Brion McClanahan addresses birthright citizenship! Watch below. https://t.co/8yWQo5HqKA
— Jefferson Davis (@Jeff_Davis1808) September 4, 2025
What is the original meaning of the Birthright Citizenship? 14 Amendment.
I want to talk about this article that appeared in Law and Liberty, written by Robert Natelson who wrote a book, The Original Constitution: What It Actually Said and Meant, Robert Natelson, 2010. Article title is "Cutting the Gordian Knot of Birthright Citizenship," Robert Natelson, Law & Liberty, September 1, 2025. I believe the 10th Amendment Center was behind that book, published in 2014 Heritage Foundation. He also contributes to the Heritage Foundation's collection on the Constitution. I'm not a big fan of the book. I love the 10th Amendment Center, but I think that book is a mistake in some ways or at least when he talks about originalism what you get is a nationalist book. That's not originalism. But Natelson is an interesting scholar. He is a former constitutional law professor. And he's written this article at Law and Liberty on Birthright citizenship what he calls the Gordian Knot. How do you cut the Gordian Knot? How do we get to the bottom of this particular issue? And this is a really short essay but I think it's pretty hard hitting and to the point. Now, his conclusion ultimately is something that I think essentially Falls in line with the Wong Kim Ark decision. So it's not revolutionary but there are some things that he points out in the piece that I think are important for talking about the 14th Amendment. Now, the 14th Amendment shouldn't even be in the Constitution. I'll just say that from the beginning the 14th Amendment wasn't ratified properly. It was promulgated essentially under a threat, "You're just going to do it." We know that two states rescinded the ratification. It never had the required number of states to ratify the amendment but it was done anyway. The 14th amendment has been used as a hammer as I've said on this show, it's the new constitution. It's been used as a hammer against the states. It's been used to expand Federal power over and over again and in a multitude of areas, right. It's not just one thing or another, and the greatest problem with it, of course, is the incorporation. But you've also got the issue of citizenship, Birthright citizenship. What does that mean? And as Natelson points out in this piece, it's very hard to get an original understanding of this amendment because the evidence, one way or the other, is pretty fragmentary. Just not a whole lot out there. We have the Senate debates, but in terms of the state ratification conventions where they actually exist there's not a whole lot of information. So it's hard to gather original meaning. Natelson is correct about this, but unfortunately, his book he knows what to do his book just falls short in many ways. but anyway Natelson and is correct about this you've got to find original meaning from the ratifying conventions. That's where you're going to get it. This is where people would say, "Well this is what we say it means." Look, originalism is an interpretation based on how the people who ratified the document or the amendment said it would be interpreted. That's what it means. Originalism is not textualism. that's something else. That's a convenient way to expand power because if we're just going to look at the text of the document, well, we can read anything we want into that. I mean it's pretty clear it's not going to restrain power very much. We can come up with all kinds of meanings for this stuff
