This week, Trump attempted to overturn the 14th Amendment with an executive order. The last people to oppose the 14th Amendment so openly? The Confederates.
The 13th Amendment ended slavery. But it quickly became clear that the former Confederates were intent on treating freed slaves as second-class citizens, denying them basic rights. For instance, even former slaves who had lived and worked in the United States for generations were barred from voting because they were deemed "the wrong sort of people." For the confederates, it didn't matter if you were born here if you were born to the wrong kind of woman. Race and ancestry mattered.
In response, the Republicans drafted and passed the 14th Amendment to guarantee birthright citizenship, ensuring that former slaveowners could not deny citizenship to freed slaves by claiming they were "lesser people." One of the most beautiful principles this country has embraced is that you don’t need to prove you were born to “the right people” to be a citizen—you simply have to be born here. The 14th Amendment fundamentally redefined citizenship, basing it on place of birth, not race, ancestry, or property ownership.
The 14th Amendment did even more—for example, it redefined representation in the House by counting all people in a state’s population. But its core principle was the realization of an ideal penned by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence: All men are created equal.
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