'Sad history': Supreme Court justices' opinions in birthright citizenship case
5. Jackson quotes Frederick Douglass on Sodom and Gomorrah, warns abandoning birthright citizenship would mark return to Dred Scott decision
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, appointed to the bench by former President Joe Biden, issued a concurring opinion that included a reference to Frederick Douglass. “After the Civil War, Fredrick Douglass frequently reflected on the events of the time through the lens of biblical stories,” she wrote. “In one speech, Douglass described how God leveled Sodom and Gomorrah on account of sin, and how, in the aftermath, Abraham stood atop a nearby mountain to survey what remained.”
Jackson asserted that Douglass invoked the imagery to “demand that Americans look down upon their own recent self-destruction, and all but unjustified survival, and remember.”
She contended that efforts to interpret the 14th Amendment as excluding birthright citizenship rely on an “interpretation of the Citizenship Clause that diverges sharply not only from what the text says, but also from the historical record as interpreted by the keepers of ‘the call of remembrance.’”
Jackson’s concurrence also suggested that “the Government and the principal dissent propose a return” to the “core tenet” of “the detestable Dred Scott decision,” which ruled that slaves are not citizens: “Their bottom line is that, for certain people, being born on American soil will not suffice to confer citizenship. It is that odious conclusion that the Citizenship Clause plainly rejects, as the Court explains.”
“The Fourteenth Amendment’s universalist aims should forever be the death knell for this kind of claim — one that seeks to make bloodline the marker of birthright. The America that was reborn from the rubble of the Civil War simply does not countenance that inequitable result,” she concluded. “Thankfully, a majority of the Court remembered this today, and has dutifully preserved the most basic animating principle of our Nation’s founding — that all human beings are created equal— once more.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
