class, or religion) serves as the cornerstone of that conception of a sovereign “people” welded to the Constitution.695 In October 2018, President Trump was reported to be considering an executive order that would reinterpret the Citizenship Clause to exclude U.S.-born children of non-citizens.696 Lawmakers (and commentators) have advanced similar proposals “since at least the early 1990s.”697 The basis for this view turns on the interpretation of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States in the Citizenship Clause. The argument holds that “jurisdiction” requires “mutual consent” grounded in “undivided allegiance” to the United States. For the consent argument to work, the “allegiance” of the native-born would be discerned by reference to their parents’ allegiance, thus undermining the core premise of American nationhood as a civic community tied to place, and not subject to any higher political authority.698 It is also difficult to fathom how such a construction of American citizenship would tolerate dual nationality, another “unsettled” area of nationality law in the United States (examined earlier in Chapter I, History and Context). The effort to reinterpret the Citizenship Clause is widely recognized as a minority viewpoint.699 Citizenship by birth on the territory in the United States traces its true origin not to the laws of England but to the momentous task of forging a functioning political community out of the ashes of the Civil War and the reality of abject inequality among its people. Some call it the country’s “second founding.” “It is one of the most promising and dangerous paradoxes of the American Republic that it dared to realize equality on the basis of the most unequal population in the world,” observed Hannah Arendt.700 For free black Americans before the war, an inclusive citizenship promised not only all-important “privileges and immunities,” but also freedom from the threat of collective expulsion and exile.701 These are the indelible social and historical origins of America’s Citizenship Clause. It is a human rights instrument, first and foremost, even if it is also an expression of the state’s sovereign power to establish the terms of membership in any political community.702 The Citizenship Clause “was meant as a direct rebuke to the infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford.”703 As noted above, in Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court considered the application of the Citizenship Clause to children of immigrants and held that, apart from children of diplomats and other foreign dignitaries with immunity, all persons born in the United States are citizens regardless of their parents’ migration status.704 Nearly a century later, in Plyler v. Doe (1982), the court relied on Wong Kim Ark in securing the right of undocumented immigrants to public education under the Equal Protection Clause (which appears just one sentence away from the Citizenship Clause in Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment). The court found: [N]o plausible distinction with respect to the Fourteenth Amendment “jurisdiction” can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.705 IV. Political attacks on citizenship by birth in the united states 155