The Supreme Court Debates Birthright Citizenship, With Trump in the Audience
WSJ Opinion: Potomac Watch
The Wall Street Journal
4.2 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 1 April 2026
⏱️ 24 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | I think the potential of Agenic is to rethink how work gets done overall. It challenges all sorts of traditional orthodoxies around how organizations execute the work at hand. That's Jason Gersatus, CEO of Deloitte U.S., talking about the transformational potential of A.Gentic AI. Join him later to learn why agents are a game changer for businesses across industries. |
| 0:25.6 | From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. The Supreme Court takes up |
| 0:33.4 | President Trump's push to redefine birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment, ending it for |
| 0:39.0 | children whose parents are in the country illegally or temporarily. How did the justices receive that |
| 0:45.0 | argument and what are the implications for immigration law and the Trump administration? |
| 0:50.7 | Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with the Wall Street Journal. We're joined today by my colleague on the journal's |
| 0:56.0 | opinion pages, columnist Matt Contenetti, who writes for the journal's new free expression newsletter. |
| 1:02.5 | A blockbuster case at the Supreme Court on Wednesday morning, more than two hours of oral arguments |
| 1:07.0 | on President Trump's executive order restricting birthright citizenship, which so far |
| 1:12.1 | has been blocked by the lower courts in attendance on Wednesday morning, at least for part of |
| 1:17.2 | this case, none other than President Trump himself. News sources say he was in the front row of |
| 1:22.1 | the public section, and that this is the first time a sitting president has walked down Pennsylvania |
| 1:27.1 | Avenue to see |
| 1:28.0 | the Supreme Court in action. This case is a big one dealing with the text of the 14th Amendment, |
| 1:33.6 | which begins this way. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the |
| 1:40.0 | jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States. That was passed after the Civil War, |
| 1:46.2 | and for close to a century, the consensus view has been that this means babies born in the |
| 1:51.4 | United States, with some small exceptions such as for foreign ambassadors are automatically citizens. |
| 1:57.9 | But the Trump administration now argues that is an old misreading of the 14th Amendment |
| 2:02.3 | and an untenable one now given the amount of illegal immigration in the country. Let's start with a |
| 2:07.6 | couple clips of this argument. First here is Chief Justice John Roberts, tangling with Solicitor General |
| 2:13.3 | John Sauer on the question of birth tourism. Media reported as early as 2015 that based on Chinese media reports, there are 500, 500 birth |
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