People But Not Citizens Rep Burlison of Missouri submitted House Bill (H.R.) 722 Life At Conception Act in January earlier this year. This bill would make any unborn human a legal person within the US. However, this bill will not change the text of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause. If you read the 14th Amendment, its text is clear. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens”. ...
What does Dobbs say? The general consensus is that Dobbs gave States the right to regulate abortion again. However, this isn’t technically true. The final result of Dobbs was that there is no right to abortion protected by a right to privacy. If there is no right to privacy protecting the right to abortion, then States inferred they had regained regulatory authority. One of the first questions I get regarding fetal personhood and citizenship is how it proves Dobbs wrong or invalidates it. It doesn’t. But that’s a feature, not a bug. ...
“Order. Order.” The gavel banged. Judge Learned Head panned across his courtroom behind spectacles that had grown too small for his round face. He shuffled papers laying before him, then looked at the defendant over the rim of his glasses slipping down his sweaty nose. “Sir, you are being charged with hate speech by the Department of Justice. How do you plead?” There was no jury. The Department had learned its lesson after juries began refusing to find their peers guilty. ...
Let’s imagine a court brief describing the Adriana Smith case from the perspective of the citizen mother and non-citizen fetus. Brief for Petitioners In the matter of Adriana Smith, Deceased, by her family and estate Statement of Facts Adriana Smith, a thirty-year-old registered nurse and United States citizen, was declared brain dead in February 2025 while approximately nine weeks pregnant. Under Georgia’s abortion restrictions, Emory University Hospital maintained Smith on life support for the sole purpose of sustaining her pregnancy. Smith’s family objected to this continuation of medical intervention, but the hospital and State authorities determined that Georgia law required continuation until the fetus reached viability. ...
The court room was packed. The case was historic; deciding if Jefferson’s state-run birthing centers humming with artificial wombs were unconstitutional breaches of the 14th Amendment’s apportionment clause. “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State” Jefferson had leapt head-first into the tech behind artificial wombs as soon as it was viable. It was a gambit to overtake the State of Madison’s population in order to gain more seats in the House of Representatives. The State of Madison was currently suing the State of Jefferson and the case had finally made its way to the Supreme Court. Months of appeals in lower courts had prolonged the case, now in its 2nd year. ...
The Fundamentals The Founders did not think about your rights as something the Government gives you. How they thought about rights is expressed across debates, letters, and even our Declaration of Independence (not a legally binding document, but illuminating none-the-less). Most people today think the Government gives us our rights. It’s probably taught this way in many schools across the US. “The 1st Amendment gives you the right to free speech…” ...
🏛️ The Structural Rights Party No Morals. Just Law. We are not here to tell you what’s right. We are here to tell you what’s allowed. 🔹 What We Believe 1. The Constitution is a Logic Engine It is not a moral document. It is not a list of virtues. It is a structural map of power: who gets to do what, and who doesn’t. We follow it ruthlessly and literally. ...
Abortion, Citizenship, and the Constitution: Why State Abortion Bans May Violate Federal Authority Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), states have regained the authority to regulate or ban abortion. But a novel constitutional argument suggests that in doing so, states may be intruding into a domain reserved exclusively to the federal government: the creation of U.S. citizens. This post outlines a constitutional theory that reframes state-enforced birth as a form of compelled citizenship creation, raising serious questions about federal supremacy, naturalization, and the limits of state power under the U.S. Constitution. ...
If it is true that undocumented residents in the US are not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”, as the 14th Amendment states, then the same legal logic applies to a fetus in the United States. A fetus, by definition, is a stateless undocumented non-citizen resident and would not be subject to the jurisdiction thereof until after it is born, per the Constitution. It’s also worth noting that the basis for Plyler v Doe is that illegal immigrants are still “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”. If undocumented immigrants and fetuses are not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, then the basis for Plyler falls and any legal precedent for equal protection of rights for undocumented people also falls.
I grew up in Texas. I went to Pine Tree Elementary School, Forney Middle School, and graduated high school in Arlington. I remember being taught we are a nation of minorities in school, but conversations today seem to imply an incredible shift from this idea. I understand why, but I would like to dig into this shift while keeping the question “Are we a nation of minorities?” in mind. Separated by “race”, the census reports the current US demographics as such. ...