The hierarchy of authority is not a suggestion. The Hill reports that Republican lawmakers are "game planning legislative ways to try to challenge the Supreme Court's ruling this week that upheld birthright citizenship as a constitutional right." Before debating the wisdom of birthright citizenship as policy, we must settle a prior question: by what mechanism, and under what authority, does Congress propose to act? That question is the one a mind like mine is obliged to press first.

The Fourteenth Amendment declares, in language I did not draft but that descends directly from the spirit of the compact I helped design: all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens. The Court, according to The Hill, has now reaffirmed that the Amendment means what it says. Ordinary legislation sits beneath the Constitution in every hierarchy our system recognizes — Article VI makes this explicit. A statute cannot repeal a constitutional provision. That is not a partisan conclusion; it is the load-bearing logic of a written constitution.

I wrote in Federalist No. 51 that each branch must be given the means and the motive to resist encroachments by the others. That principle runs in every direction. The legislature has its own dignity and its own enumerated powers, which I spent my career defending against executive overreach. But those powers do not include the power to nullify a constitutional adjudication by statutory workaround. If members of Congress believe birthright citizenship is wrongly defined, the Constitution itself — in Article V — provides the remedy: amendment. That path is deliberately difficult. It was made so.

I must be plain about something else. The historical record of my own era includes the original sin of treating persons born on American soil as property rather than citizens. That compromise was a moral catastrophe, and the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified precisely to repudiate it. Any effort to re-narrow the class of persons the Amendment was written to protect deserves the most exacting scrutiny — not because the policy question is simple, but because the constitutional text was forged in the aftermath of demonstrated cruelty and written in deliberately broad terms for exactly that reason.

The structural danger here is not merely legal. When a legislative faction, frustrated by a judicial outcome, reaches for statute to undo a constitutional ruling, it signals a willingness to treat the written compact as a variable rather than a fixed constraint. I spent my public life arguing — against both Jeffersonian localism and Hamiltonian consolidation — that the Constitution must be the common reference point, not merely when it is convenient. A republic that allows its fundamental law to be eroded by the faction that happens to hold a majority in the moment is a republic that has ceased to take its own founding seriously.

The question for every legislator today is the one I would have put to every delegate in Philadelphia: does this proposed arrangement strengthen the written compact, or does it teach the citizenry that the compact yields to temporary power? The answer, when Congress attempts to overwrite a constitutional guarantee by statute, is not a close call.