Garrett Epps in the Atlantic in July:

I have been writing about the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and its meaning for the children of the undocumented, for more than a decade. In a 2006 book, Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America, I traced the drafting of the Amendment and the process by which the Senate added citizenship language in May 1866. In a subsequent scholarly article, “The Citizenship Clause: A ‘Legislative History,’” I reviewed in exhaustive (you’ve been warned) detail the debates over this precise clause. I have written about the birthright citizenship issue for The Atlantichere, here, and here.

…

Tyrants and would-be autocrats throughout history have itched to get their hands on the law of citizenship. When Hitler took power in Germany, he engineered the passage of the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped citizenship from Germans not of “German blood.” Jews and others were subsequently “state subjects,” without the rights of “real” Germans. That inequality by law was a key part of the chain of events leading to the Holocaust. The Soviet Union, in a law promulgated in 1931, gave the power to annul the citizenship of any citizen to the Presidium of the Soviet Central Committee. Over the years, thousands of dissidents—including Stalin’s political rival Leon Trotsky, the poet Joseph Brodsky, the Jewish activists Avital and Natan Sharansky, and the Nobel Prize–winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—were stripped of citizenship, driven into exile, and (in Trotsky’s case) murdered.

Nice company Trump keeps.

A democratic country belongs to its people, not the other way around. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment knew this well. They’d had decades of experience with racist state laws denying citizenship to slaves, free black Americans, and immigrants. The citizenship clause placed American citizenship—national, equal, unitary, irrevocable—at the center of the democratic polity that they hoped to build from the ashes of the house divided. No one has offered convincing evidence that they secretly intended citizenship to be a gift of the state; no one but Anton has dared to suggest that a president could void the citizenship clause by executive order.

The idea, in fact, seems outlandish today; but until recently, so too did the idea of an overnight Muslim ban, or of forcibly seizing, caging, and drugging innocent children. “We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude,” Samuel Johnson once wrote, “but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor, and reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.”

The administration is accustoming the public to crimes of great magnitude. What was unimaginable in November 2016 is already happening in 2018, and it will keep happening until Americans stop it.

They do know how to ratchet.