I don’t particularly love everything about the United States and its government. But there are a few things that I do love about it. One of those things is the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, particularly Section 1 of the Amendment. It’s great. What it says, basically, is that everyone born in the United States is a citizen and that all citizens have a right to “equal protection under the laws.”
That equal protection part is especially important, as most civil rights cases that have won people their rights have been based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Brown v. Board of Education—which is the case that struck down segregation in schools and found that the doctrine of “separate but equal” was inherently unequal and violated the Equal Protection Clause—was based on the Fourteenth Amendment. Obergefell v. Hodges—the case that legalized same-gender marriage in the United States—was based on the Fourteenth Amendment. Yes, the Fourteenth Amendment is a very good amendment.
Donald Trump should read it sometime.
According to AP, on conservative social media site Truth Social on Saturday, Donald Trump threatened to take away citizenship from his longtime rival Rosie O’Donnell, an openly lesbian woman who recently moved to Ireland to protect her 12-year-old nonbinary child after Trump’s election to the presidency again in 2024. Ireland has a program that allows people who have a parent or grandparent born in Ireland to claim citizenship, which O’Donnell has, giving her dual citizenship in the U.S. and Ireland.
Naturally, as noted above, the Fourteenth Amendment clearly states that the government (and, therefore, Trump) cannot take citizenship away from anyone born in the United States. Rosie O’Donnell was born in New York, which is in the United States, and therefore is a citizen, period. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” the amendment reads. Which means that the President of the United States, the so-called “leader of the free world,” is publicly threatening to do something he is expressly forbidden to do by the Constitution. I know we’re all beyond being surprised by anything crazy that Donald Trump does, but come on, this is a pretty flagrant thing that we need to call out. Otherwise, what rule of law do we have?
On Trump’s first day in office, he issued an executive order declaring that the Fourteenth Amendment does not grant birthright citizenship to people born in the United States whose parents were not citizens at the time of their birth, an argument that courts keep rejecting. O’Donnell’s father was an Irish immigrant, but there’s nothing out there claiming that her mother was as well. So it doesn’t seem like Trump’s executive order, which has been blocked anyway, applies here.
Some people online are calling out major news outlets for underplaying the importance of this. And, frankly, I have to agree. We seem to be entering a phase of the United States where the rule of law doesn’t apply anymore if Trump decides it doesn’t. Even when courts tell him that he can’t do something, he continues to do it anyway. This is setting a dangerous precedent and leaves us in a place where we have to wonder what the future is for the rule of law and the Constitution in this country. If Trump can do what he wants, then the experiment we call America is over.
