Birthright citizenship was one of the Republican Party’s greatest accomplishments. Now some...

Birthright citizenship was one of the Republican Party’s greatest accomplishments. Now some Republicans want to end it.

By Greg Sargent August 18 at 3:05 PM

Donald Trump’s call for doing away with birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants has once again focused media attention on the idea and led some of his GOP rivals to signal openness to it. The Huffington Post looked at the positions of the 2016 GOP candidates and concluded that “a good chunk of the GOP field” wants to revisit birthright citizenship.

As conservative writer Ben Domenech notes, many other GOP lawmakers have supported the idea in recent years, as do Republican voters, even though birthright citizenship is “one of the things that is relatively unique to the American experiment,” and requires rebelling against the “Constitutional mandate placed within the Fourteenth Amendment in the wake of the Civil War.”

But there’s another historical irony here that was pointed out by renowned American historian Eric Foner: The 14th amendment and birthright citizenship rank among the great and defining accomplishments of the Republican Party, back when it was the Party of Lincoln.

“This was one of the historic achievements of the Republican Party,” Foner, who has written extensively on Reconstruction and the meaning of American freedom, tells me. “There’s plenty of irony here.”

Foner thinks that ending birthright citizenship would require changing the 14th amendment, which was passed and ratified after the Civil War to secure the citizenship of former slaves. Recall that the 14th amendment came after the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was passed by Republicans in Congress and (among other things) defined all people born in the United States (except Native Americans who didn’t pay taxes) as citizens. That Act was passed over the veto of Democratic president Andrew Johnson, and the 14th amendment was then secured by Congressional Republicans — and ratified by the states — to make African American citizenship irreversible.

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