On: Supreme court to release opinions with several high-stakes rulings to come inclu

The court will speak, and the nation will listen. But what will it hear? The question of birthright citizenship is before them, and I find myself turning it over like a text that has been read too quickly. The Fourteenth Amendment says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” The originalists say this is clear. The revisionists say it was never meant to include the children of those here without permission. Both claim the text. Both claim the history.

But here is the distinction that matters: the text is not the same as the intention of the framers, and the intention of the framers is not the same as the meaning the text has carried for a century and a half. The original text says what it says. The commentaries - the debates, the subsequent rulings, the political arguments - have buried it under layers of interpretation that serve the needs of the interpreters. The question is not what the framers would have wanted in 1868. The question is what the text means now, in the light of its own logic.

I am troubled. Not by the outcome - I do not know what it will be - but by the method. The court is being asked to decide a question of jurisdiction: who belongs to the polity? But the polity is not a club with a membership committee. It is a body that constitutes itself through its own laws. The child born on this soil is subject to the jurisdiction of the state from the moment of birth. That is the fact. The citizenship follows from the fact. To deny it is to deny the logic of the text.

The philosopher sees this. The faithful citizen feels it. Both see truly within their domain. The question is whether the court will see clearly enough to distinguish the text from the commentaries that have grown around it.