DeSantis backs constitutional convention to reverse birthright citizenship ruling

Governor DeSantis is right to challenge the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship ruling — and right to point to a constitutional convention as the legitimate constitutional remedy available to the states. The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, with the explicit purpose of granting citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their descendants. Applying its birthright clause to the children of undocumented immigrants or temporary visa holders is a modern judicial extrapolation that stretches far beyond the Amendment’s original purpose and historical context. The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was understood at ratification to exclude the children of foreign diplomats and, more broadly, those without allegiance to the United States. Applying it broadly to anyone physically present on American soil, regardless of their parents’ legal status, is a policy choice disguised as constitutional interpretation.

The constitutional convention pathway, provided under Article V, exists precisely for situations like this — when the people and the states believe the judiciary has misread the founding document. It is not an anti-democratic tool; it is a deeply democratic one. Thirty-four state legislatures calling for a convention, followed by ratification by thirty-eight, is a deliberately high bar that ensures any constitutional change commands genuine national consensus. That DeSantis acknowledged the difficulty of meeting that threshold only demonstrates his honesty about the process, not a weakness in his argument.

Moreover, the governor is exercising exactly the kind of federalist leadership the framers envisioned. States are not obligated to accept erroneous constitutional interpretations in silence. Florida, as one of the most populous states and a consistent driver of conservative legal strategy, is a natural leader for a coalition of states seeking redress. Calling for a convention is not extreme; it is constitutionally orthodox.

The stakes extend well beyond ideology. A nation’s sovereign right to define the conditions of citizenship is among the most fundamental powers a government possesses. Virtually every peer democracy in the world — including Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Ireland — has modified or never adopted unconditional birthright citizenship. The United States stands nearly alone among developed nations in this regard. DeSantis is not proposing something radical; he is proposing that America align its citizenship law with democratic norms that most of the world has already adopted.

Governor DeSantis’s call for a constitutional convention to undo the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship ruling is a response to a settled constitutional question with a remedy that is, at best, a distraction and, at worst, a genuine threat to constitutional stability. The 14th Amendment’s guarantee that all persons born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens has been in continuous legal force since 1868 and was reaffirmed in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898, one of the Supreme Court’s most carefully reasoned citizenship decisions. The Court’s ruling this week upheld that century-old precedent. That is not judicial overreach — it is the Court performing its most basic function.

The constitutional convention route, whatever its theoretical validity under Article V, carries risks that should give any serious constitutionalist pause. A convention called on one topic has no established legal mechanism to prevent it from expanding its scope — a so-called “runaway convention” scenario that legal scholars across the ideological spectrum have warned about for decades. The last time the country held a constitutional convention, in 1787, delegates arrived to amend the Articles of Confederation and instead wrote an entirely new governing document. Reopening the Constitution to that kind of plenary revision, in today’s polarized political environment, is an extraordinarily dangerous gamble to take over an immigration policy dispute.

DeSantis himself admitted the effort would be nearly impossible — which raises the question of what purpose this rhetoric serves beyond red-meat politics at a flag-waving ceremony. Stoking support for a process its own champion concedes cannot succeed is not governance; it is performance. Florida has real problems — housing costs, insurance market failures, water quality — that demand executive attention and leadership. A governor’s time and political capital spent on constitutionally quixotic campaigns is time not spent on those concrete challenges.

Finally, the normative argument that other countries have restricted birthright citizenship proves less than it appears to. The United States is not France or Germany; it is a nation whose constitutional identity was explicitly forged around universal birthright as a repudiation of race-based exclusion from civic life. Gutting that principle — even through a technically legitimate constitutional process — would represent a fundamental break with the moral architecture of the post-Civil War republic. The 14th Amendment was designed to be difficult to undo for precisely this reason.