle that everyone born in the United States, with a handful of exceptions, is automatically a citizen of the United States.
“It was always told to me,” the president declared, “that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t.”
In fact, such an order would undoubtedly be unconstitutional. It would also violate a deeply rooted American idea — that anybody, regardless of race, religion, national origin, or the legal status of one’s parents, can be a loyal citizen of this country.
Birthright citizenship is established by the Civil Rights Act of 1866, still on the books today, and by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified two years later. The only exceptions, in the words of the amendment, are persons not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Members of Congress at the time made clear that this wording applied only to Native Americans living on reservations — then considered members of their own tribal sovereignties, not the nation — and American-born children of foreign diplomats. (Congress made all Native Americans citizens in 1924.)
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