Clarence Page

As a Black American who is old enough to remember the last days of legal Jim Crow racial segregation, I pay special attention whenever I hear signs that in many American minds the Civil War never really ended.

So does President Trump. That may help to explain why he took the extraordinary step on Wednesday of appearing in person in the grand chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court, apparently the first president to do so, as his solicitor general made the case against “birthright citizenship” before the high court justices.

The issue, one of the most important Supreme Court rulings expected this year, is whether a Trump may deny citizenship to babies born in the U.S. based on the legal immigration status of their parents.

The policy, outlined in an executive order issued on his first day of his second term of office, seems to contradict the plain language of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, federal judges in four separate cases have ruled Trump’s order was unconstitutional, and now the Supreme Court is reviewing three of those rulings.

At one particularly quotable moment in Wednesday’s arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts dismissed U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer’s contention that today’s immigration problems require a revision of the understanding that virtually all children born on U.S. soil become American citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

Sauer painted a menacing picture of “a sprawling industry of birth tourism” that has led to “uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations” arriving in the U.S. to have their children here.

“We’re in a new world now,” Sauer said, “where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen.”

“Well, it’s a new world,” Roberts countered. “It’s the same Constitution.”

The durability of such constitutional protections is evidenced by its survival in the Constitution since the Reconstruction era.

We’ve come a long way since the high court’s infamous Dred Scott v. Sanford ruling in March 1857, when Chief Justice Roger Taney issued what legal scholars have denounced as the worst Supreme Court’s opinion in history.

The question before the court then was whether African Americans are citizens of the United States and thus able to file suit in federal court.

Taney went for the jugular. Black people, enslaved or free, were not citizens, he wrote, and had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” They were “beings of an inferior order” and not included in the Declaration of Independence.

In fact, many would say, Taney was only describing plainly — without a hint of sugar-coating — what most Americans believed to be true under the laws and customs of those antebellum times.

Yet Taney’s words evoked such disgust, horror and profound discomfort in many minds that it helped lead directly in those increasingly tense times to the outbreak of the Civil War.