On his first day in office — of his second term, not his wasted first term — President Trump signed an executive order ending anchor babies, the practice of treating kids born to illegals on U.S. soil as full-fledged citizens. (Apparently, our Founding Fathers wanted to ensure that poverty-stricken third-worlders who force their way into our country would never have to leave.)

Three federal district court judges promptly issued (you’ll never guess) nationwide injunctions blocking Trump’s order. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on those injunctions any day now.

It may be that the anchor baby lunacy is, as the Manhattan Institute’s Robert Verbruggen says, “a nutty policy we’re probably stuck with.” The exclusionary rule was invented out of whole cloth, too, and it also did great damage to the country. But given a golden opportunity to overturn Miranda 25 years ago, the court passed. Longevity trumped reality.

That is clearly the assumption of smug liberals sneering that Trump’s executive order is “blatantly unconstitutional,” as one injunction-happy judge put it. Their sublime confidence in the permanence of a made-up constitutional right is awe-inspiring.

The way liberals (and Fox News) carry on about the sacred right of illegals to give birth to anchor babies, you’d think the Constitutional Convention consisted of little else than James Madison imploring his fellow delegates to ensure that Mexicans who sneak across the border and drop a baby would be able to start collecting welfare right away.

In fact, the whole “birthright citizenship” scam is based on a wildly expansive interpretation of post-Civil War amendments that were designed to help blacks and former slaves. Birthright citizenship, let alone the anchor baby con, has nothing to do with the original Constitution. And as Trump keeps saying, the post-Civil War amendments, such as the 14th, are all about slavery.

But liberals are masters of taking ideas from the fringes of academia and cementing them onto the Constitution. Crackpot “rights” no one had ever heard of before go from absurdity to inviolable in about five minutes, and suddenly, you’re a kook or a racist if you disagree.

Other rights on the Fringe-to-Constitution conveyor belt:

– The aforementioned Miranda right, requiring courts to throw out criminal confessions simply because the cop screwed up, was invented by Yale Kamisar in the early ‘60s and adopted by the Supreme Court in 1966.

– “Disparate impact,” allowing test results alone to prove race discrimination, was invented by Robert Belton in the '60s and adopted by the Supreme Court in 1971.

– “New Property,” treating welfare as “property,” deserving due process rights, was invented by Yale law professor Charles Reich in 1964 and adopted by the Supreme Court in 1970.

The genesis of anchor babies is even less weighty than these nouveau “rights.” Citing a 1912 book by the register of copyrights Clement L. Bouve, Justice William Brennan slipped the idea of anchor babies into footnote 10 in 1982, but it was never adopted by the court. Brennan’s footnote was mere dicta, i.e. an irrelevant aside, of no legal import.

It’s not as if no one had ever noticed the 14th Amendment until Justice Brennan came along. There’s more than a century of Supreme Court jurisprudence blathering about its meaning. Here’s an abbreviated summary:

– Slaughterhouse Cases, 1873 — i.e. five years after the Civil rights amendments were adopted, so the justices probably had some idea what they were talking about:

“[O]n the most casual examination of the language of these amendments, no one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose found in them all, lying at the foundation of each, and without which none of them would have been even suggested; we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.”

– Ex Parte Virginia, 1879 — six years after the amendments were adopted. Notice: nothing about Mexicans running across our border when they’re eight months pregnant:

“[The 13th and 14th amendments] were primarily designed to give freedom to persons of the African race, prevent their future enslavement, make them citizens, prevent discriminating State legislation against their rights as freemen, and secure to them the ballot. …

”[N]otwithstanding the amendment …, the freedmen were, by legislation in some of the Southern States, subjected to such burdensome disabilities in the acquisition and enjoyment of property, and the pursuit of happiness, as to render their freedom of little value. …

“It thus removed from discussion the question … whether descendants of persons brought to this country and sold as slaves were citizens, within the meaning of the Constitution.”

– Strauder v. West Virginia, 1880, or seven years after the civil rights amendments were added to our Constitution. Again, nothing about pregnant Mexicans or Chinese birth tourists:

“The Fourteenth Amendment … is one of a series of constitutional provisions having a common purpose — namely, securing to a race recently emancipated, a race that, through many generations, had been held in slavery, all the civil rights that the superior race enjoy. The true spirit and meaning of the amendments … cannot be understood without keeping in view the history of the times when they were adopted and the general objects they plainly sought to accomplish.”

And that’s how it stood for more than a century until liberals latched onto Brennan’s non-binding footnote 10 and began browbeating the rest of us about anchor babies as if it were a fundamental principle in our founding document.

In fact, liberals’ reliance on Brennan’s footnote — it’s all they’ve got — proves that they are lying. If the natural, normal reading of the 14th Amendment is that anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen, then why did Brennan have to say it?

No justice ever felt the need to drop a footnote to clarify that soldiers can’t be quartered in private homes in peacetime without the owner’s consent. You know why? Because that’s actually in the Constitution. Manifestly, anchor babies were not part of the accepted understanding of the 14th Amendment. These are the facts, no matter what the women on the Supreme Court have to say.

COPYRIGHT 2025 ANN COULTER