The GOP Is Rewriting What It Means to Be a Person

The far right is weaponizing a doctrine that granted rights and liberties in order to snuff out the citizenship of anyone who isn’t a white man.

https://newrepublic.com/article/189651/gop-supreme-court-citizenship-attack

https://archive.ph/BrAxR

It’s a chilling fact that the Project 2025 playbook written for Donald Trump’s administration is just a roadmap for the first 180 days. But based on the contents of that manual, the MAGA movement’s longer-term goals aren’t exactly a mystery. Still, if people want a broader sense of what’s coming down the pike in the months and years ahead, it’s instructive to look at litigation involving rights granted under a Reconstruction-era addition to the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to extend full citizenship to formerly enslaved Black people, and it undergirds the right of all Americans to be treated equally under the law, no matter who they are or in which state they reside. Yet over the past year, conservatives have been increasingly open in their beliefs that pregnant women, transgender adolescents, affirming parents of trans kids, and immigrants are not legally entitled to the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections—all while arguing that fertilized eggs are.

Republicans are using strategic litigation to effectively rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment to prioritize conservative white men and embryos above and beyond everyone else. They are warping something used to grant rights into a bludgeon to take them away, and are redefining who counts as a person in the United States. “The selectivity about whom the Fourteenth Amendment ought to apply to is stunning,” said Khiara M. Bridges, professor at University of California at Berkeley School of Law. “It’s not demanded by the text of the Constitution at all. Instead, these are political choices that are being made, and they’re elevating certain individuals’ rights.” Michele Goodwin, professor of constitutional law and global health policy at Georgetown Law, calls this process of picking and choosing “citizenship gerrymandering”—a process in which one’s rights are not necessarily granted by the Constitution but rather a live issue, subject to the whims—and more specifically, the prejudices—of state lawmakers and courts.

The judiciary is already stacked with Trump picks, but in the next four years, it’s possible that half of all judges will be his nominees. Many GOP-appointed members of the judiciary profess to care about the original intent of our laws, but accepting this theory of the amendment is merely “opportunistic originalism,” Goodwin said. States are quickly passing laws and filing litigation over issues such as abortion and trans rights because the makeup of the courts provides a chance “to make movement within these particular spaces,” Goodwin said. Movement, specifically to the right, is necessary to a coalition of Christian fundamentalists, white nationalists, and power-hungry Republicans displeased that women and Black people have made gains in the modern fight for full citizenship, Goodwin said. These fights culminated in protections including the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and, yes, Roe v. Wade.

States and private lawyers have set about demolishing those rights, and the Supreme Court has responded in turn: It gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, a 2013 ruling that Goodwin said basically ignored the Reconstruction Amendments; overturned Roe despite scholarship showing a Fourteenth Amendment basis for bodily autonomy following the end of inheritable chattel slavery; and then ended affirmative action in college admissions in 2023. “If you look back at what’s taken shape in the last 15 to 20 years, it’s really been a dismantling of racial justice, and so now everything else is up for grabs,” she said, adding, “Race is often the conduit for undermining what will be the rights of us all.” “All of this ultimately is about power and how power situates within our democracy,” Goodwin said. “I think that they’re stuck on something that is really important, which is the arc of citizenship that happens to be for disfavored people.”

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