This week, the Supreme Court began hearing arguments in the case that could restrict birthright citizenship from children born to parents who are in America illegally or temporarily.

Trump's lawyers have hitched their argument to the technical meaning of four

words in the very first line of the 14th Amendment, which is known as the Citizenship Clause.

But this is really a fight over something much bigger. It's a fight over what kind of America

we want to live in. Because to understand why the 14th Amendment of all amendments has become a target for MAGA Republicans,

you have to understand just how transformational it was for American democracy.

There's a line that runs through American history, a before and an after,

a moment when one America ended and a different, more democratic America began. And that line is the

14th Amendment. Ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War, the 14th Amendment did something

that no document in American history had ever done before. It declared that everyone born on this soil is a citizen. Not the right kind of people,

not just those whose parents were already here, not people who looked a certain way or came from a

certain place. Everyone, quote, all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject

to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof

are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside, end quote.

It's not a complicated amendment.

For most of us, that sounds like obvious settled law.

But for Trump and the broader MAGA movement, everything that came after the 14th Amendment

is a mistake. And now this administration is standing before the Supreme Court of the United States

trying to reverse that course. The government's case hangs on this. They are arguing that people

here illegally or temporarily are not, quote, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

And therefore, their U.S.-born children are not entitled to citizenship.

But to understand what's really happening in that courtroom, you have to understand what the

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