Jeff Jacoby eloquently applauds America’s birthright citizenship. A slice:
Abolishing birthright citizenship has been a fixture of the MAGA agenda for years. Trump’s order was designed to force a confrontation, in the hope that at least five justices might overturn a principle of American law regarded as settled for generations. So far, every court to examine the issue has been unequivocal: Presidents have no authority to cancel the citizenship of babies born in the United States. When US District Judge John Coughenour, appointed by President Reagan in 1981, temporarily blocked Trump’s order, he noted that in more than 40 years on the bench, he couldn’t recall another case “where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”
Viewed through the lens of law and history, the case for birthright citizenship is overwhelming. The 14th Amendment opens with an unequivocal declaration: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” That language was written to ensure that virtually anyone born in America would be recognized as American — regardless of race, social standing, or the citizenship of their parents. In an 1898 landmark, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court confirmed that a child born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants was a citizen —even though, under the Chinese Exclusion Act, his parents had been barred from naturalizing.
For 127 years, that precedent has been the rock on which American citizenship policy rests. The only exceptions are babies whose parents are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of US law, namely foreign diplomats, enemy occupiers, or (until 1924) American Indians born on tribal lands. No court has ever accepted the claim that undocumented immigrants or foreign tourists are in that category.
Viewed through the lens of practicality, the case for birthright citizenship is even stronger. Ending it would upend administrative systems that have functioned smoothly for more than a century. State governments issue birth certificates on the assumption that anyone born here is a citizen. Hospitals are not immigration outposts; nurses do not check passports in the delivery room. No centralized federal registry exists to evaluate parents’ legal status, nor could one be created without building an intrusive bureaucracy unlike anything Americans have ever tolerated.
John Yoo predicts that the U.S. Supreme Court will refuse to end birthright citizenship. A slice:
President Trump is entitled to ask the court to overturn Wong Kim Ark. But his administration must persuade the justices to disregard the plain text of the Constitution, the weight of the historical evidence from the time of the 14th Amendment’s ratification and more than 140 years of unbroken government practice and judicial interpretation.
A conservative, originalist Supreme Court is unlikely to reject the traditional American understanding of citizenship held from the time of the Founding through Reconstruction to today.
George Will is right: At least when it comes to war powers, “the Constitution, Congress and norms are cobwebs inadequate for lassoing a presidential locomotive.” A slice:
The lesson is stark. Do not expect the Constitution’s language and structure to impede what decades of presidential practices have made normal: presidents doing what they choose regarding warmaking. The current president has pushed prerogative to absurdity (e.g., defining war as something waged by suspected drug smugglers). In domestic affairs (e.g., a bogus “emergency” justifying tariffs; an executive order amending the 14th Amendment regarding birthright citizenship), the Constitution probably soon will restrain him. Regarding warmaking, however, the Constitution, Congress and norms are cobwebs inadequate for lassoing a presidential locomotive.
So, voters are learning the Constitution’s limited ability to mitigate the consequences of their choices. Neither the language of the law (constitutional or other), nor what are now shadows of norms, can substitute for what is indispensable: an occupant of the presidency whose constitutional conscience causes him or her to distinguish the proper from the merely possible.
Given what the foreword of [Michael] McConnell’s book calls today’s widespread sense of “constitutional degradation,” it might seem quaint to speak of a president’s constitutional conscience. In a few years, however, there can again be presidential self-restraint grounded in personal humility, and in uncodified principles — moral and prudential — requiring decent respect from the decent.
Brian Gross argues persuasively that AI will enhance and leverage, not reduce, human creativity. Two slices:
The Industrial Revolution provoked a comparable dread. As Phil Gramm and Michael Solon recently wrote in these pages, the transition from artisanal production to industrial scale was denounced as “disastrous” and “terrible” even as it increased life expectancy by 25% and lifted standards of living. While some jobs vanished, far more and better jobs appeared. The same thing happened when assembly lines reshaped manufacturing, when robotics entered the factory floor, when computers displaced typewriters, and when the internet placed a printing press on every desk.
The surprise isn’t the anxiety; it’s how reliably we forget its cyclical nature. What critics of AI overlook is the enduring lesson that when tools change, human creativity doesn’t shrink. It expands.
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The deeper truth is that AI is less a rival to human creativity than a multiplier of it—allowing people to spend more time on what technology can’t replicate: judgment, taste, voice, imagination. A language model can imitate Hemingway’s rhythm but not his soul; it can echo Shakespeare’s cadences but not the consciousness that produced them. That AI can, for a moment, fool our ears is a testament to its power as mimicry. That it can’t touch us in the depths of our hearts is why it makes human originality more, not less, precious.
