President Donald Trump lost his Supreme Court bid to restrict birthright citizenship through executive order, but one of his own appointees may have handed Republicans a blueprint for pursuing much of the same goal through Congress.Voting with the 6-3 majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed that Executive Order 14160, which restricts automatic citizenship to people born to U.S.citizens or permanent residents, couldn't take effect.
But in a concurring opinion, he also pointed to a different path forward.Kavanaugh argued the Court should have resolved the case under federal law rather than the Constitution, laying out a potential legislative path for Congress to pursue changes to birthright citizenship.Congress first wrote the Fourteenth Amendment's birthright citizenship language into federal law in 1940, then carried it over into the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.Because Congress adopted that language after the Supreme Court's landmark 1898 decision in United States v.
Wong Kim Ark, which established that most people born in the United States automatically become U.S.citizens, Kavanaugh said lawmakers effectively incorporated the Court's interpretation into federal statute.TRUMP SUFFERS MAJOR SUPREME COURT DEFEAT AS JUSTICES UPHOLD BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIPWASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 27: Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh speaks at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, on Capitol Hill September 27, 2018 in Washington, DC.
A professor at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, Ford has accused Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her during a party in 1982 when they were high school students in suburban Maryland.(Photo By Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images) (Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images)Kavanaugh said Trump couldn't use an executive order to change a ...