For the second time in as many months, President Trump has signed executive orders seeking to narrow the scope of birthright citizenship in the United States, targeting birth tourism and expanding categories of ineligibility — this despite the Supreme Court's June 2026 reaffirmation that the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee stands as it has for over a century. The orders reflect a persistent tension between executive ambition and constitutional constraint, between a government's desire to define belonging and a founding document's insistence on its breadth. History suggests that when these two