Trump’s executive orders
The sheer numbers and scope of the executive orders Trump has issued are overwhelming. The Trump team has apparently been preparing this for a long time, a sort of executive order wishlist that they now get to fulfill. I’ve only scratched the surface of what appear so far to be the most important of the orders.
Birthright citizenship I dealt with in some depth in this recent post. It was always understood that there would be legal challenges and that it’s possible those challenges will succeed. I actually think they will succeed, not because the law can’t be changed, but because the proper mechanism for the change of an amendment is another amendment. I happen to think Trump’s position on birthright citizenship makes sense and I would support it; it’s just that an EO can’t do that, IMHO.
So to me it’s no surprise whatsoever that this has happened – the first round in the battle:
A federal judge in Seattle blocked, temporarily, President Donald Trump’s attempt to rescind birthright citizenship — the idea spelled out in the Constitution that every person born in the United States is an American citizen.
Senior U.S. District Judge John Coughenour on Thursday was blistering in his criticism of Trump’s action as he granted a temporary restraining order that blocks Trump’s executive order from taking effect nationwide. …
The executive order will remain blocked for at least 14 days while lawsuits in Washington and elsewhere proceed. Washington will next seek a preliminary injunction from Coughenour, which would continue to block the executive order as cases move along.
I assume the issue will probably go to SCOTUS.
Here are some of Trump’s other EOs, this time having to do with the Middle East:
US President Donald Trump revoked a host of what he called “harmful” executive orders and actions under former President Joe Biden that included the sanctioning of Jews living in the West Bank accused of undermining peace and security.
He also halted funding to Unrwa, the agency which distributes aid in Gaza but which Israel has repeatedly accused of employing staff with close links to terror group Hamas. The UN has admitted that nine of the agency’s staff may been involved in the October 7 attack on Israel.
Caroline Glick has done major work on how awful the sanctions on these “settlers” have been; see this, for example.
And Trump states the glaringly obvious and designates the Houthis as a terrorist group again:
In an executive order signed on Wednesday, Trump said that the terrorist group “threaten[s] the security of American civilians and personnel in the Middle East, the safety of our closest regional partners, and the stability of global maritime trade.”
“Supported by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force (IRGC-QF), which arms and trains terrorist organizations worldwide, the Houthis have fired at U.S. Navy warships dozens of times since 2023, endangering American men and women in uniform,” the order noted.
“I assume the issue will probably go to SCOTUS.”
I hope it does and I think that may be part of the plan. I’m also seeing a lot of garment rending from certain sectors over the quantity of the EOs – as if it wasn’t decades of executive overreach that got us here.
Also, Trump needs to declare that pantifa A) exists and B) is terrorist group. Nobody who would balk at that has opinions I give a rat’s ass about.
What strikes me is that these orders didn’t leak before inauguration day, despite the obvious large-scale assistance of lawyers and advisors in writing them.
It’s possible the automatic birthright citizen ban for temporary residents or illegal alien parents may stand. I’m sure the administration knew this would go to the Supreme Court.
Trump Tally update – looks like more sissy sanctions and lots of talk about Iran:
Trump’s EO on birthright citizenship was a deliberate provocation IMO, to get the issue out into the public domain so it can be debated.
Most people simply assume that every country does this, when in fact the USA is almost alone in this regard. If the hicks and hayseeds and yahoos found out about this, why, they might question why WE do it when almost no other country does. Can’t have that now, can we?
Birthright citizenship is a dumb idea, especially when it’s combined with very high levels of legal immigration, high levels of illegal immigration, refugee resettlement, and student visas. There are at minimum 3 million people arriving here, year in year out, and too many of them feel no pressure to assimilate.
Maybe what Trump is angling for is for some kind of deal to be made: birthright citizenship stays, but only if it’s accompanied by a genuine crackdown on illegal immigration, birth tourism, the refugee resettlement racket, the diversity lottery, and chain migration. Maybe Trump tells Schumer that he’d better think long and hard about a deal like that, because with 2/3 of the public in support of deportations for illegals, public opinion on birthright citizenship is also likely to shift in a direction Schumer does not like.
I predict that the birthright citizenship EO will not go to SCOTUS. The law is actually pretty clear that this change can’t be made by EO. They’ll appeal to the 9th circuit, and lose. After that, there’s not much reason for SCOTUS to grant cert. because the 9th Circuit’s decision won’t be wrong.
If Trump would really like to end birthright citizenship, he should get behind a Constitutional amendment and recognize that he’s in for a long slog.
A factual and compelling case for why the Supreme Court should issue a definitive ruling in support of President Trump’s EO on Birthright Citizenship.
