Anti-abortion politics helped make the modern GOP. Activists supplied energy and votes to the conservative movement for nearly a half-century after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973. That energy has dissipated a bit in recent years, but justices may have handed the right a new rallying cause: birthright citizenship.
‘A new bloody shirt’
The Supreme Court’s narrow ruling last week upholding birthright citizenship “just handed right-wingers a new bloody shirt to wave in every single political campaign,” Georgetown University’s Aderson Francois said to The Atlantic. The topic “will become the new Roe v. Wade” for Republican politicians trying to appeal to anti-immigration voters who want to keep the American-born children of migrants from automatically becoming citizens. The issue will be more salient because the court voted 5-4 in the case. Conservative activists “now know they are only one vote away from eliminating birthright citizenship by judicial fiat,” said The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer.
“The conservative legal movement is far better equipped today” than the antiabortion movement was in 1973, Rachel Bovard of the Conservative Partnership Institute said at First Things. The right overturned Roe through “decades of activism, thought leadership, strategic litigation and judicial appointments.” That model “should now be aimed” at birthright citizenship and must “act as a litmus test for every future conservative nominee.” Granting unquestioned citizenship to the children of migrants “incentivizes illegal entry, rewards birth tourism and erodes the meaning of citizenship for generations to come.”
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The debate about birthright citizenship is “about to get worse,” Jonah Goldberg said at The Dispatch. We have seen this story before. Rather than settling the issue, Roe v. Wade failed to spare the country an “ugly debate over abortion.” The same will be true of citizenship. The court has “more than likely turbocharged” the debate over immigration.
‘Just getting started’
Justices actually gave the country a “reverse Roe v. Wade” in the birthright case, Thomas G. Moukawsher said at Newsweek. The court in Roe created a “privacy right to abortion that was previously unknown” while in the citizenship ruling it refused to “take away a birth-based citizenship right that was universally known.” The Trump administration’s attempt to overturn that right via executive order “contradicted a bedrock assumption about who was an American” that a majority of the court could not abide.
The conservative movement “turned Roe into its jurisprudential white whale,” said Jay Willis at Balls and Strikes. The right “spent five decades organizing around the goal of someday killing” that ruling, and did so in 2022 even though the legal arguments had not really changed. The only difference across 50 years was that conservatives “at last marshaled the five votes they needed to do it.” The crusade against birthright citizenship is “just getting started.”
Republican voters are “sounding more and more” like President Donald Trump on the issue, said Sarah Longwell at The Bulwark. Birthright citizenship is going to be a policy touchstone for any “GOP presidential aspirant in 2028 and beyond.”
