United States
A stroke of the pen is not enough to end America’s birth right citizenship laws. Donald Trump has so many more political and legal mountains to climb before his presidential decree can take effect.
First there is the law. Already 24 Democratic states have launched lawsuits opposing Trump’s sudden end to birth right citizenship.
They are on firm ground. The Fourteenth Amendment of the US constitution says: “All persons born…in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
Trump claims that birth right citizenship has never challenged in the courts. That is wrong. In the 19th century, fear of the “Yellow Wave” led to the exclusion in 1882 of Chinese immigrants from American shores. In 1898 American-born Wong Kim Ark visited his parents in China. When he returned to America he was refused entry.
Wong’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court. He won. There have been no further challenges in the courts.
Far-right Republican congressmen have since worked to keep the issue alive but their efforts have failed to move beyond the committee stage. Their argument is that those who drafted the 14th Amendment meant to write allegiance rather than jurisdiction. Furthermore that children born in the US of foreign parents are subject to the political allegiance (and jurisdiction) of the country of their parents.
The fact is, however, that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment wrote what they wrote. We can’t go back and ask them if they meant what they wrote.
So, it would appear, that the legal route is blocked. Although it may not be. There is 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court and a third of the court owe their seats on the bench to Donald Trump.
India
India has a severe climate change problem. For a start it is caught between the competing priorities of development, the world’s largest population and a warming planet.
Its economy needs to grow to maintain its population which in 2023 overtook China as the world’s largest.
The easiest way to do that is to continue to rely on antiquated coal-fired power stations which have made India the world’s third worst emitter of Co2 after China and the US.
At the same time, the rapidly warming surface of the world is having an outsized impact on the subcontinent. The country is not only poorer than most, it is also hotter. July to October of 2024 in India saw the highest recorded minimum temperatures since 1901. This in turn led to cyclones and floods as well as droughts.
India’s green technology sector is working overtime to minimise the damage. In the financial year ending March 2025 it will add 35 gigawatts of solar and wind energy to the national power grid. That is roughly enough to power 10 million homes. The plan is to add 500 gigawatts of renewable energy by the end of 2030. The problem is that there are an estimated 250 million homes.
This means that the country is unlikely to reach its target of net zero emissions until 2070. Therefore it must find way to adapt and minimise damage until then.
One adaptive tool is the application of coping mechanisms. More than 100 Indian cities, districts and states have drawn up “heat action plans,” which involve planting trees, opening water kiosks in public spaces and more naturally ventilated buildings with courtyards and fans.
Of at least equal concern is the growing scarcity of water. India has 18 percent of the world’s population but only 4 percent of its fresh water. Last March India’s tech hub of Bangalore nearly ran out of water.
If there is not enough to drink, there is even less to irrigate crops. This has been alleviated somewhat by using recycled waste water which is unfit for human consumption but fine for plants. To Indians it is becoming clear that climate change is here to stay. Political will is lacking, economic pressures are increasing and humans must learn to adapt as well as reduce carbon emissions.
Venezuela
Donald Trump was not the only American president sworn in this month. Further south Nicolas Maduro started his third term in office. Each administration has been more controversial than the previous one.
Maduro’s inauguration was held in the parliament building ten days before Trump took the oath of office in the Rotunda of the US Capitol. It marked the start of his third term.
Maduro’s first presidential tenure started in March 2013 when his mentor Hugo Chavez unexpectedly died just two months into his fourth term. Chavez was well on his way to becoming the textbook left-wing South American dictator when Maduro picked up the baton. He has been running with it ever since.
His election in 2019 was a total sham. Ditto for 2024. It is almost universally accepted that the real winner of the most recent poll was 75-year-old Edmundo Gonzalez who in turn was acting as a stalking horse for opposition leader Marina Corina Machado whom Maduro banned from running for office. Gonzalez is in exile in Spain and Machado is in hiding somewhere in Venezuela. Both fear for their lives.
Maduro, however, is a past master of ignoring international and domestic public opinion and declaring that black is white and that the Venezuelan people love him. After rigged elections in 2018 the National Assembly declared his election invalid and voted Juan Guaido acting president in 2019. Maduro ignored parliament. Guaido called for mass protests. They quickly fizzled out when Maduro ordered the army onto the streets to suppress them.
In fact, the generals are the real power in Venezuela. They support Maduro because he lavishes them with praise, power and lucrative business contracts. Almost everyone else opposes him, even the lower and middle ranks of the military. In fact, roughly ten percent of Venezuela’s political prisoners are middle-ranking army officers.