“Birthright Citizenship: Game On!”
https://americanmind.org/salvo/birthright-citizenship-game-on/
Bauxite:
He started the ball rolling this way. He’s well aware he might lose in court. Then he almost certainly will change his approach.
Trump has set a new land-speed record for the first few days of a presidency!
Almost certainly better than he would have done, had he won in 2020.
Of course, we’ve now got a deeper hole to dig out of. But we’ve got a solid shot at another two terms with Vance or someone else, which I doubt would have been possible if Trump’s terms had been consecutive.
Nonetheless, Biden’s term was scary. If Biden hadn’t tried to run again and thus been couped, Democrats could well have won after a regular primary and a candidate better than Harris.
It reads like a chapter out of the Old Testament, of a people losing their way, being tested, then finding their back again.
At any rate the 14th Amendment was not understood at the time to require birthright citizenship, because later statutes added Native Americans to those born American citizens, and they didn’t need a Constitutional amendment to enact those statutes, and there would have been no need for those statutes if the 14th Amendment had been understood to say that everyone born in America is a citizen.
And American Samoans are excluded from American citizenship at birth as well, which was done by statute. And when some of them sued, the courts ruled in 2015 and 2019 that the 14th Amendment does not cover them.
Trump should issue an EO to defund the UN and, further, to evict the UN from Turtle Bay.
I don’t think Trump expects that all his executive orders are going to hold up. I think they are intended to say “I am fighting for you”, and the people opposing the implementation of those orders are self-identifying as people who are fighting against us.
The repeal of LBJ’s affirmative action order is thought-provoking. There have been five other Republican Presidents since then, and not one of them, not even St Reagan, repealed that order, though it was in their power to do so. By doing so, Trump is sending the message, “I am doing this when all the others said it could not be done, or promised to and didn’t do it.”
Even his pardons aren’t all “working”–at least one judge in DC has decided she can disregard them because she doesn’t agree with them. And people like this are self-identifying.
The DC judges haven’t said they can disregard the pardons. What they are doing, however, is to dismiss charges, as ordered by the president, but without prejudice, leaving open the possibility of charges being re-filed in some distant future when a vindictive Democrat occupies the White House.
Trump should issue an EO to defund the UN and, further, to evict the UN from Turtle Bay.
IrishOtter49:
Likewise. Baby steps first.
Geoffrey Britain on January 23, 2025 at 5:27 pm
My quick look at Geoffrey’s article suggests that a big part of the problem is that the important case Wong Kim Ark was incorrectly decided. So in theory, if true, we don’t need a new constitutional amendment.
In a way, it’s the Overton Window again, but on a court level.
@Tommy Jay: The argument against birthright citizenship does not hinge on overturning one decision. It based as well on things that happened before and after.
The New York Times today listed these ten Day 1 Trump initiatives: Click on the links for details
Withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, the pact among almost all nations to fight climate change.
Declare a national energy emergency, a first in U.S. history, which could unlock new powers to suspend certain environmental rules or expedite permitting of certain mining projects.
Attempt to reverse Mr. Biden’s ban on offshore drilling for 625 million acres of federal waters.
Begin the repeal of Biden-era regulations on tailpipe pollution from cars and light trucks, which have encouraged automakers to manufacture more electric vehicles.
Roll back energy-efficiency regulations for dishwashers, shower heads and gas stoves.
Open the Alaska wilderness to more oil and gas drilling.
Restart reviews of new export terminals for liquefied natural gas, something the Biden administration had paused.
Halt the leasing of federal waters for offshore wind farms.
Eliminate environmental justice programs across the government, which are aimed at protecting poor communities from excess pollution.
Review all federal regulations that impose an “undue burden” on the development or use of a variety of energy sources, particularly coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, hydropower and biofuels.
To those of you questioning Trump’s EO – what part of the clause ‘and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ don’t you understand?* It does not refer to traffic tickets. It refers to country allegiance and that was made quite clear during debate on the amendment. The Dems disregarding that doesn’t change the intent. Great of Trump to drag this into the light AND put the SC on the spot. I’d like to see them try to tell the American people that the authors of the 14th meant it to apply to illegal entrants and visitors.
Even if Wong was correctly decided, the parents were in the US legally and permanently domiciled here. Also, if just being born in the US was enough there would not have been a need to pass a law giving Indians citizenship. It was needed because they had a prior ‘allegiance’ to their tribe.
*My favorite ‘subject to…’ clarification example; Are illegals drafted? Are they taxed on their world wide income?
Which EO creates the concentration camps and puts the donkeys in them?
From Investor’s Business Daily in 2005: “Becoming a U.S. citizen should require more than your mother successfully sneaking past the U.S. Border Patrol.”
