August 7, 2025
Birthright Citizen: The Little Conjunction That Explains Everything
By Ted Noel
I have been getting just enough email about “birthright citizenship” to suggest that there are some key misunderstandings about the concept and the implications of the Fourteenth Amendment to make one more exploration of the idea worthwhile. So as your resident “splainer,” I’ll try to ‘splain it for you.
The Fourteenth Amendment was adopted on July 9, 1868. It was the final product of a process that Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull began in 1866. His Civil Rights Act of 1866 stated that
“all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power…are hereby declared citizens of the United States…”
President Andrew Johnson didn’t like the bill, so he vetoed it, but Congress overrode his veto. The Fourteenth Amendment changed the language very slightly to “born or naturalized in the United States
and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” but it kept that all-important conjunction, which I’ve highlighted.
That three-letter word means that there are
two (another three-letter word) conditions that have to be met. They aren’t the same thing. That three-letter conjunction is the source of all the legal arguments. So that you can clearly understand it, let’s look at a unanimous Second Amendment decision called Caetano v. Massachusetts.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/08/birthright_citizen_the_little_conjunction_that_explains_everything.html
