NBC “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker left out a key portion of the Fourteenth Amendment when she challenged President-elect Donald Trump on his plans to end so-called birthright citizenship by executive order.
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In the interview, which aired Sunday, Welker asked, “You promised to end birthright citizenship on day one. Is that still your plan?”
“Yeah, absolutely,” Trump responded.
“The Fourteenth Amendment though says that ‘All persons born in the United States are citizens.’ Can you get around the Foourteenth Amendment with an executive action?” Welker followed up.
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Currently, when illegal aliens have children in the country, federal policy has been to recognize them as U.S. citizens.
“Well, we’re going to have to get a change,” Trump answered Welker.
She again questioned if Trump would do so through executive action.
“Well, if we can through executive action,” Trump said.
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In his Agenda 47 plan put out last year, Trump explained that he would issue an executive order on the subject that “will explain the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment, that U.S. Citizenship extends only to those both born in AND ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States.”
That’s the key clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that Welker left out, which read when taken together, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
“Constitutional scholars have shown for decades that granting automatic citizenship to the children of illegal aliens born in the United States is based on a patently incorrect interpretation of the 14th Amendment,” Trump said last year.
“The purpose of the 14th Amendment had nothing to do with the citizenship of immigrants, let alone the citizenship of the children of illegal aliens. Its purpose was to extend citizenship to people newly freed from slavery, whose status was left in question after the infamous case Dred Scott v. Sandford,” he noted.
“The framers of the 14th Amendment made clear that ‘persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens [or] who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers’ are not ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the U.S.,” Trump said.
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GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah responded to Welker’s omission of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” posting on X, “Those words matter.”
The senator serves on the Judiciary Committee and is a former federal prosecutor, legal clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, and author of multiple books about the Constitution.
Lee argued, “Congress has the power to define what it means to be born in the United States ‘and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”
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He concluded, “In this instance, [Meet The Press] seems to try to render a debatable matter beyond debate by selectively omitting key words from the Constitution, making it appear incorrectly that the Fourteenth Amendment proscribes any and all restrictions on birthright citizenship.”
Welker clearly planned to press Trump hard on his plans to end birthright citizenship by executive order, so she had to know (or should have known) the crux of his argument for doing so was the Fourteenth Amendment’s clause, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
Her failure to quote those words was a deceptive way to frame the question and perhaps an effort to make Trump’s plan look lawless, which is one of the left-wing media’s favorite narratives about him.
If the mainstream media has any interest in regaining its credibility, a good place to start is not to selectively edit key facts to try to make Trump look bad.
