Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Supreme Court and justice. I'm Nina Totenberg, and I cover the Supreme Court.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today on the show, a major court case over the future of citizenship in this country.

For more than two hours, the Supreme Court discussed if all babies born in the United States,

regardless of their parents' status, are automatically granted citizenship.

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer began by laying out the thrust of his argument.

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court, the citizenship clause was adopted just after

the Civil War to grant citizenship to the newly freed slaves and their children, whose

allegiance to the United States had been established by generations of domicile here.

It did not grant citizenship to the children of temporary visitors or illegal aliens

who have no such allegiance. Throughout the arguments, though, Justice has returned to that

concept again and again with skepticism. Justice Neil Gorsuch pressed the matter in exchange with Sauer.

Whose domicile matters? I mean, it's not the child, obviously. It's the parents you'd have us focus on. And, you know, what if, is it the husband? Is it the wife? What if they're unmarried? Who's domicile? Well, in the executive order, it draws a distinction between the mother and the father. That's really the mother's domicile. I think that would matter. Well, but 1868 matters, you're telling us. So what's the answer? The 1868 sources talk about parental. I'm not aware of them drawing a distinction between mother or father, but they say the domicile of the child follows the domicile of the parent. In her argument, Cecilia Wong, the national legal director for the ACLU, said the Trump administration's interpretation would up it into the Constitution and the lives of millions of people.

The executive order fails on all those counts. Swaths of American laws would be rendered senseless.

Thousands of American babies will immediately lose their citizenship.

And if you credit the government's theory, the citizenship of millions of Americans,

past, present and future, could be called into question.

All of this tells us the government's theory is wrong.

One of the biggest moments came when Chief Justice John Roberts directly rebuked the government's argument.

We're in a new world now, as Justice Alito pointed out to, where eight billion people are

one plane right away from having a child as a U.S. citizen.

Well, it's a new world. It's the same Constitution.

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