Article from Reason by Joe Setyon.

In an interview with Axios on HBO that aired this morning, Trump suggested he could do away with birthright citizenship, which was instituted by the 14th Amendment. As Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown explained, birthright citizenship grants American citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil.

The relevant portion of the amendment reads: “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.”

Trump doesn’t believe that should necessarily apply to the American-born children of undocumented immigrants. An executive order, he suggested, might clear things up. “It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” he told Axios. “You can definitely do it with an act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order.” The president added that the change is “in the process. It’ll happen…with an executive order.”

Not so fast, says Amash. He indicated on Twitter that presidents can’t, in fact, just sign executive orders to do away with parts of the Constitution or laws.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Justin Amash Uploaded by AlbertHerring) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons