Donald Trump still isn’t taking “no” for an answer.
Just hours after the Supreme Court rejected his attempt to end birthright citizenship through executive action, Trump was already floating a new plan—one that ignores how the Constitution actually works.
Instead of accepting that the Court shut down his effort to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment, Trump claimed Republicans could simply pass a law through Congress to eliminate birthright citizenship.
“No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!” Trump declared on Truth Social. “Congress should start TODAY to work on ending… Birthright Citizenship.”
There’s one major problem with that idea. It’s not how the Constitution works.
Birthright citizenship isn’t an ordinary federal law that Congress can rewrite whenever it wants. It’s protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, which has guaranteed citizenship to people born in the United States since it was ratified in 1868 following the Civil War. Congress can’t simply pass a statute that overrides the Constitution.
Changing that would require a constitutional amendment—a process intentionally designed to be extraordinarily difficult.
That means securing two-thirds majorities in both the House and Senate before convincing three-fourths of the states to ratify the change. In today’s political climate, that isn’t just unlikely. It’s politically unimaginable.
Trump’s latest proposal isn’t a clever workaround. It’s another attempt to convince supporters that the Constitution says something it doesn’t.
Still fuming over the ruling, he sarcastically congratulated Chinese President Xi Jinping, claiming China had somehow scored a “massive Birthright Citizenship WIN” because America wouldn’t end the constitutional guarantee.
Rather than accepting that defeat, Trump is now suggesting Congress can simply legislate away a constitutional right.
It can’t. And the fact that the president is pretending otherwise says a lot about how little regard he has for constitutional limits when they stand in the way of his agenda.