Meanwhile the fate of everyday Venezuelans shifts from bad to worse under the staggering weight of economic mismanagement and international sanctions. Massive oil deposits made Venezuela a prosperous country before Hugo Chavez came to power. Per capita income was the equivalent of $8,000 compared to today’s figure of $2,300. Official inflation statistics are currently running at 48 percent—relatively good compared to the 1,700,000 percent a few years ago.
Ukraine
So, what is Trump’s plan for Ukraine? For a start he appears to have abandoned his plan to end the war in 24 hours. The new time is 100 days, according to William Kellogg, Trump’s 80-year-old envoy for the Ukraine War.
Both sides have made noises about a willingness to end the fighting. But it remains to be seen that if those noises will be matched with a political will.
The man tasked with trying to bring Volodomyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table is 80-year-old retired general William Kellogg. He has been a Trump supporter since 2016 and was national security adviser to vice president Mike Pence.
Kellogg played a key pro-Trump role in the president’s first impeachment and US-Ukrainian relations. A major part of the impeachment was the assertion that Trump telephoned Zelensky and threatened to withhold US military aid unless he provided damaging information about the Biden family. Kellogg testified that there was “nothing untoward” in the conversation between Trump and Zelensky.
Trump does not forget. He is thus more likely to listen than not listen to General Kellogg’s advice. At the same time, Trump, has one clear objective—no more fighting.
So far that advice appears to be to wave the carrot and stick at both sides and aim for a long-term ceasefire rather than a wholesale peace agreement. The bones of this agreement would be that the frontline is frozen but that Ukraine continues to lay claim to Crimea and the Donbas Region and the fighting stops.
If Zelensky rejects this then Trump will reduce or end US military aid to Ukraine. If Russia rejects the proposal then Trump will increase US military aid and impose additional sanctions on Russia.
The problem is that Putin believes he is winning. He wants more. He wants international recognition for the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas Region, including land not occupied by Russian troops. He also wants the Zelensky government removed from office; a pro-Russian government installed in its place and guarantees that Ukraine not join either the EU or NATO.
That would turn Ukraine into a Russian satellite and spell victory for Putin.
* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and author of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “America Made in Britain".
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14 Comments
Tom, the Birthright issue needs to make its way to the SC so we can finally see, clear as day, whether the court is a court of law or a court of politics.
Most of Trump’s appointees, and the Republican appointees before him, have espoused the theory of Originalism and Textualism made so famous by Antonin Scalia. That says you have to look at the WORDS of the constitution and the law at the time it was written, not try and pry the meaning behind it or apply today’s standards.
Using that theory it should be a clearly unanimous decision that Trump’s decree is unlawful based on the text of the constitution. It will be interesting to see if any of the Originalists on the court wriggle and squirm to find a way out of their long held and publicly spoken legal theories.
Tom, you write: ‘Of at least equal concern is the growing scarcity of water. India has 18 percent of the world’s population but only 4 percent of its fresh water. Last March India’s tech hub of Bangalore nearly ran out of water.’
Hitchhiking to India in 1962 taught me about ‘sky water’, Asia’s capture of ever drop into the house tank. I am a teetotaller; water is my life blood. In 1971, I built my little house in Corfu with a well and a tank. Last summer the island ran out of water, tourist couldn’t have a shower after their day on the beach, tankers brought water from the mainland mountains. Corfu introduced a State of Emergency: the reservoirs were dry; bore holes were drilled across the island; de-salination plants were planned. Then the storm came: two inches of water in my pool in one hour; it flooded Corfu Town and was carried to the sea as the ground was baked by summer heat.
Demand is increasing: more tourists; AI datacentres to be cooled; Spain and other Mediterranean counties in drought; a world heating up.
And now, four years of Trump who does not believe in the Climate Crisis.
@Daniel: The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution gives citizenship to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof“. It’s somewhat open to interpretation what ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ means: That was the legal point of contention when the issue first came to the Supreme Court in 1898 in the case of Wong Kim Ark. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that even an Originalist could decide that text does not cover children of illegal immigrants (who are subject to the jurisdiction of another country and who are living in the US contrary to US laws). I don’t think that question was explicitly tested in 1898.
We have only to look at the Shamina Begun case https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2n8xv61x3o to see how this could be interpreted by a compliant US Supreme Court. Trump has already declared a national emergency at the US border with Mexico. Emergency powers allow for draconian policies to be implemented on the grounds of national security interests while constitutional legal arguments wind their way to the US Supreme court.
