Birthright Citizenship Ruling: What Trump, Dissenters Say

President Trump isn't dropping his fight over birthright citizenship, even after the Supreme Court ruled against him. In a social media post, Trump called the decision "too bad for our Country" and urged Congress to start work immediately on a legislative workaround, reports the New York Times. "No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!" he wrote. In its ruling Tuesday, the court overturned a Trump executive order that sought to end the policy of bestowing citizenship on children born on American soil. The order violates the 14th Amendment, declared the 6-3 ruling authored by Chief Justice John Roberts.

• Kavanaugh dissent: Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh joined the majority, along with the court's three liberal justices. Kavanaugh, however, dissented from the majority ruling by disagreeing that the order violated the Constitution, per the Washington Post. He agreed it violated federal law, though.
• Thomas vents: Clarence Thomas was in the "no" camp with Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, and Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion joined by Gorsuch. "The Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support," Thomas wrote.
• Alito, too: "This is one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court, and in my judgment, the Court has made a serious mistake," Alito wrote. "As interpreted by the Court today, the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on virtually everyone who happens to be born in this country, including the children of 'birth tourists.'" But a "careful analysis" of the amendment shows it does not do that, he asserted. (The full text of the 1868 amendment is here.)
• Birth tourism: As alluded to by Alito, supporters of Trump's executive order argued that the existing policy encourages "birth tourism," in which pregnant women come to the US for the express purpose of giving birth. "The trouble is that there is scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view," wrote Roberts, per the Wall Street Journal.