Overview
- President Trump’s legal team asked the Supreme Court to adopt an “original meaning” view of the 14th Amendment that would exclude children of temporary visitors and undocumented immigrants from birthright citizenship.
- A forthcoming Georgetown Law Journal Online study by University of Virginia professor Amanda Frost reviewed 584 members of Congress from 1865 to 1871 and identified more than a dozen who might not qualify under Trump’s test, yet none faced citizenship challenges.
- The absence of such challenges is presented as contemporaneous evidence against narrowing the amendment’s citizenship clause, described by Frost as the constitutional “dog that did not bark.”
- The only relevant dispute from the era targeted Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels in 1870 over the nine-year citizenship requirement, and that challenge failed.
- The research aligns with longstanding scholarship that those born in the United States are citizens except for narrow categories such as children of diplomats or enemy forces.