re: #85 Big Beautiful Door

It is a prevalent rightwing talking point: the 14th Amendment was only meant to grant citizenship to freed slaves.

Strike the ‘only’ and this actually becomes reasonable.

Birthright citizenship pretty much was the only way to grant citizenship to freed slaves, and any language broad enough to do that job would also give citizenship to children born in the US, independent of their parents’ legal status.

The reason birthright citizenship had to be used for freed slaves is that the only other way to define citizenship is by the status of the parents, which obviously wouldn’t work.