Of course during the last four years, the Border Patrol was impressed into serving as Welcome Wagon, so the “sneaking” part wouldn’t have applied.
Re: AI Executive Orders
The Trump administration is serious about AI to the tune of $100 billion / year. (Cutting-edge AI is ferociously expensive.)
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/ai/ai-american-industry/
I’m favorably impressed. There are blizzards of buzzwords, so who knows? But somehow I read it differently than if Biden were president. Elon is somewhere in the mix. Maybe these guys know what they are doing.
There is some sort of inside baseball drama going on. Musk is critical of the AI project. I enclose the next few quotes for your amusement:
________________________________
“It’s clear he has abused the proximity to the president,” said the Trump ally. “The problem is the president doesn’t have any leverage over him and Elon gives zero fucks.”…
But Trump, when asked by reporters about Musk blasting the deal, said [Tech CEOs] were “putting up the money.”
“The government’s not putting up anything. They’re putting up money. They’re very rich people, so I hope they do,” Trump said. “And, I mean, Elon doesn’t like one of those people.”
Trump said it did not bother him that Musk criticized the deal, saying, “No, it doesn’t. He hates one of the people in the deal.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/23/trump-staff-musk-conflict-00200311
Unsealing the JFK, RFK, and MLK files is a well deserved “take that” slap at our politicized surveillance agencies. Will opening these long sealed files implicate the FBI, CIA, and possibly LBJ as well?
I always thought the 14th amendment was to provide citizenship to the freed slaves because some of the states were playing games with that and claiming they weren’t citizens. It wasn’t ment to provide citizenship to illegal aliens.
Will opening these long sealed files implicate the FBI, CIA, and possibly LBJ as well?
==
No. They may reveal bureaucratic bungling. Dale van Atta of Jack Anderson’s staff once wrote that there was wretched excess in classifying documents and that the modal purpose of declaring something ‘confidential’ was to cover up mistakes.
Techno Fog – Legal and Investigative Analyst – has a free substack post out on Trump’s Birthright Citizenship EO—too long for me but here are snippets:
Ohio Senator Jacob Howard (1862-1871) was one of six U. S. senators to serve on the Joint Commission for Reconstruction – ‘..a congressional committee that studied the conditions in the Southern states after the Civil War. The committee’s work influenced Reconstruction legislation, including the Fourteenth Amendment and the Reconstruction Act of 1867’ wrote:
Article seems to offer both sides of the issue—too long for me tho. Techno Fog’s assessment:
Karmi, Thinks for that. Birthright citizenship doesn’t include aliens.
“This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers”
the problem is this exception, allowed up to 30 million illegals to settle in this country, replacement theory is replacement fact until plyer vs doe, there was no exception for aliens,
on another point, the trump administration went as far as anyone in taking out general suleimani, the top man in the command staff, similar to what israel did after 40 years with the leading lights of hezbollah, like shakr,
Read Techno Fog’s assessment at the end carefully – Birthright Citizenship may be something the SC keeps since its been used for “100+ years”.
John Yoo says:
ChatGPT – has birthright citizenship been broadly accepted Constitutional citizenship rule?:
Will the SC go against the long-time “jus soli (right of the soil)” rule? Techno Fog thinks not…
I would have made the American Samoans citizens from birth, but the actions of Congress and the court do indicate that there are limits to birthright citizenship. Other places have also been under our jurisdiction without persons born there automatically becoming citizens — most notably the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone.
Maybe the problem wasn’t so much that Wong Kim Ark was wrongly decided as that Congress and the courts didn’t keep up with changing circumstances. There were no “illegal aliens” in 1898, except for those who had evaded deportation orders. If you got here and didn’t have a serious disease and weren’t a criminal, an anarchist, or a mental defective, you were let in.
“Birds of passage” weren’t a serious problem back then either. In the days before airplanes nobody flew into the US just to have a child. Most of the children born here who returned with their parents to the the parents’ native land would would have had to make the passage here along with other immigrants and would have had to put up with the same hardships as other immigrants if they wanted to return to the US.
https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1882591796129402967
issues in controversy
For two strong legal analyses on birthright citizenship,
I just read these today:
https://americanmind.org/salvo/birthright-citizenship-game-on/
Birthright Citizenship: Game On! John C. Eastman [7 mins]
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-case-against-birthright-citizenship/
The Case Against Birthright Citizenship Edward J. Erler [15 mins]
two more items in The Federalist that don’t go into as much detail as the two above.
No guarantees on how the current SCOTUS justices will see the current situation and past rulings and related contemporary historical commentary.
Miguel, very interesting comment by Mike Benz.
It is like he has his own personal Panopticon on the IC.