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Who Gets to Be a Citizen Today?
In a highly anticipated decision, the Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, reaffirming that children born in the United States are citizens under the 14th Amendment, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The ruling preserves one of the Constitution’s clearest guarantees, and averts what would have been one of the most sweeping assaults on American citizenship since Reconstruction.
The ruling was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson; Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch dissented in full, and Brett Kavanaugh in part.
The Court reached the correct result. But no constitutional democracy should take comfort in the fact that four justices were prepared to strip citizenship from children born on American soil, embracing Trump’s effort to narrow the Citizenship Clause and erase a constitutional promise that has defined U.S. democracy for more than 150 years. Their willingness to do so exposes just how vulnerable even our most fundamental constitutional commitments have become.
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July 2026 Reads for the Rest of Us
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A Case for Court Reform
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Looking to Black and Indigenous Foremothers to Resist Erasure
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‘We the People’ Is America’s First Promise. Who Gets to Belong?
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The United States Is No Country for Mothers. (Not Yet.)
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A Fourth of July Reading List for Feminists: Our Favorite Books, Essays and Multimedia Projects for America at 250
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American Democracy on Fire (with Steve Vladeck and Moira Donegan)
In this episode of On The Issues, we confront American democracy on fire. How did we get here and who lit the match? In a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the United States Supreme Court gutted a fundamental provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), landmark legislation enacted by Congress at the height of the civil rights movement to eradicate entrenched patterns of voter suppression and promote equality at the ballot box. With key mandates in the VRA now eviscerated under the hand six justices on the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, what’s next? The Court has the lowest approval ratings since confidence in the court has been measured. Many Americans now wonder—can the Court be trusted?
The Supreme Court has emphasized that if women want reproductive freedom and don’t like abortion bans, they should go vote. But what happens when the Court plays a strategic role in diluting voting power and making voting more difficult by stripping away protections?
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Join Ms. Magazine and Get Our Landmark FEMINIST 250 Print Issue for This Pivotal Moment in American History
As the U.S. prepares to mark its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026, questions loom over the celebration: Whose America gets remembered, whose gets erased—and how do we imagine and build a democracy that includes all of us?
In the Summer issue of Ms., we revisit the nation’s founding through a feminist lens, reclaiming the stories too often left out of the official narrative: women who challenged the authors of the Declaration of Independence and later the U.S. Constitution for deliberately writing women out of America’s founding documents, Black women who resisted oppression from the start, Indigenous societies built around women-led governance, queer lives in revolutionary America, Asian women’s struggles for belonging and the long fight to make disability visible in our history.
We also look back at 54 years of feminist reporting from the pages of Ms.—proof that the battles for bodily autonomy, equality and democracy did not begin yesterday—and forward to the bold new ideas that could shape a freer, fairer future for the next 250 years.
Get a year of Ms. for just $20 (a 43 percent discount off our usual price) when you join today!
The Ranked Ballot Is the Pro-Women, Pro-Voter, Pro-Democracy Reform America Needs
For 250 years, the story of American democracy has been a story of expanding who holds power and who gets to decide who yields it.
The 15th Amendment, the 17th, the Voting Rights Act, the 19th Amendment and the 26th—each was a structural intervention, a deliberate redesign of the rules to bring more people into the democratic process. And at each iteration, a bet was made on the same proposition: Democracy works better when more people have real power within it.
We are overdue for the next chapter.
Women make up 51 percent of the American population and hold fewer than 29 percent of seats in Congress. That gap is not a product of insufficient ambition, inadequate candidates or a thin pipeline of viable women. It is the product of an electoral system that was designed before women could vote, and has never been fundamentally redesigned since.
Ranked-choice voting changes that. The ranked ballot is the single most powerful, best-documented structural reform available for advancing women’s political participation, and it serves every voter, at every level of government, on every ballot.
In a ranked-choice voting election, voters rank candidates in order of preference—first choice, second and third—and if no candidate wins a majority outright, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated and their votes are redistributed until someone reaches a winning threshold.
Under this system, voters can express a genuine preference without fear of wasting their vote on a candidate who can’t win, and qualified women candidates can run without fearing splitting the vote.
(This is part of a new series FEMINIST 250: Democracy’s Feminist Future, a special Ms. series examining the next chapter of U.S. democracy through a feminist lens. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, the series explores how women and marginalized communities have shaped democratic progress, what lessons history offers for the challenges ahead, and how a more inclusive, representative and equitable democracy can be built for the next 250 years.)
