An excellent post on the 14th Amendment.
Now of course the president does not have the authority to amend the Constitution by means of an executive order. Not only would that be illegal, it would be tyranny to attempt it. Thus, say, if the president were to sign an executive order that granted an additional senator to every state, while California and New Jersey were still limited to two senators, such an action would be laughed at all the way up to the Supreme Court, and laughed at all the way home again.
But that is not what we are dealing with here. If the president were to sign such an order, he would not be overturning any aspect of the Constitution. He would be overturning an ambiguous and very dubious interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, an interpretation that began in 1982 when it was sneeveled into the footnote of a decision by Justice Brennan. So once Trump signed the executive order, it would be challenged in court, ipso pronto, and the Supreme Court would then decide on the subject, directly, for the first time, and about time.
A Brief History:
The Fourteenth Amendment does not grant birthright citizenship to the children of illegals. What it did, in the aftermath of the Civil War, was grant citizenship to freed blacks. The intent was to reverse the implications of the infamous Dred Scott case.
“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” (14.1).
The amendment was adopted in 1868, and was dealing with the aftermath of slavery, and an appalling war. The amendment did not apply willy nilly, in every direction. In 1884, an Indian named John Elk took his case to the Supreme Court, arguing that he was an American citizen because he was born here, and he lost that case. The reason he lost his case was found in that subject to the jurisdiction clause. Indians were subject to their own Native American jurisdictions, and so the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to them. Another Supreme Court case a few years later (1898) did settle a birthright citizenship for children of legal immigrants who were born here. American Indians were made citizens in a law that was passed in 1924. Because illegal aliens were subject to no jurisdictions at all, they were not considered citizens, even if born here, until Brennan’s 1982 footnote.
Given all this, it is not surprising that our understanding of the subject is in a frightful muddle. The Supreme Court does need to deal with it. And those who are hyperventilating over Trump’s high-handed disregard for “the Constitution” need to breathe into a paper bag or something.