Less than two weeks into this second Trump presidency, the fearmongering has already reached fever pitch. “He can’t do it!” the critics have invariably howled in decrying President Donald Trump’s landmark day-one executive order upending the status quo on birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” The usual suspects in the punditocracy say Trump’s order is “blatantly unconstitutional” and that it “violates settled law.” Perhaps it’s even “nativist” or “racist,” to boot!

Like the Bourbons of old, pearl-clutching American elites have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Because when it comes to birthright citizenship, the virtue signaling and armchair excoriation is not just silly — it’s dead wrong on the law. Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order on birthright citizenship is legally sound and fundamentally just. The maestro of Mar-a-Lago deserves credit, not condemnation, for implementing such a bold order as one of his very first second-term acts.

The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, 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.” The clause’s purpose was to overturn the infamous 1857 Supreme Court case, Dred Scott v. Sandford, and thereby ensure that Blacks were, and would forever be, full-fledged citizens.

But Blacks were here from America’s beginning. The ruinous slavery debate aside, in 1868 Blacks were thus universally viewed — unlike, for example, American Indians — as “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. (Congress did not pass the Indian Citizenship Act, which finally granted birthright citizenship to American Indians, until 1924.) Our debate today thus depends on whether, in 1868, aliens — legal or illegal — were considered “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

They weren’t.

In the post-Civil War Republican-dominated Congress, the 14th Amendment was intended to constitutionalize the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which had passed two years prior. Rep. James Wilson (R-Iowa), then House Judiciary Committee chairman and a leading 14th Amendment drafter, emphasized that the amendment was “establishing no new right, declaring no new principle.” Similarly, Sen. Jacob Howard (R-Mich.), the principal author of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, described it as “simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already.”

In other words, the 14th Amendment formalized the Civil Rights Act of 1866. And the citizenship clause of that law reads: “All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.” In other words, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” necessarily excludes those “subject to any foreign power.”