Tribe: Birthright Citizenship Makes America a ‘More Perfect Union’

Harvard Law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe said Friday on CNN’s “OutFront” that birthright citizenship makes the United Staes a “more perfect union.”

Tribe said, “He did not get the theoretical power to erase part of the Constitution. A very important part of the Constitution that we fought a Civil War to establish all persons born in the United States are automatically citizens by virtue of their birth. That’s central to the nation we have become. And no one on the Supreme Court suggested that is not part of the Constitution. The dissenters pointed out that even judges across the ideological spectrum all agreed, all experts agree that what the president did by stripping birthright citizenship from people and basically restoring the world that ours looked like when Dred Scott was decided, what he did was unconstitutional, flagrantly unconstitutional but there’s a catch. Catch me if you can, that’s what Justice Sotomayor and Justice Jackson in an earlier set of cases, said, is this president’s mantra. Basically, if you have the time and resources to sue the Executive Branch and get an order saying that what they are doing is illegal, they can still do it to anybody. But you, one by one, we have to bring these lawsuits. Class actions are a possible alternative.”

He added, “I would ask people to take a step back and ask, what did we fight a Civil War over? It wasn’t only about slavery, though that was the immediate cause, it was about forming a more perfect union. Part of that part that had been the law until Dred Scott upset. It was that everybody born here is a citizen of this country. That’s what makes us unique, in part. No other country, or almost no other country does that. The people who are hurt by this decision, while the courts mull it over, are going to be, in many cases, stateless, because not having been born in the country that their parents came from, they’re not citizens of that country. They’ll lose all kinds of benefits. They will be an underclass that is not America. That is not what we fought for, either a War of Independence or the Civil War, to achieve.”

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