“We Can Easily Make It Up in Congress”

00The narrative being tested

The claim, posted to Truth Social on June 30, 2026 — hours after the Supreme Court ruled against Executive Order 14160: “we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation…No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!” (FactCheck.org, July 1, 2026). Around it travels a cluster this page also tests: that Wong Kim Ark protects only legal residents’ children; that the Fourteenth Amendment was “only about former slaves”; that the Court’s 2025 injunction ruling had already cleared the EO’s path; and the counter-overstatement that Congress has no citizenship role at all.

01What the law says — verified against the texts

“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.” — U.S. Constitution, Fourteenth Amendment, § 1 (1868)

In United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), the Court held that a child born in San Francisco to Chinese parents — noncitizens whom Congress had barred by statute from ever naturalizing — “becomes at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States.” The exclusions from the Clause are a closed, narrow set: children of foreign diplomats, of enemy forces in hostile occupation, and (historically, per Elk v. Wilkins) of tribal members — a category Congress addressed by statute in 1924 by expanding citizenship to it.

And on the exact question posed in 2026, the 1898 Court was explicit:

“The Fourteenth Amendment, while it leaves the power, where it was before, in Congress, to regulate naturalization, has conferred no authority upon Congress to restrict the effect of birth, declared by the Constitution to constitute a sufficient and complete right to citizenship.” — United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898) — verified verbatim against the U.S. Reports

The same opinion found “no authority, legislative, executive or judicial, in England or America” for statutes superseding citizenship by birth, and held that the Chinese Exclusion Acts — acts of Congress — “do not and cannot apply” to a Fourteenth Amendment citizen. The Congressional Research Service’s standing conclusion: Wong Kim Ark “is most often interpreted as barring the federal government from accomplishing such denial through any means other than a constitutional amendment.”

02The EO’s two-year road to a 6–3 loss

03The claims, checked

Status note (checked at publication, July 11, 2026): the legislative push is real, not rhetorical — the Birthright Citizenship Act (H.R. 569) predates the ruling, and House leadership says it is “looking at all angles” after Barbara. The analysis above is why those bills face the same wall the EO hit: a statute cannot subtract from a clause the Supreme Court has now construed twice. This page will track any bill that reaches a vote.

04The argument, assembled

• The text is constitutional, not statutory — and a statute cannot amend the Constitution. That is not a partisan proposition; it is the architecture.
• The 1898 Court answered the 2026 claim in advance: Congress may regulate naturalization but has “no authority… to restrict the effect of birth.”
• The 2026 Court closed the last asserted loophole: the domicile reading was argued by the government itself and rejected 6–3, with the injunction against the EO affirmed.
• The EO never took effect for a single day — enjoined from signing to strikedown, with the 2025 injunction ruling deciding remedies, not merits.
• The honest path exists and is the one dismissed: a constitutional amendment. Calling Article V “unnecessary” is the claim’s entire error.

05Sources

Related on this site: Are “Illegals” Using Social Security? — the companion check on what the law actually provides to noncitizens.