Senate confronts the question of birthright citizenship
Witnesses came in for and against. Who made the better case?
Wendi Strauch Mahoney | March 17, 2026
At the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution’s March 10 hearing, “Protecting American Citizenship: Birthright Citizenship for Illegal Aliens and Tourists,” senators and witnesses confronted the fundamental question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause has been stretched beyond its meaning. Attorney Charles J. Cooper, Professor Ilan Wurman, and author and Government Accountability Institute president Peter Schweizer argued that current doctrine is too broad. Professor Amanda Frost and Marine veteran Alejandro Barranco defended birthright citizenship as both constitutionally settled and central to the American civic tradition.
Cooper offered legal arguments for restriction, arguing that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means “full and complete” jurisdiction, “requiring a permanent reciprocal political bond between the parents of the new citizen and the United States.” He added that a “reciprocal bond” means “an enduring allegiance,” reserved for those “who have made this country their lawful and permanent home.” It does not apply to children of parents who are here temporarily, even if they are lawful visitors to the United States. As such, Cooper argued, it follows that children of illegal aliens “are excluded as well.” He said that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment modeled the citizenship clause after the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which he argued “unequivocally excluded from birthright citizenship children of aliens here temporarily and of aliens who have deliberately entered the country illegally.”
Wurman explained that the original common-law and Fourteenth Amendment understanding of birthright citizenship turned not on mere birthplace, but on whether the child’s parents were lawfully under the sovereign’s protection and thus subject to its full jurisdiction — an argument that would exclude at least the children of illegal aliens, and possibly some children of temporary visitors, from automatic citizenship at birth.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/03/senate_confronts_the_question_of_birthright_citizenship.html