The Observer view on Russian aggression the west risks a far worse conflict if it fails Ukraine now
“…it is vital that Zelenskyy’s call to arms, to attain peace through strength, must be heard and acted upon. Starmer was right, during recent visits to Ukraine and Poland, to urge allies to “double down” on support for Kyiv to achieve “peace on Ukraine’s terms”. Mark Rutte, the Nato chief, is right to urge increases in national defence budgets. And Zelenskyy is right to urge Europe as a whole to wake up to the full extent of the Russian threat, step up to its global responsibilities – and be prepared, for example, to send tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine to enforce a ceasefire and deter renewed aggression. Even Trump may slowly be realising that there will be no peace anywhere if Putin wins.”
This really does feel like an early 1939 moment between Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland with the US in isolation mode and European countries scrambling to counter an onslaught of hybrid warfare.
How does Ukraine get to a position where their demands are met in regards to regaining lost territory. It’s three years since the much heralded spring offensive, and since then it’s reached stalemate with Ukrainian forces just about holding a line at huge costs. Any cessation of hostilities, would eventually be lines drawn and boundaries rewritten.
As Tom writes “The bones of this [Trumps] agreement would be that the frontline is frozen but that Ukraine continues to lay claim to Crimea and the Donbas Region and the fighting stops.”
Trump seems to believe that he can, in cooperation with Saudi Arabia and other gulf states, bring the price oof oil down to $45 a barrel by a massive expansion of oil production with ihis “drill baby drill” slogan. That is also how he would plan to offset increased consumer prices from tariffs and fill the hole left by tax cuts for the wealthy.
It is suggestedc that oil at $45 a barrel would cripple Russian export earnings and their ability to continue financing the war economy. It may just be bluster to avoid having to take responsibility for cutting funding to Ukraine and leaving them to manage from their own resources and European aid but this is what Kellogg is saying is the plan.
@Simon it’s true that it wasn’t tested directly, but the holding was: “ that under the Fourteenth Amendment, a man born within the United States to Chinese citizens who have a permanent domicile and residence in the United States and are carrying out business in the United States—and whose parents were not employed in a diplomatic or other official capacity by a foreign power—was a citizen of the United States.” A permanent domicile doesn’t make a person a US citizenship, they still have to apply for it and go through the process. So in theory, the same holding could apply to the children of immigrants who haven’t gone through the legal process to remain. But I still think an Originalist/Textualist would struggle because the framer of the amendment – John Armor Bingham – said two years before its passing that it was designed to solidify the Civil Rights Act and grant citizenship to the children of foreign nationals where the child was born in the US. Originalists, by their own proclamations, don’t go looking for “what if” this and “but what about” that, so they’d have to go off Bingham’s words. But hopefully we’ll see!
There is much talk about ‘a compliant supreme court’. Having studied the US constitution and the various amendments and interpretations as part of an A level course, I think (and hope) that compliance will not extend to interpreting the constitution. It’s one thing to get compliance on social and medical issues, but the constitution is largely written in unambiguous language and the members of the supreme court, for all that they were appointed by Trump are first and foremost long standing expert judges and will value that in making any interpretations of the constitution.
As to getting amendments to the constitution, that will be virtually impossible, unless there were to be political consensus, which won’t happen on these issues. First, any amendment has to achieve a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress. Them 3/4 of the US states have also to agree any amendment. I see that some congressman has introduced a constitutional amendment to allow Trump to run for a 3rd term. That has even less chance than a snowflake in hell from passing.
Just a quick arithmetical comment on Tom’s India article
Its population is 1.429 billion, so if it has 250 million homes, that would men 57 people per home
@Ian
1,429m / 250m =5.716
Remember the world tends to use 1B = 1,000M.
@Roland: Only the English-speaking world. Mainland Europe uniformly uses the long scale, where 1B = 1,000,000M
Those who support the idea of removing the birth right citizenship laws call the offspring of immigrants “anchor babies”. The implication being that if they have a child who is now a USA citizen, and the family should not be broken up they would be allowed to stay.
Sorry to be pedantic but your 6th paragraph regarding India is incorrect. You start the 2nd sentance with the word “therefore”. This implies that not reaching the climate goals will result in it having to implement adaptation measures. The goals in themselves are an arbitary indicator of India’s success in combatting climate change. The non achievement of them does not cause anything except political embarrassment.