Human creativity isn’t an output function. It lies in choices—what to emphasize, what to omit, what risks to take—the forms of judgment no machine can automate. The challenge for policymakers, then, is to resist the temptation to smother AI with fear. Regulation should focus on establishing clear rules for attribution, data use and ownership so that the rarest element in the creative economy—original human insight—continues to be rewarded.
The Industrial Revolution, the information age, and the early digital economy all show what happens when we let innovation raise the baseline: more opportunity, more discovery, more unexpected flashes of genius. A decade from now, we will likely see today not as the end of human creativity, but as the moment when originality became more valuable.
Eric Boehm corrects yet another of Trump’s countless falsehoods about trade.
Greg Lukianoff decries the 37-day imprisonment of Larry Bushart, of Lexington, Tennessee, for exercising his freedom of speech. A slice:
The government has helped to normalize this repression. Following regulatory threats from the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, ABC briefly suspended “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” after Mr. Kimmel discussed Mr. Kirk’s killing in a monologue. The State Department said it revoked visas held by foreigners who celebrated the assassination online. The Defense Department has reviewed service members’ social media posts about Mr. Kirk; at least a dozen service members have been suspended or relieved of duty because of their comments.
None of this diminishes the horror of Mr. Kirk’s killing. He was shot to death while speaking — apparently, for speaking — to students on a college campus. That violence sent a chilling message.
It’s the same message jailing Mr. Bushart sends: Some ideas are too dangerous to express, and those who give voice to them may lose their lives, their liberty or their livelihood.
The best way to honor Mr. Kirk is not to criminalize speech. It is to ensure that argument remains the alternative to violence. In a just society, people should not fear that they will be killed for their speech. And they should not fear that they will spend five minutes in jail — let alone five weeks — for sharing a nonthreatening meme.
Laura Williams explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining: Modern campus culture fails to prepare graduates for the real world. A slice:
Business leaders complain that recent graduates are unable to work independently, lack motivation and problem-solving abilities, and are easily offended.
“Many recent college graduates may struggle with entering the workforce for the first time as it can be a huge contrast from what they are used to throughout their education journey,” Intelligent’s chief education and career development adviser Huy Nguyen said in the report.
Universities are pouring resources into defining welcoming layouts, lowering barriers, policing microaggressions, and establishing safe spaces. But recent products of that pipeline are paying the price. And lest we forget, most will keep paying it. University graduates owe an average of $28,244 one year after they leave school.
Columnist and podcaster Brad Polumbo was still in college at Amherst when he told Fox News his dorm’s university staff had tried to soothe stressed-out students using “Carebears to Cope” during finals week. He found it condescending, and he’s excelled in a competitive, skills-based career since. Many of the kids who’ve been fired from their first jobs, though, are emerging from a world that coddles them and prioritizes protecting their emotional vulnerability and intellectual comfort. But your comfort zone is a terrible place to build any intellectual muscle.
The Editorial Board of the Washington Post applauds the U.S. Department of Justice’s stepping back from its practice of encouraging racial preferences. A slice:
Progressive identity politics is in retreat after resounding defeats in court and at the ballot box. But if a future Democratic administration wants to recommit to woke politics, it will still have many tools at its disposal. One of them is the legal doctrine of “disparate impact,” which encourages companies, universities and state and local governments to fixate on race and ethnicity to a fault. Attorney General Pam Bondi has chipped away at the doctrine with revised regulatory guidance this week, and other departments can follow her lead.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is aimed at intentional discrimination. The concept of disparate impact stretches that idea to the point of incoherence. It says that different average outcomes among groups — even if there was no intent to discriminate — can still be a civil rights violation. Institutions that receive Justice Department grants have been regulated according to this standard, prohibited from doing anything that has the “effect” of creating disparities among groups.
In fact, those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it long.
The fortune made by Henry Ford was an incidental by-product of the historic expansion of productivity that expanded the lives of millions. Why third parties should imagine themselves entitled to intervene in such processes, to which they contributed nothing, and to preempt the decisions of others – decisions for which the interventionists pay no price if they are wrong – is one of the great mysteries of our time.
Critics insist that their industrial policy prescriptions would be better for the typical worker, less-educated workers, and anyone unable to obtain the skills needed to compete in the current job market. But such policies would promote a culture of dependency because they would make it easier for people to remain in less-educated and lower-skilled categories and thus leave them unprepared to deal with future changes and challenges. Besides, such policies show little faith in the average Americans’ ability to better themselves and ignore all the evidence that suggests that they can improve their living standards when given the opportunity.
