One of the worries of the Court is that this order could be retroactive. Native Americans were not citizens until the earlier half of the 20th century. Considering the plaintiffs kept bringing up Wong Kim Ark, it sounded like the Trump admin wanted the court to vacate a ruling from 1898, which could theoretically allow them to retroactively strip citizenship from people already granted it, perhaps even posthumously (meaning multiple generations of people would suddenly not be citizens).
Wong Kim Ark was itself a baffling decision imho. I read through it once. It seemed to me that it should have been 1 sentence, “Constitution says citizen, therefore he legally is one”. Instead it went through dozens of pages of nuanced and somewhat precarious reasoning to reach the same conclusion.
That the current SCOTUS took this case at all made it sound like they were inclined to overturn Wong Kim Ark, and decide that the Constitution really didn’t mean what it said.
One of the worries of the Court is that this order could be retroactive. Native Americans were not citizens until the earlier half of the 20th century. Considering the plaintiffs kept bringing up Wong Kim Ark, it sounded like the Trump admin wanted the court to vacate a ruling from 1898, which could theoretically allow them to retroactively strip citizenship from people already granted it, perhaps even posthumously (meaning multiple generations of people would suddenly not be citizens).
Wong Kim Ark was itself a baffling decision imho. I read through it once. It seemed to me that it should have been 1 sentence, “Constitution says citizen, therefore he legally is one”. Instead it went through dozens of pages of nuanced and somewhat precarious reasoning to reach the same conclusion.
That the current SCOTUS took this case at all made it sound like they were inclined to overturn Wong Kim Ark, and decide that the Constitution really didn’t mean what it said.